Compiled by members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project and published on the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death, this is the definitive new catalogue of all of Bosch's extant paintings and drawings. His mastery and genius have been redefined as a result of six years of research on the iconography, techniques, pedigree, and conservation history of his paintings and on his life. This stunning volume includes all new photography, as well as up-to-date research on the individual works. For the first time, the incredible creativity of this late medieval artist, expressed in countless details, is reproduced and discussed in this book. Special attention is being paid to Bosch as an image maker, a skilled draughtsman, and a brutal painter, changing the game of painting around 1500 by his innovative way of working. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

The fruits of knowledge--such as books, data, and ideas--tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, "Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit.
Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period's monumental shifts in culture and learning.

In this beautifully illustrated overview, Renee Worringer provides a clear and comprehensive account of the longevity, pragmatism, and flexibility of the Ottoman Empire in governing over vast territories and diverse peoples. A Short History of the Ottoman Empire uses clear headings, themes, text boxes, primary source translations, and maps to assist students in understanding the Empire's complex history.

This monograph is the first title in a new series titled Opera Maestra, specifically focused on the work and itinerary of the artists who made history, from an unprecedented perspective. The series begins with Leonardo da Vinci, captured by the expert Marco Versiero. At the core the analysis is the specific soul, among the thousands of Leonardo's, that Marco Versiero wants to underline: his mirror-soul; namely, Leonardo's eye between Human and Nature. In other words, the eye that allowed the artist to mediate between his favourite dimensions (the human and the natural one), and allowed them to communicate with each other without cancelling themselves, but rather managing to reflect one in the other's light, like in front of a mirror. An essential biographical note introduces the reader to Marco Versiero's pages, enriched with 61 detailed pictures. The pictures, proposing not only a selection of Leonardo's paintings but also of his drawings, enhanced with comprehensive captions, tell the itinerary of the genius from the years of his apprenticeship in Verrocchio's workshop till the days of his maturity.

Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed sweeping innovations in the art of sculpture. Sculptors rediscovered new types of images from classical antiquity and invented new ones, devised novel ways to finish surfaces, and pushed the limits of their materials to new expressive extremes. The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy surveys the sculptural production created by a range of artists throughout the peninsula. It offers a comprehensive overview of Italian sculpture during a century of intense creativity and development. Here, nineteen historians of Quattrocento Italian sculpture chart the many competing forces that led makers, patrons, and viewers to invest sculpture with such heightened importance in this time and place. Methodologically wide-ranging, the essays, specially commissioned for this volume, explore the vast range of techniques and media (stone, metal, wood, terracotta, and stucco) used to fashion works of sculpture. They also examine how viewers encountered those objects, discuss varying approaches to narrative, and ponder the increasing contemporary interest in the relationship between sculpture and history.

An all-new, jewel-like, reader-friendly format gives new life to this relaunch of an international best-seller.Leonardo da Vinci?artist, inventor, and prototypical Renaissance man?is a perennial source of fascination because of his astonishing intellect and boundless curiosity about the natural and man-made world. During his life he created numerous works of art and kept voluminous notebooks that detailed his artistic and intellectual pursuits.The collection of writings and art in this magnificent book are drawn from his notebooks. The book organizes his wide range of interests into subjects such as human figures, light and shade, perspective and visual perception, anatomy, botany and landscape, geography, the physical sciences and astronomy, architecture, sculpture, and inventions. Nearly every piece of writing throughout the book is keyed to the piece of artwork it describes.The writing and art is selected by art historian H. Anna Suh, who provides fascinating commentary and insight into the material, making Leonardo's Notebooks an exquisite single-volume compendium celebrating his enduring genius.

