The untold story of how paper revolutionized art making during the Renaissance, exploring how it shaped broader concepts of authorship, memory, and the transmission of ideas over the course of three centuries In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society-not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist's workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became "Europeanized" through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper-as refuse and rags transformed into white surface-informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists' thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.

This sumptuous catalogue provides an overview of French art circa 1500, a dynamic, transitional period when the country, resurgent after the dislocations of the Hundred Years' War, invaded Italy and all media flourished. What followed was the emergence of a unique art: the fusion of the Italian Renaissance with northern European Gothic styles. Outstanding examples of exquisite and revolutionary works are featured, including paintings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, tapestries, and metalwork. Exciting new research brings to life court artists Jean Fouquet, Jean Bourdichon, Michel Colombe, Jean Poyer, and Jean Hey (The Master of Moulins), all of whose creations were used by kings and queens to assert power and prestige. Also detailed are the organization of workshops and the development of the influential art market in Paris and patronage in the Loire Valley. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Grand Palais, Paris (10/06/10-01/10/11) The Art Institute of Chicago (02/27/11-05/30/11)

Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 and remained there until his death in 1520, working as painter and architect for popes Julius II and Leo X and for the most prestigious patrons. Here the artist changed his painting style several times, looking at the works of Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo and the vast repertoire of ancient painting and sculpture. In the Eternal City Raphael practised architecture for the first time, designing buildings that reflected the models of Antiquity such as the Pantheon, the descriptions deriving from written sources such as Vitruvius' treaty on architecture, and the examples of modern architects like Donato Bramante. This guide supplies essential and up to date information on all the civil or religious buildings designed or built by Raphael in Rome, and the frescoes and paintings, housed in churches or museums, whether executed in the city or arrived there at a later stage.

One of the most influential scholars of the Renaissance, Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) gained fame not only for his literary theory and poetry, but for his incredible collection of art and antiquities. Drawing on anecdotes from Bembo's letters and unpublished archival material, Susan Nalezyty analyzes how Bembo's collection functioned as a source of inspiration for artists like Titian and writers like Giovanni della Casa. As visitors to the collection marveled at the quality and variety of the displayed objects, Bembo encouraged investigations into the ways in which contemporary art compared with ancient objects. Often straddling the line between the visual and literary worlds, these critical discussions catalyzed artistic experiments that led to new modes of creative expression. This generously illustrated volume brings Bembo's collection to life and reveals its key role in the development of Renaissance artistic philosophy and historical study of the classical past.

"Ambitious Form" describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors--Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti--as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked.

Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.

A fifteenth-century Flemish painter who spent most of his life in Bruges, van Eyck was revered for his innovative manipulation of oil paint. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details - allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre.

In January of 1469, the accounts of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy record a payment to the scribe Nicolas Spierinc for having written "some prayers for my lord." Seven months later, the same account notes a payment to the illuminator Lievin van Lathem for twenty-five miniatures plus borders and decorated initials in the same manuscript. In this seminal study, the late Antoine de Schryver presents an argument that the documents refer to the exquisite prayer book of Charles the Bold now in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Ms. 37)--one of Charles's most splendid commissions, belonging to the greatest era of Netherlandish Burgundian book painting.
De Schryver's in-depth research opens a window onto the careers of the Van Lathem, who served three rulers of the Burgundian Netherlands over forty years, and Nicolas Spierinc, the most inventive and brilliant scribe of Charles's court. This volume reproduces all of the book's miniatures and some of its elegant calligraphic pages.

The Wellby Bequest, received by the Ashmolean Museum in 2013, consists of some 500 precious and exotic objects, mainly from Continental Europe, from the late medieval to the rococo, and is the most remarkable accession of this kind of material to any museum in the UK since the bequest of Ferdinand de Rothschild to the British Museum in 1898 (the Waddesdon Bequest). The collection was assembled by three generations of the Wellby family with an intention that it should reflect the great princely treasure chambers (Kunstkammer) preserved in Dresden, Vienna, Innsbruck, and elsewhere. Many of these objects have never been previously published. This beautiful and accessible book introduces over sixty of the prime pieces from this astonishing addition to the Ashmolean, presenting material of the type incomparably superior to anything in other UK museums outside London. Both authors are specialists in European decorative arts of the Renaissance and later periods.

