As a great master of the early Renaissance, Piero della Francesca created paintings for ecclesiastics, confaternities, and illustrious nobles throughout the Italian peninsula. Since the early twentieth century, the rational space, abstract designs, lucid illumination and naturalistic details of his pictures have attracted wide audiences. Piero's treatises on mathematics and perspective fascinate scholars in a wide range of disciplines. This Companion brings together new essays that offer a synthesis and overview of Piero's life and accomplishments as a painter and theoretician.

Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace has often been considered the artist's most aesthetically perfect work. Executed between 1508 and 1511, it features a painted ceiling, a pavement of inlaid marble, and four frescoed walls, all orchestrated with a cast of famous historical figures who exemplify the various disciplines of learning. Joost-Gaugier's study is the first to examine the elements of the Stanza della Segnatura as an ensemble, exploring the meaning of the frescoes and accompanying decoration in light of recent studies into the intellectual world of High Renaissance Rome.

The first publication to consider the relationship between these two major artists of the High Renaissance Through most of Michelangelo's working life, one of his closest colleagues was the great Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo (1485 -1541). The two men met in Rome in 1511, shortly after Sebastiano's arrival from his native city, and while Michelangelo was based in Florence from 1516 to 1534 Sebastiano remained one of his Roman confidants, painting several works after partial designs by him. This landmark publication is about the artists' extraordinary professional alliance and the friendship that underpinned it. It situates them in the dramatic context of their time, tracing their evolving artistic relationship through more than three decades of creative dialogue. Matthias Wivel and other leading scholars investigate Michelangelo's profound influence on Sebastiano and the Venetian artist's highly original interpretation of his friend's formal and thematic concerns. The lavishly illustrated text examines their shared preoccupation with the depiction of death and resurrection, primarily in the life of Christ, through a close analysis of drawings, paintings, and sculpture. The book also brings the austerely beautiful work of Sebastiano to a new audience, offering a reappraisal of this less famous but most accomplished artist. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London (03/15/17-06/25/17)

"My husband Jan finished me on 17 June 1439. . . . My age was 33 years." So speaks Margaret van Eyck from the frame of her portrait. This painted inscription honors its maker Jan van Eyck, even as it blurs the distinction between living subject and painted double. Frame Work, an in-depth study of paintings, sculpture, and manuscript illumination in their varied social settings, argues that frames and framing devices are central to how Renaissance images operate. In a period of rapid cultural change, framing began to secure the very notion of an independent "artwork," and reframings could regulate the meaning attached to works of art-a process that continues in the present day. Highlighting innovations in framing introduced by figures such as Donatello, Giovanni Bellini, and Jean Fouquet, this original book shows how the inventive character of Renaissance frames responds to broader sociopolitical and religious change. The frame emerges as a site of beauty, display, and persuasion, and as a mechanism of control.

This is a study of the German artist, Conrad Von Soest. It sets the artist in the context of the early Northern Renaissance and the society of Westphalian. The book also outlines the system of workshops and patronage prevalent at that time as well as production methods used in the artist's workshop.

This new Catalogue Raisonne, Part III in the series on Natural History, is based on the collection originally formed by Prince Federico Cesi in the early 17th century and later acquired by Cassiano. These drawings constitute the first truly scientific study of fossilized woods and are executed with such finesse, skill and detail that they will be of immense interest both to art-historians and to historians of science. The drawings, the majority of which have remained unstudied and unpublished until now, include specimens of wood and animal fossils, ammonites and concretions, pyrits and baked clays, as well as a series of field drawings giving the sites where these specimens were found. The introductory essays discuss the background to Cesi's project as well as the importance of the drawings to the history of seventeenth- century culture and science.'Scott & Freedberg's book will prove to be an important resource for all those interested in the history of geology, and it is a must for all university libraries.' (Howard J. Falcon-Lang in Geological Magazine, Volume 138/4 - 2001)