The historiography of timekeeping is traditionally characterized by a dichotomy between research that investigates the evolution of technical devices on the one hand, and research that is concerned with the examination of the cultures and uses of time on the other hand. Material Histories of Time opens a dialogue between these two approaches by taking monumental clocks, table clocks, portable watches, carriage clocks, and other forms of timekeeping as the starting point of a joint reflection of specialists of the history of horology together with scholars studying the social and cultural history of time. The contributions range from the apparition of the first timekeeping mechanical systems in the Middle Ages to the first evidence of industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Since 1900, the connections between art and technology with nature have become increasingly inextricable. Through a selection of innovative readings by international scholars, this book presents the first investigation of the intersections between art, technology and nature in post-medieval times. Transdisciplinary in approach, this volume's 14 essays explore art, technology and nature's shifting constellations that are discernible at the micro level and as part of a larger chronological pattern. Included are subjects ranging from Renaissance wooden dolls, science in the Italian art academies, and artisanal epistemologies in the followers of Leonardo, to Surrealism and its precursors in Mannerist grotesques and the Wunderkammer, eighteenth-century plant printing, the climate and its artistic presentations from Constable to Olafur Eliasson, and the hermeneutics of bioart. In their comprehensive introduction, editors Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Wamberg trace the Kantian heritage of radically separating art and technology, and inserting both at a distance to nature, suggesting this was a transient chapter in history. Thus, they argue, the present renegotiation between art, technology and nature is reminiscent of the ancient and medieval periods, in which art and technology were categorized as aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods (the Latin ars, the Greek techne), an area moreover supposed to imitate the creative forces of nature.

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.

Casting fresh light on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British art, literature, ecological science and paganism, Decadent Ecology reveals the pervasive influence of decadence and paganism on modern understandings of nature and the environment, queer and feminist politics, national identities, and changing social hierarchies. Combining scholarship in the environmental humanities with aesthetic and literary theory, this interdisciplinary study digs into works by Simeon Solomon, Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, Robert Louis Stevenson, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, Arthur Machen and others to address trans-temporal, trans-species intimacy; the vagabondage of place; the erotics of decomposition; occult ecology; decadent feminism; and neo-paganism. Decadent Ecology reveals the mutually influential relationship of art and science during the formulation of modern ecological, environmental, evolutionary and trans-national discourses, while also highlighting the dissident dynamism of new and recuperative pagan spiritualities - primarily Celtic, Nordic-Germanic, Greco-Roman and Egyptian - in the framing of personal, social and national identities.

Luxurious, beautiful, and portable, tapestry was the pre-eminent art form of the Tudor court. Henry VIII amassed an unrivaled collection over the course of his reign, and the author weaves the history of this magnificent collection into the life of its owner with an engaging narrative style. Now largely dispersed or destroyed, Henry's extensive inventory is here reassembled and reveals how, through tapestry, Henry identified himself with historic, religious, and mythological figures, putting England in dialogue-and competition-with the leading courts of Early Modern Europe while promoting his own religious and political agendas at home. Campbell's original account sheds new light on Tudor political and artistic culture and the court's response to Renaissance aesthetic ideals. Sumptuously illustrated with newly commissioned photographs, this stunning re-creation of Europe's greatest tapestry collection challenges the predominantly text-driven histories of the period and offers a fascinating new perspective on the life of Henry VIII. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

In 1908, an idea arose during a conversation between Dr Felix Peipers and Rudolf Steiner. Steiner had been lecturing on the healing nature of the Egyptian Goddess Isis, and drew a parallel to the Christian Madonna, Mary. From that, Steiner and Peipers started to formulate a sequence of fifteen Madonna images, primarily by Raphael, which Dr Peipers used effectively in meditative therapy with his patients. All fifteen images are included in the book. This book explores the nature of the Madonna images, addressing topics ranging from the mystery of seeing, beauty, truth and goodness, and Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom, to Isis and Madonna, working with images and Rudolf Steiner's healing mission. There is a special section on Raphael's Sistine Madonna. This book is a perfect complement to Raphael's Madonnas (edited by Christopher Bamford), a beautiful collection of colour Madonna images.

Few Renaissance Venetians saw the New World with their own eyes. As the print capital of early modern Europe, however, Venice developed a unique relationship to the Americas. Venetian editors, mapmakers, translators, writers, and cosmographers represented the New World at times as a place that the city's mariners had discovered before the Spanish, a world linked to Marco Polo's China, or another version of Venice, especially in the case of Tenochtitlan. Elizabeth Horodowich explores these various and distinctive modes of imagining the New World, including Venetian rhetorics of 'firstness', similitude, othering, comparison, and simultaneity generated through forms of textual and visual pastiche that linked the wider world to the Venetian lagoon. These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but equivalent participation in the Age of Encounters. Whereas historians have traditionally focused on the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World, and the Dutch and English mapping of it, they have ignored the wide circulation of Venetian Americana. Horodowich demonstrates how with their printed texts and maps, Venetian newsmongers embraced a fertile tension between the distant and the close. In doing so, they played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America.