Materials carried the meaning of early modern art. Transformed and crafted from the matter of nature, art objects were the physical embodiment of both the inherent qualities of materials and the forces of culture that used, refined and produced them. The study of materials offers a new approach to this important period in the history of art, science and culture, linking the close study of painting, sculpture and architecture to much wider categories of the everyday and the exotic. Drawing on new research and models from anthropology, material culture and the history of art, scholars in The matter of art explore topics as diverse as Inka stonework, gold in panel painting, cork platforms for shoes, and the Christian Eucharist. -- .

This volume narrates the life of Raphael, 500 years after his death, and presents the various aspects of the unique artistic experience of the genius. Particular significance is given to Raphael's management of his studio: more than any other artist, in fact, he was able to act as an entrepreneur, organizing and directing an excellent group of collaborators, which could be expanded or contracted in response to requirements. It was a modern organization which was ahead of its time in that it included a kind of marketing. His inventions and ideas were spread thanks to engravings and woodcuts. The life and the main masterpieces of one of the finest artist of the whole history of art. For the first time in a title about Raffaello the reader will find a final chapter dedicated to his carvings, which made him the first artist entrepreneur of history.

How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination. European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet, as Christopher Heuer explains, between 1500 and 1700, one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally "abstract," the far North-a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination-offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a "non-site," spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts-and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy. In Into the White, Heuer uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates over perception and matter, representation, discovery, and the time of the earth-long before the nineteenth century Romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, he argues, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and impossible to be mastered, something beyond the idea of image itself.

When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions-expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images-and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.

This book provides a new perspective on Sienese painting after the Black Death, asking how social, religious, and cultural change affect visual imagery and style. Judith Steinhoff demonstrates that Siena's artistic culture of the mid and late fourteenth century was intentionally pluralistic, and not conservative as is often claimed. She shows that Sienese art both before and after the Black Death was the material expression of an artistically sophisticated population that consciously and carefully integrated tradition and change. Promoting both iconographic and stylistic pluralism, Sienese patrons furthered their own goals as well as addressed the culture's changing needs. Steinhoff presents both detailed case studies as well as a broader view of trends in artistic practice and patronage. She offers a new approach to interpreting artistic style in the Trecento, arguing that artists and patrons alike understood the potential of style as a vehicle that conveys specific meanings.

The architecture of the Italian Renaissance, theorized by artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, influenced styles and trends of the following centuries throughout Europe and beyond. This volume offers a comprehensive compilation of Italian Renaissnace architecture--richly documented, illustrated, arranged by region, and including a glossary.

During the nineteenth century, Albrecht Durer's art, piety, and personal character were held up as models to inspire contemporary artists and-it was hoped-to return Germany to international artistic eminence. In this book, Jeffrey Chipps Smith explores Durer's complex posthumous reception during the great century of museum building in Europe, with a particular focus on the artist's role as a creative and moral exemplar for German artists and museum visitors. In an era when museums were emerging as symbols of civic, regional, and national identity, dozens of new national, princely, and civic museums began to feature portraits of Durer in their elaborate decorative programs embellishing the facades, grand staircases, galleries, and ceremonial spaces. Most of these arose in Germany and Austria, though examples can be seen as far away as St. Petersburg, Stockholm, London, and New York City. Probing the cultural, political, and educational aspirations and rivalries of these museums and their patrons, Smith traces how Durer was painted, sculpted, and prominently placed to accommodate the era's diverse needs and aspirations. He investigates what these portraits can tell us about the rise of a distinct canon of famous Renaissance and Baroque artists-addressing the question of why Durer was so often paired with Raphael, who was considered to embody the greatness of Italian art-and why, with the rise of German nationalism, Hans Holbein the Younger often replaced Raphael as Durer's partner. Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, this book sheds new light on museum building in the nineteenth century and the rise of art history as a discipline. It will appeal to specialists in nineteenth-century and early modern art, the history of museums and collecting, and art historiography.

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account traces Rosa's strategies of self-promotion, and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject matter - witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic and dark violence - and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime. Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.

