In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was one art form in which English artists excelled above all their continental European counterparts: the painting of miniatures. This fascinating book explores the genre with special reference to two of its most accomplished practitioners, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, whose astounding skill brought them international fame and admiration. Four centuries ago, England was famous primarily for its literary culture - the dram a of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the works of the great lyrical and metaphysical poets. When it came to the production of visual art, the country was seen as something of a backwater. However, there was one art form for which English artists of this period were renowned: portrait miniature painting, or as it was known at the time, limning. Growing from roots in manuscript illumination, it was brought to astonishing heights of skill by two artists in particular: Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619) and Isaac Oliver (c .1565-1617). In addition to exhibiting the exquisite technique of the artists, portrait miniatures express in a unique way many of the most distinctive and fascinating aspects of court life in this period: ostentatious secrecy, games of courtly love, arcane symbolism, a love of intricacy and decoration. Bedecked in elaborate lace, encrusted in jewellery and sprinkled with flowers, court ladies smile enigmatically at the viewer; their male counterparts rest on grassy banks or lean against trees, sighing over thwarted love, or more modestly express their hopes in Latin epigrams inscribed around their heads. Often set in richly enamelled and jewelled gold lockets, or beautifully turned ivory or ebony boxes, such miniatures could be concealed or revealed, exchanged or kept, as part of elaborate processes of friendship, love, patronage and diplomacy at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I /VI. This richly illustrated book, like the exhibition it accompanies, explores what the portrait miniature reveals about identity, society and visual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Originally published in 1940, this book charts the origins and evolution of academies of art from the sixteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. Pevsner expertly explains the political, religious and mercantile forces affecting the education of artists in various countries in Western Europe, and the growing 'academisation' of artistic training that he saw is his own day. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the various historical schools of art instruction and the history of art more generally.

In this book, Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier offers the first systematic study of Pythagoras and his influence on mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, religion, medicine, music, the occult, and social life as well as on architecture and art in the late medieval and early modern eras. Following the threads of admiration for this ancient Greek sage from the fourteenth century to Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth, this book demonstrates that Pythagoras s influence in intellectual circles Christian, Jewish, and Arab was more widespread than has previously been acknowledged. Joost-Gaugier shows that during this period Pythagoras was respected by many intellectuals in different areas of Europe. She also shows how this admiration was reflected in ideas that were applied to the visual arts by a number of well known architects and artists who sought, through the use of a visual language inspired by the memory of Pythagoras, to obtain perfect harmony in their creations. Among these were Alberti, Bramante, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Thus did, she suggests, some of the greatest art works in the Western world owe their modernity to an inspirational force that, paradoxically, had been conceived in the distant past."

This book employs a new approach to the art of sixteenth-century Europe by incorporating rhetoric and theory to enable a reinterpretation of elements of Mannerism as being grounded in sixteenth-century spirituality. Lynette M. F. Bosch examines the conceptual vocabulary found in sixteenth-century treatises on art from Giorgio Vasari to Federico Zuccari, which analyses how language and spirituality complement the visual styles of Mannerism. By exploring the way in which writers from Leone Ebreo to Gabriele Paleotti describe the interaction between art and spirituality, Bosch establishes a religious base for the language of art in sixteenth-century Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, religious studies, and religious history.

Michelangelo s extant correspondence is the most abundant of any artist. Spanning 67 years, it comprises roughly 1,400 letters, of which 500 were written by Michelangelo himself. Biographers and art historians have combed the letters for insight into Michelangelo s views on art, his contractual obligations, and his relationships. Literary scholars have explored parallels between the letters and Michelangelo s poetry. Nevertheless, this is the first book to study the letters for their intrinsically literary qualities. In this volume, Deborah Parker examines Michelangelo s use of language as a means of understanding the creative process of this extraordinary artist. His letters often revel in witticisms, rhetorical flourishes, and linguistic ingenuity. Close study of his mastery of words and modes of self-presentation shows Michelangelo to be a consummate artist who deploys the resources of language to considerable effect."

