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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600
The Book of Miracles first surfaced only a few years ago and is one of the most spectacular discoveries in the field of Renaissance art. The near-complete illustrated manuscript, created in Augsburg around 1550, is composed of 169 pages of large-format illustrations in gouache and watercolor, depicting wondrous and often eerie phenomena. The mesmerizing images deal with both biblical and folkloric tales, depicting stories from the Old Testament and Book of Revelation as well as events that took place in the immediate present of the manuscript's author. From shooting stars to swarms of locusts, terrifying monsters to fatal floods, page after page hypnotizes with visions alternately dreadful, spectacular, and even apocalyptic. This volume presents the revelatory Book of Miracles in a new, compact format, making this extraordinary document accessible to everyone. It comes with a translation of the manuscript texts and two essays that give an introduction to the cultural and historical context of this unique Renaissance work.
Accompanying a focused display at The Courtauld Gallery that will bring together for the first time Pieter Bruegel the Elder's only three known grisaille paintings - the Courtauld's Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery (which is barred from travel), The Death of the Virgin from Upton House in Warwickshire (National Trust) and Three Soldiers from the Frick Collection in New York - this book will examine the sources, function and reception of these three exquisite masterpieces. The panels will be complemented by prints and contemporary replicas, as well by other independent grisailles in order to shed light on the development of this genre in Northern Europe. Despite his status as the seminal Netherlandish painter of the 16th century, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) remains an elusive artist: fewer than forty paintings are ascribed to him. Of these, a dozen are cabinet-sized. These small-scale works offer key insights as they often bear a personal significance for the artist and were sometimes given as gifts to friends and patrons. Presenting these works together for the first time is not only an extraordinary and unprecedented opportunity but it will be extremely revealing, considering their unusual nature in both Bruegel's oeuvre and 16th-century art in general. Monochrome painting in shades of grey was a mainstay of Netherlandish art from the early 15th century, most often present on the wings of altarpieces and preparatory sketches for engravings. In contrast, Bruegel's panels constitute one of the earliest and rare examples of independent cabinet pictures in grisaille, created for private contemplation and enjoyment. This seemingly austere type of painting has often been imbued with religious or political significance. On a purely artistic level, it enabled the painter to showcase his skill by limiting his palette. The publication, which includes a technical investigation of the three panels, will provide the opportunity to reassess the practical aspects of the grisaille technique and the many ways in which this effect was achieved. Indeed, Bruegel's three monochromatic paintings display quite different techniques, raising the question of the painter's intent. This is the latest in the series of books accompanying critically acclaimed Courtauld Gallery displays, following on from Collecting Gauguin (2013), Antiquity Unleashed (2013), Richard Serra (2013), A Dialogue with Nature (2014), Bruegel to Freud (2014) and Jonathan Richardson (2015).
This sweeping overview of Rembrandt's extraordinary achievement as a draughtsman fills a gap in the otherwise enormous literature on the artist. Beautifully illustrated, mostly in colour, the more than 150 drawings - culled from a corpus of some 800 - are discussed in detail. The drawings span Rembrandt's entire productive life as an artist, from early self-portraits in the 1620s to late drawings from the 1660s of the victim of an execution, a state coach, and historical and mythological images. The scope of the book allows readers to delve into the very broad range of Rembrandt's oeuvre of drawings.
Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes
originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include
works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget,
Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan
Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed
mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A
brochure listing each title in the "International Library of
Psychology" series is available upon request.
The painter and printmaker Albrecht Durer is one of the most important figures of the German Renaissance. This book accompanies the first major exhibition of the Whitworth Art Gallery's outstanding Durer collection in over half a century. It offers a new perspective on Durer as an intense observer of the worlds of manufacture, design and trade that fill his graphic art. Artworks and artefacts examined here expose understudied aspects of Durer's art and practice, including his attentive examination of objects of daily domestic use, his involvement in economies of local manufacture and exchange, the microarchitectures of local craft and, finally, his attention to cultures of natural and philosophical inquiry and learning. -- .
"[An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him." -New Yorker "Freud's Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired." -John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar "This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud's response to Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty." -Colm Toibin, author of Brooklyn and Nora Webster After a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli's frescoes the greatest artwork he'd ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn't recall the artist's name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind's eye. This is known as the "Signorelli parapraxis" in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud's own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues. What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud's biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud's feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman. Freud's Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art's singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires. Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.