The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State R^ constitutes a genealogy of the academic, confraternal, and guild practices of artists in Florence, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. It examines the institution's everyday practices, for which its daily transactions, expenses, sources of income, and seemingly inconsequential rulings provides an index, along with its official statutes, public mandates, and "extraordinary" proceedings, many of which have remained unpublished until now. Together with theoretical, critical and historiographical primary sources, these documents provide a picture of the operations and work of the Florentine Academy and the processes that governed the gestures, dictated the behaviors, and shaped the thought of those who moved within its walls. Looking diachronically at identity formation within a particular institution of the Medici state, this study also examines the connections between the Academy and an emergent public sphere within which modern bourgeois subjectivity took shape.

Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo are familiar names that are often closely associated with the concepts of genius and masterpiece. But what about Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Irene di Spilimbengo? Their names are unfamiliar and their works are literally unknown. Why? Defining the Renaissance 'Virtuosa' considers the language of art in relationship to the issues of gender difference through an examination of art criticism written between 1550 and 1800 on approximately forty women artists who were active in Renaissance Italy. Fredrika Jacobs demonstrates how these theoretical writings defined women artists, by linking artistic creation and biological procreation. She also examines the ambiguity of these women as both beautiful object and creator of beautiful object. Jacobs' study shows how deeply the biases of these early critics have inflected both subsequent reception of these Renaissance virtuose, as well as modern scholarship.

A modern rethinking of the career and vision of one of the greatest artists of all time on the 500th anniversary of his death

The towering genius of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) has been celebrated-and remained undisputed-for hundreds of years. A groundbreaking, essential addition to scholarship, Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered continues this legacy while simultaneously reexamining the multifaceted artist's life and work from the ground up. This authoritative, four-volume study marks the 500th anniversary of the great master's death with a sweeping, up-to-date portrait of Leonardo as he has never been seen before.

Internationally renowned Leonardo specialist Carmen C. Bambach unfurls new narratives, largely based on the most important, yet most misunderstood, body of evidence available: the artist's drawings, paintings, and manuscripts. In the manner of a biographer, Bambach combs through contemporary documents and more than 4,000 surviving sheets of Leonardo's notes and drawings to extract details about his development as an artist and thinker that have never before been suggested. Some 1,500 illustrations portray the staggering, spectacular legacy that Leonardo left behind on paper and canvas. Through Bambach's comprehensive research, Leonardo emerges as a figure who both embodies his era and completely transcends it, enduring as one of history's greatest artists, scientists, and inventors.

This is the first in-depth historical study of Jan Gossart (ca. 1478-1532), one of the most important painters of the Renaissance in northern Europe. Providing a richly illustrated narrative of the Netherlandish artist's life and art, Marisa Anne Bass shows how Gossart's paintings were part of a larger cultural effort in the Netherlands to assert the region's ancient heritage as distinct from the antiquity and presumed cultural hegemony of Rome. Focusing on Gossart's vibrant, monumental mythological nudes, the book challenges previous interpretations by arguing that Gossart and his patrons did not slavishly imitate Italian Renaissance models but instead sought to contest the idea that the Roman past gave the Italians a monopoly on antiquity. Drawing on many previously unused primary sources in Latin, Dutch, and French, Jan Gossart and the Invention of Netherlandish Antiquity offers a fascinating new understanding of both the painter and the history of northern European art at large.

Masaccio's "Trinity" examines one of the most influential paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Renowned for the grandeur of its characterizations and for the perspectival illusion of its architectural setting, the fresco was famous from the time it was painted in the 1420s, and remembered despite its having been hidden from view for nearly two centuries. This volume considers the "Trinity" in its historical and spiritual contexts, and describes the significance of Masaccio's innovative depictions of time and space.

Defining the Renaissance "Virtuosa" considers the language of art in relationship to the issues of gender difference through an examination of art criticism written between 1550 and 1800 on approximately forty women artists who were active in Renaissance Italy. Fredrika Jacobs demonstrates how these theoretical writings defined women artists, by linking artistic creation and biological procreation. Jacobs' study shows how deeply the biases of these early critics have inflected both subsequent reception of these Renaissance virtuose, as well as modern scholarship.