Leonardo da Vinci: A Reference Guide to His Life and Works covers all aspects of his life and work, beginning with his paintings, including several he never completed, that form the core of his artistic oeuvre. The extensive A to Z section includes several hundred entries. The bibliography provides a comprehensive list of publications concerning his life and work *Includes a detailed chronology detailing Leonardo Da Vinci's life, family, and work. *The A to Z section includes Leonardo's main patrons, the major places he worked, and the artists and scholars whose work and ideas played an important role in the formation of his career. *The bibliography includes a list of publications concerning his life and work. *The index thoroughly cross-references the chronological and encyclopedic entries.

This publication will be the only available English-language monograph to date on sixteenth-century sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi (c. 1455-1528), who earned the nickname 'Antico' with his highly refined reductions of Greco-Roman antiquities. His bronzes - many of which were produced at the brilliant court of Isabella d'Este at Mantua - were remarkable for being meticulously cast and finely cleaned and finished, designed for close appreciation in the privacy of a courtly studio. His black patination and exquisite detailing, such as gilded hair and silver-inlaid eyes, are characteristic. Given Antico's importance for the history of sculpture, this book is a much needed resource in the field, presenting new scientific research and the results of technical studies undertaken at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. A series of essays places Antico's life, work and technique in a contextual framework useful for understanding his body of work. In addition to providing an overview of the artist's career, the catalogue will address key topics from his workmanship and craft to his relationship with the court of Mantua. Eleonora Luciano, associate curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art, provides a biography of the artist; Claudia Kryza-Gersch, curator of Italian sculpture at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, discusses Antico as a pioneer of Renaissance sculpture; Stephen Campbell, professor and chair of the department of the history of art at John Hopkins University, writes about 'Antico and Humanism at the Court of Mantua'; Davide Gasparotto, curator at the Galleria Nazionale di Parma, considers Antico's portraiture; Denise Allen, curator at the Frick Collection, New York, writes about 'Materials, Workmanship and Meaning' in the artist's work. Two appendices present new scientific work: Dylan Smith and Shelley Sturman, both conservators at the National Gallery of Art, explore the technology of Antico's bronzes, and Richard Stone, conservator emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, examines Antico's patinas. Exhibition held at National Gallery of Art, Washington.

A gifted yet controversial anatomical teacher, Robert Knox (1791-1862) published this remarkable study in 1852. It explores the influence of anatomy on evolutionary theories and fine art respectively. The first part of the work discusses the lives and scientific insights of the eminent French naturalists Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844). Rejecting the explanations offered by natural theology, Knox maintains that descriptive anatomy can give answers to questions surrounding the origin and development of life in the natural world. The latter part of the book is concerned with the relation that anatomy bears to fine art, specifically the painting and sculpture of the Italian Renaissance. Entering the debate about the importance of anatomical knowledge in art, Knox focuses on 'the immortal trio' of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. Henry Lonsdale's sympathetic biography of Knox has also been reissued in this series.

Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.

Originally published in 1922, and first delivered in a slightly altered form as lectures at the University of London in 1911, this book gives a general review of 'the Church-Building Arts of England' from the Roman occupation until 1540. Prior studies the effects of major political and social events on English church art and architecture, and the ways in which art, particularly art located in churches and cathedrals, served as 'the vehicle of medieval civilization'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in English medieval art and history.

In this study, first published in 2006, Henk Th. van Veen reassesses how Cosimo de' Medici represented himself in images during the course of his rule. Traditionally, Cosimo is seen to be posing as a republican prince in the images made of him during the early years of his reign; as his power grew, he represented himself as a proud dynastic and territorial ruler. By contrast, van Veen argues that Cosimo represented himself as a lofty ruler in the initial phase of his regime, but that from 1559 onwards he posed as a citizen-prince. Analyzing all of Cosimo's major commissions, both art and architecture, to support his argument, van Veen also examines historiographical and literary evidence, as well as the civic traditions, rites, and customs that Cosimo promoted in sixteenth-century Florence.

Although Bosch's known works amount to no more than two dozen paintings and a handful of drawings, the artist had an enormous impact on religious imagery during his lifetime and for centuries afterward. His enigmatic and mind-bending depictions of humans, animals, and nature undoubtedly influenced the surrealist movement of the 20th century. This book explores Bosch's works in terms of medieval morality, the religious beliefs of his time, and the Northern Renaissance in general. This elegant volume offers exquisite, full-colour reproductions that afford readers the opportunity to linger over the works' amazing details. The accompanying text examines Bosch's singular place in the canon of Western art, as a revolutionary portrayer of the imagination, and as a pioneer in the depiction of heaven and hell.