Cities are shaped as much by a repertoire of buildings, works and objects, as by cultural institutions, ideas and interactions between forms and practices entangled in identity formations. This is particularly true when seen through a city as forceful and splendid as Venice. The essays in this volume investigate these connections between art and identity, through discussions of patronage, space and the dissemination of architectural models and knowledge in Venice, its territories and beyond. They celebrate Professor Deborah Howard's leading role in fostering a historically grounded and interdisciplinary approach to the art and architecture of Venice. Based on an examination and re-interpretation of a wide range of archival material and primary sources, the contributing authors approach the notion of identity in its many guises: as self-representation, as strong sub-currents of spatial strategies, as visual and semantic discourses, and as political and imperial aspirations. Employing interdisciplinary modes of interpretation, these studies offer ground-breaking analyses of canonical sites and works of art, diverse groups of patrons, as well as the life and oeuvre of leading architects such as Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio. In so doing, they link together citizens and nobles, past and present, the real and the symbolic, space and sound, religion and power, the city and its parts, Venice and the Stato da Mar, the Serenissima and the Sublime Port.

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.

Scholars have traditionally focused on the subjects and meanings of Hieronymus Bosch's works, whereas issues of painting technique, workshop participation, and condition of extant pictures have received considerably less attention. Since 2010, the Bosch Research and Conservation Project has been studying these works using modern methods. The team has documented Bosch's extant paintings with infrared reflectography and ultra high-resolution digital macro photography, both in infrared and visible light. Together with microscopic study of the paintings, this has enabled the team to write extensive and critical research reports describing the techniques and condition of the works, published in this extraordinary volume for the first time. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

This is a long-awaited and authoritative reinterpretation of the early life and career of arguably the greatest artist in history. Author John T. Spike surveys Michelangelo's early life from birth to his early thirties, probing the thinking, artistic evolution and yearnings of a young man thoroughly convinced of his own exceptional talent. Spike explores Michelangelo's involvement in the most troubling controversies of his age, and recreates Florence and Rome with vivid sketches of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Leonardo, Julius II and Machiavelli. This is a prodigiously informative and compelling account that will fulfil the need for a major Michelangelo biography for this generation and many to come.

A remarkable private collection formed over the last thirty years is the focus of this richly illustrated book that introduces the reader to English silver spanning a century and a half from a little before the Tudor age (1485-1603) to the threshold of the Civil War (1642-51). This was a period when England changed out of all recognition. At the beginning it was still essentially a medieval country dominated by an autocratic king and a rich and powerful Church; by the end of the period the Church had lost virtually all of its power and, with the execution of Charles I in 1649, the monarchy itself was abolished. To a degree, this changing world is mirrored in the styles represented by the silver featuring in the collection. Besides setting the silver against its social and historical background the book examines the wide range of techniques used by silversmiths at the time to shape and adorn silver objects.

Artists like Botticelli, Holbein, Leonardo, Durer, and Michelangelo and works such as the Last Supper fresco and the monumental marble statue of David, are familiar symbols of the Renaissance. But who were these artists, why did they produce such memorable images, and how would their original beholders have viewed these objects? Was the Renaissance only about great masters and masterpieces, or were women artists and patrons also involved? And what about the "minor" pieces that Renaissance men and women would have encountered in homes, churches and civic spaces? This Very Short Introduction answers such questions by considering both famous and lesser-known artists, patrons, and works of art within the cultural and historical context of Renaissance Europe. The volume provides a broad cultural and historical context for some of the Renaissance's most famous artists and works of art. It also explores forgotten aspects of Renaissance art, such as objects made for the home and women as artists and patrons. Considering Renaissance art produced in both Northern and Southern Europe, rather than focusing on just one region, the book introduces readers to a variety of approaches to the study of Renaissance art, from social history to formal analysis.

Compared to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance is brief--little more than two centuries, extending roughly from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century--and largely confined to a few Italian city states. Nevertheless, the epoch marked a great cultural shift in sensibilities, the dawn of a new age in which classical Greek and Roman values were "reborn" and human values in all fields, from the arts to civic life, were reaffirmed.
With this volume, Eugenio Garin, a leading Renaissance scholar, has gathered the work of an international team of scholars into an accessible account of the people who animated this decisive moment in the genesis of the modern mind. We are offered a broad spectrum of figures, major and minor, as they lived their lives: the prince and the military commander, the cardinal and the courtier, the artist and the philosopher, the merchant and the banker, the voyager, and women of all classes. With its concentration on the concrete, the specific, even the anecdotal, the volume offers a wealth of new perspectives and ideas for study.

In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes - her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.