Witches and ghosts, dream medicine, women's carnivals, masquerade, monsters, rebel angels, the ship of fools and the dance of death: Carnivals and Dreams explores the extraordinary world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Renaissance surrealist, student of folklore and painter of dreams. In the generation between Rabelais and Shakespeare, the Reformation shook the foundations of the collective imaginary. As the old visual cultures of carnival, dreams and the dead were fragmented and demonised in the minds of Europeans, Bruegel became the first artist to make popular culture the subject of serious art. In his hands, it became an inexhaustible medium through which he could address the new anxieties of his contemporaries. Louise Milne shows how Bruegel's inventions express the shifting mental landscapes of the sixteenth century, arguing that his art marks nothing less than the genesis of the modern nightmare in art and culture. This is a book that can be read on many levels, a ground-breaking cultural history of art and the visual imagination, explored in clear lucid prose, through a dazzling range of new sources. Louise S. Milne is a Lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University and Edinburgh College of Art. "Wonderfully rich and thought-provoking... Essential reading for anyone interested in culture in general and the work of Bruegel in particular." Lynne Holden, Cosmos "One of the most searching and imaginative studies of Pieter Bruegel's art ever published... Milne takes seriously the idea that art is or can be a kind of continuation of dreaming. Marvellous and long awaited." Christopher Wood, Yale University

Visualizing Boccaccio represents a new approach to the interpretation of Boccaccio's classic book of erotic tales, The Decameron. 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 demonstrates how the juxtaposition of verbal and visual renditions permits new interpretations of each of these works.

This work is the only autobiography of a Renaissance artist. It vividly describes the artist's life at the Papal Court in Rome and at the Royal Court of France, including and eyewitness account of the Sack of Rome in 1527. Cellini also gives us intimate details of his career as a Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith.

Michelangelo is considered one of the greatest poets of the sixteenth century. He also filled hundreds of sheets of paper with exquisite drawings, many of which went on to become some of the most celebrated masterpieces of all-time. Organized chronologically, this collection combines the artist's own words with his sketches and finished artwork. His letters about the Sistine Chapel and Pope Julius, for example, will be illustrated with sketches he would have been working on at the time he was writing. The writing and art is selected by Carolyn Vaughan, former editor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who provides fascinating commentary and insights into the material throughout the book.

Where previous accounts of the Renaissance have not fully acknowledged the role that music played in this decisive period of cultural history, Laurenz Lutteken merges historical music analysis with the analysis of the other arts to provide a richer context for the emergence and evolution of creative cultures across civilizations. This fascinating panorama foregrounds music as a substantial component of the era and considers musical works and practices in a wider cultural-historical context. Among the topics surveyed are music's relationship to antiquity, the position of music within systems of the arts, the emergence of the concept of the musical work, as well as music's relationship to the theory and practice of painting, literature, and architecture. What becomes clear is that the Renaissance gave rise to many musical concepts and practices that persist to this day, whether the figure of the composer, musical institutions, and modes of musical writing and memory.

This book traces the development and spread of architecture under the Mughal emperors. Professor Asher considers the entire scope of architecture built under the auspices of the imperial Mughals and their subjects. She looks in particular at the role of political and cultural ideology, the relationship between construction in the major cities and in the provinces and the continuing Mughal fascination with paradisical imagery that culminated in the construction of the Taj Mahal.

Villa Madama, Raphael's late masterwork of architecture, landscape, and decoration for the Medici popes, is a paradigm of the Renaissance villa. The creation of this important, unfinished complex provides a remarkable case study for the nature of architectural invention. Drawing on little known poetry describing the villa while it was on the drawing board, as well as ground plans, letters, and antiquities once installed there, Yvonne Elet reveals the design process to have been a dynamic, collaborative effort involving humanists as well as architects. She explores design as a self-reflexive process, and the dialectic of text and architectural form, illuminating the relation of word and image in Renaissance architectural practice. Her revisionist account of architectural design as a process engaging different systems of knowledge, visual and verbal, has important implications for the relation of architecture and language, meaning in architecture, and the translation of idea into form.