The book explores the subject of Russian icons and their changes as well as the discussion on art that unfolded in Russia in the 15th and 16th centuries. Taking the representation of the Old Testament Trinity, attributed to Andrei Rublev, as its point of departure, it discusses and analyses the key issues of the iconography of the Holy Trinity and the process of the emergence and the dissemination of the imagery of God the Father and the New Testament Trinity in Russia. These issues are framed in the context of the debate that took place at the time within the Muscovite Orthodoxy, which concerned heresy, the relations with other denominations, the identity of the Russian Orthodox Church and the place of the icons in the existing canon.

Following the arc of Bellini's career, from his early devotional paintings to his later, occasionally secular works, this book offers an in-depth appreciation of the Venetian master who dominated the Early Renaissance. Featuring nearly every extant Bellini work, as well as those of his contemporaries, this book brims with gorgeous Renaissance art. Author Johannes Grave focuses on some of the artist's greatest works including Allegoria Sacra, the Brera Pieta, and the altarpiece of San Giobbe-to explore how Bellini excelled in tempera before mastering oil painting. Grave discusses how Bellini's precise lines, his delicate facial expressions, and the subtle effects of light and shadow were used in his religious paintings as well as his portraiture and late mythological depictions. This book examines Bellini's life, including his complex relationships with his father Jacopo, his brother Gentile, and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna. It considers the original contexts of Bellini's works, and elucidates the ways in which these paintings were meant to be perceived. The book also links Bellini's devotional paintings with the poetic creations of his pupil Giorgione. An important contribution to the scholarship of Renaissance art, this masterful book reaffirms Bellini's status as one of Venice's greatest painters.

This book was first published in 2000. Antiquity and its Interpreters examines how the physical and textual remains of the ancient Romans were viewed and received by writers, artists, architects, and cultural makers of early modern Italy. The importance of antiquity in the Renaissance has long been acknowledged, but this volume reconsiders the complex relationship between the two cultures in light of recent scholarship in the field and a new appreciation and awareness of the act of history writing itself. The case studies analyze specific texts, the archaeological projects that made 'antiquity' available, the revival of art history and theory, the appropriation of antiquities to serve social ideologies, and the reception of this cultural phenomenon in modern historiography, among other topics. Demonstrating that the antique model was itself an artful construct, Antiquity and its Interpreters shows that the originality of Renaissance culture owed as much to ignorance about antiquity as to an understanding of it. It also provides a synthesis of seminal work that recognizes the reciprocal relationship of the Renaissance to antiquity.

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as "things in themselves"--things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance "discovery" of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

First published in 2000, Confraternities and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Italy: Ritual, Spectacle, Image was the first book to consider the role of Italian confraternities in the patronage of art. Eleven interdisciplinary essays analyze confraternal painting, sculpture, architecture, and dramatic spectacles by documenting the unique historical and ritual contexts in which they were experienced. Exploring the evolution of devotional practices, the roles of women and youths, the age's conception of charity, and the importance of confraternities in civic politics and urban design, this book offers illuminating approaches to one of the most dynamic forms of corporate patronage in early modern Italy.

Vitruvius's Ten Books of Architecture, the only architectural treatise to have survived from antiquity, was the fountainhead of architectural theory in the Italian Renaissance. Offering theoretical and practical solutions to a wide variety of architectural issues, this treatise did not, however, address all of the questions that were of concern to early modern architects. Originally published in 1999, this study examines the Italian Renaissance architect's efforts to negotiate between imitation and reinvention of classicism. Through a close reading of Vitruvius and texts written during the period 1400-1600, Alina Payne identifies ornament as the central issue around which much of this debate focused. Ornament, she argues, facilitated a dialogue across disciplines and invited exchanges with literary and rhetorical practices. Payne's study also highlights the place of the architectural treatise in the text-based culture of the period and of architectural discourse in Renaissance thought.