The art of the Sistine Chapel, decorated by artists who competed with one another and commissioned by popes who were equally competitive, is a complex fabric of thematic, chronological, and artistic references. Four main campaigns were undertaken to decorate the chapel between 1481 and 1541, and with each new addition, fundamental themes found increasingly concrete expression. One theme in particular plays a central role in the chapel: the legitimization of papal authority, as symbolized by two keys-one silver, one gold-to the kingdom of heaven. "The Sistine Chapel: Paradise in Rome" provides a concise, informative account of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. In unpacking this complex history, Ulrich Pfisterer reveals the remarkable unity of the images in relation to theology, politics, and the intentions of the artists themselves, who included such household names as Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Through a study of the main campaigns to adorn the Sistine Chapel, Pfisterer argues that the art transformed the chapel into a pathway to the kingdom of God, legitimising the absolute authority of the popes. First published in German, the prose comes to life in English in the deft hands of translator David Dollenmayer.

This book examines the art and ritual of flagellant confraternities in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Meeting regularly to beat themselves with whips, members of these confraternities concentrated on the suffering of Christ in the most extreme and committed way, and the images around them provided visual prompts of the Passion and the model suffering body. This study presents new findings related to a variety of artworks including altarpieces, banners, wall paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and paintings for the condemned, many from outside the Florence-Rome-Venice triangle.

Depicting the Creation of Woman presented a special problem for Renaissance artists. The medieval iconography of Eve rising half-formed from Adam's side was hardly compatible with their commitment to the naturalistic representation of the human figure. At the same time, the story of God constructing the first woman from a rib did not offer the kind of dignified, affective pictorial narrative that artists, patrons, and the public prized. Jack M. Greenstein takes this artistic problem as the point of departure for an iconographic study of this central theme of Christian culture. His book shows how the meaning changed along with the form when Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano, and other Italian sculptors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries revised the traditional composition to accommodate a naturalistically depicted Eve. At stake, Greenstein argues, is the role of the artist and the power of image-making in reshaping Renaissance culture and religious thought.

Sifting the available evidence, Carlo Ginzburg builds up a vivid portrait of Piero della Francesca's patrons and convincingly explains the contemporary intrigues resonant in his painting. This new edition, extensively illustrated, includes additional material by Ginzburg dealing with the work of Roberto Longhi, the dating of the Arezzo Cycle, and the rediscovery of della Francesca in the twentieth century.

Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and “exploratory” contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted—systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective—and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large. Provocative and challenging, this book will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine.

Craving pleasure as well as knowledge, Raphael Sanzio was quick to realize that his talent would only be truly appreciated in the liberal, carefree and extravagantly sensual atmosphere of Rome during its golden age under Julius II and Leo X. Arriving in the city in 1508 at the age of twenty-five, he was entranced and seduced by life at the papal court and within a few months had emerged as the most brilliant star in its intellectual firmament. His art achieved a natural grace that was totally uninhibited and free from subjection. His death, at just thirty-seven, plunged the city into the kind of despair that follows the passing of an esteemed and much loved prince.In this major new biography Antonio Forcellino retraces the meteoric arc of Raphael's career by re-examining contemporary documents and accounts and interpreting the artist's works with the eye of an expert art restorer. Raphael's paintings are vividly described and placed in their historical context. Forcellino analyses Raphael's techniques for producing the large frescos for which he is so famous, examines his working practices and his organization of what was a new kind of artistic workshop, and shows how his female portraits expressed and conveyed a new attitude to women. This rich and nuanced account casts aside the misconceptions passed on by those critics who persistently tried to undermine Raphael's mythical status, enabling one of the greatest artists of all time to re-emerge fully as both man and artist.

Michelangelo's originality as an artist lay not only in ideas about perfection and beauty, but also in his unique approach to the artistic process and art's site specificity. Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel and the sculptures of the Medici Chapel and Julius II's tomb should all be understood as dramatic interventions at their sites. Instead of adapting to and blending in with their surroundings, these are works that interact with the space, the ceremonies, and the music. In addition, the many uncompleted works and the artist's own writings point to an aesthetic of continuous processing, where the fundamentals remain as important as the finished work. In Siting Michelangelo, Peter Gillgren investigates Michelangelo's works as conceived with the aim of altering and rearranging what was already in place. Gillgren's study shows that not only must we look closely at works of art, but we must fully consider them as embodiments of their sitedness. This original and thought-provoking book applies a fresh critical perspective to the essentials of the discipline of art history. Includes 4-colour, specially commissioned reconstruction-images, a fold-out spread of the Sistine Chapel ceiling and overlay-image as special effect on transparent paper.