In this ambitious study, Richard Wendorf establishes the grounds of comparison between two arts that have often been linked in a casual way but whose historical interrelations remain almost completely unexplored. By focusing on the great age of English portraiture - from the arrival of Van Dyck to the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson - the author shows that, despite their obvious differences, visual and verbal portraits often shared similar assumptions about the representation of historical character. Grounded in modern theory devoted to the comparison of literature and painting and to the problem of representation, this book examines each form of portraiture in terms of the other. Among those writers considered are Izaak Walton, John Evelyn, John Aubrey, Roger North, Goldsmith, Johnson, Mrs Piozzi, Boswell; among the artists are Van Dyck, Lely, Samuel Cooper, Jonathan Richardson, Hogarth and Reynolds. The careers of `double agents' (painters, like Richardson and Reynolds, who experimented with biographical writing) are also discussed. The Elements of Life is a ground-breaking critical history of biography and portrait-painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Scholars have traditionally viewed the Italian Renaissance artist as a gifted, but poorly educated craftsman whose complex and demanding works were created with the assistance of a more educated advisor. These assumptions are, in part, based on research that has focused primarily on the artist's social rank and workshop training. In this volume, Angela Dressen explores the range of educational opportunities that were available to the Italian Renaissance artist. Considering artistic formation within the history of education, Dressen focuses on the training of highly skilled, average artists, revealing a general level of learning that was much more substantial than has been assumed. She emphasizes the role of mediators who had a particular interest in augmenting artists' knowledge, and highlights how artists used Latin and vernacular texts to gain additional knowledge that they avidly sought. Dressen's volume brings new insights into a topic at the intersection of early modern intellectual, educational, and art history.

The brightly colored tin-enameled earthenware called maiolica was among the major accomplishments of decorative arts in 16th-century Italy. This in-depth look at the history of maiolica, told through 140 exemplary pieces from the world-class collection at the Metropolitan Museum, offers a new perspective on a major aspect of Italian Renaissance art. Most of the works have never been published and all are newly photographed. The ceramics are featured alongside detailed descriptions of production techniques and a consideration of the social and cultural context, making this an invaluable resource for scholars and collectors. The imaginatively decorated works include an eight-figure group of the Lamentation, the largest and most ambitious piece of sculpture produced in a Renaissance maiolica workshop; pharmacy jars; bella donna plates; and more. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (08/29/16-02/26/17)

Unprecedented in scope, this fifth volume in the Architecture in Context series traces the rediscovery of Classical ideas and the emergence of the great artists and architects of late 15th- and early 16th-century Italy that led to the cultural peak characterized as the High Renaissance. It begins with a definition of Mannerism, the seminal development from the High Renaissance and the Baroque, associated with such dominant and influential figures as Raphael, Michelangelo, Vignola, Romano and Palladio. The political context within which Mannerism and its variants developed - from the Reformation to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War - is outlined before the major figures and achievements of Italian architecture in the period are explored in great depth and breadth. The journey then moves to France and architects and thinkers such as Pierre Lescot, Philibert de l'Orme, J.A. du Cerceau and Salomon de Brosse. These two major traditions - with the intercession of architects from the Netherlands who had ideas of their own - had a huge impact in central Europe, the ideas spreading across a vast area including modern-day Germany, Austria and Poland. After a digression to the notably eclectic England of Elizabeth I and James I, where pioneers such as Robert Smythson were overshadowed by the towering figure of Inigo Jones, Reformations ends with a survey of architecture in the Iberian peninsula and the colonies of Spain and Portugal, where the powerful influence of the Italian masters met a strong vernacular tradition. Profusely illustrated and with many specially drawn plans, this is a wide-ranging and detailed guide to the architecture of a period that continues to fascinate and engage us today.