This book focuses on the Ashburnham Pentateuch, an early medieval illuminated manuscript of the Old Testament whose pictures are among the earliest surviving and most extensive biblical illustrations. Dorothy Verkerk shows how the lively and complex illustrations of Genesis and Exodus, which incorporate references to contemporary life, were used to explain important church teachings. She provides a key to understanding the relationship between the text and pictures. Verkerk also argues that the manuscript was created in Italy, thereby solving a mystery that has baffled scholars for the last century and demonstrating that early medieval Italian artists were capable of complex innovations in the field of the visual arts.

Originally published in 1997, Visualizing Boccaccio represents an intriguing approach to the interpretation of Boccaccio's classic book of erotic tales, The Decameron. Using literary, critical, psychoanalytic, and film theories, Jill Ricketts offers a feminist critique of these stories, exposing tensions generated by sexual difference that motivate privilege and investigating the possibilities of change in power relations associated with that privilege. In a comparison of selected tales from The Decameron with works by Cimabue and Giotto, fifteenth-century manuscript illumination, a series of paintings by Botticelli, and Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinematic interpretation of the tales, Ricketts also demonstrates how the juxtaposition of verbal and visual renditions permit new interpretation of each of these works.

In this study, Luba Freedman examines the revival of the twelve Olympian deities in the visual arts of sixteenth-century Italy. Renaissance representations of the Olympians as autonomous figures in paintings, sculpture and drawing were not easily integrated into a Christian society. While many patrons and artists venerated the ancient artworks for their artistic qualities, others, nourished by religious beliefs, felt compelled to adapt ancient representations to Christian subjects. These conflicting attitudes influenced the representation of deities intentionally made all'antica, often resulting in an interweaving of classical and non-classical elements that is alien to the original, ancient sources. This study, the first devoted to this problem, highlights how problematic it was during the Cinquecento to display and receive images of pagan gods, whether shaped by ancient or contemporary artists. It offers new insights into the uneven absorption of the classical heritage during the early modern era.

Michelangelo's extant correspondence is the most abundant of any artist. Spanning 67 years, it comprises roughly 1,400 letters, of which 500 were written by Michelangelo himself. Biographers and art historians have combed the letters for insight into Michelangelo's views on art, his contractual obligations, and his relationships. Literary scholars have explored parallels between the letters and Michelangelo's poetry. Nevertheless, this is the first book to study the letters for their intrinsically literary qualities. In this volume, Deborah Parker examines Michelangelo's use of language as a means of understanding the creative process of this extraordinary artist. His letters often revel in witticisms, rhetorical flourishes, and linguistic ingenuity. Close study of his mastery of words and modes of self-presentation shows Michelangelo to be a consummate artist who deploys the resources of language to considerable effect.

Although much has been written about literary, cultural, and artistic influences in the work of Cervantes, at the time of this book's publication very little had been said about his interest in the classics. Frederick de Armas argues convincingly in this book that throughout his literary career, Cervantes was interested in the classical authors of Greece and Rome. Rather than looking at Cervantes' texts in relation to other literary works, this book demonstrates how Cervantes' experiences in Italy and his observation of Italian Renaissance art - particularly the works of Raphael at the Vatican - led him to create new images and structures in his works.

Skira Mini ARTbooks is a pocket-sized series, conveniently priced, very practical and with lots of images dedicated to single international artists, artistic movements and painting genres. The genius of Italian painting, symbol of grace and beauty, is considered one of the greatest and most popular artists of all time. An introduction to the life of the artist, with his masterpieces.

This volume directs a transdisciplinary gaze on the field of Renaissance Studies as currently practised in Europe, North America and beyond. The concept of the Renaissance as applied to a particular time and place is still regarded as being of central importance to the history of thought and culture. The essays collected here raise the question of the contemporary relevance of the Renaissance. What is the significance of doing Renaissance Studies now, not only in terms of the field per se, but in terms of what the field has to say to contemporary society? In the past, the field of Renaissance Studies has drawn themes and orientations from particular concerns of the moment, without losing its rigorous focus, and has given back crucial insights to those studying it. Could the same be said today? To facilitate a multifaceted answer, this book attempts to cover some of the principal areas of this interdisciplinary field within the humanities and social sciences. Contributors include specialists in history, languages and literatures, the history of science, cultural studies, art history, philosophy, sociology and politics.