Spanning from the innauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. In "Art and Magic in the Court of the Stuarts," Vaughan Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature.Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldy, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.
This book recounts the exciting rediscovery of Giorgio Vasari's painting Allegory of Patience, painted in 1551-52 for the Bishop of Arezzo, Vasari's hometown. The painting was conceived in Rome with the aid of Michelangelo, as many surviving letters reveal. The work will be on view to the public at the National Gallery, London, through 2023. The monumental figure of a woman, life-sized, with arms crossed, watches time run down. The passing of time is symbolized in the drops that fall from an antique water clock beside her, gradually wearing away the stone on which she rests her foot. The Bishop of Arezzo regarded patience as the key to his career and achievements, and wished it to be represented in a picture. Vasari consulted his contemporaries and fellow humanists as well as the great sculptor Michelangelo when deciding what form it should take. The image represents more exactly the Latin tag 'diuturna tolerantia' (daily tolerance). The painting quickly became famous in its time and numerous copies were made of it - but not until now has the original emerged. Thanks to letters between those involved, the painting and the process of its creation are richly documented, and in particular provide insights and quotations about picture-making from Michelangelo. The book carries full documentation of the work and its known copies, some of which can be traced to leading patrons in Renaissance Italy. It also examines Vasari's own autograph technique and artistic aims.
Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on 'The Vitruvian Man', c. 1492 by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and printed on silver.
The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations of Renaissance art to new fields, Space, Image and Reform expands the ideas at the center of her work further back in time, further afield, and deeper into familiar topics, thus achieving a cohesion not usually seen in edited volumes honoring a single scholar.
A rare examination of the political, social, and economic contexts in which painters in Tudor and Early Stuart England lived and worked While famous artists such as Holbein, Rubens, or Van Dyck are all known for their creative periods in England or their employment at the English court, they still had to make ends meet, as did the less well-known practitioners of their craft. This book, by one of the leading historians of Tudor and Stuart England, sheds light on the daily concerns, practices, and activities of many of these painters. Drawing on a biographical database comprising nearly 3000 painters and craftsmen - strangers and native English, Londoners and provincial townsmen, men and sometimes women, celebrity artists and 'mere painters' - this book offers an account of what it meant to paint for a living in early modern England. It considers the origins of these painters as well as their geographical location, the varieties of their expertise, and the personnel and spatial arrangements of their workshops. Engagingly written, the book captures a sense of mobility and exchange between England and the continent through the considerable influence of stranger-painters, undermining traditional notions about the insular character of this phase in the history of English art. By showing how painters responded to the greater political, religious, and economic upheavals of the time, the study refracts the history of England itself through the lens of this particular occupation.
Arguably the greatest sculptor of all time, Donatello (c.1386-1466) was at the vanguard of a revolution in sculptural practice in the early Renaissance. Combining ideas from classical and medieval sculpture to create innovative sculptural forms, Donatello had an unparalleled ability to portray emotions in works intended to inspire spiritual devotion. Pieces such as the penitent St Mary Magdalene and the bronze of David remain deeply affecting to audiences today. Working in marble, bronze, wood, terracotta and stucco, he contributed to major commissions of church and state; was an intimate of the Medici family and their circle in Florence, and highly sought after in other Italian cities. This book, specially commissioned to accompany the 2023 exhibition at the V&A, explores Donatello's extraordinary creativity within the vibrant artistic and cultural context of fifteenth-century Italy, surveying his early connection with goldsmiths' work and the collaborative nature of his workshop and processes. It also reflects on Donatello's legacy, reviewing how his sculpture inspired subsequent generations in the later Renaissance and beyond.
'Never was a painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist take a greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind of breezy festival and feeling it through the medium of perpetual success...He was the happiest of painters.' Henry James on Veronese, 1909 Collected here for the first time, these fascinating early biographies (one of which has never been translated before) describe and celebrate the astonishingly fertile art of Paolo Veronese. Most of what we know about Veronese comes from these three essays. 'I have known this Paolino and I have seen his beautiful works. He deserves to have a great volume written in praise of him, for his pictures prove that he is second to no other painter', wrote Veronese's contemporary Annibale Carracci in the margins to his copy of Vasari's writings, continuing 'and this fool passes over him in four lines. And just because he was not Florentine.' It was indeed a measure of his fame that Vasari, whose Life of Veronese is reprinted here, should have overcome his pro-Tuscan prejudices to write about his great Venetian contemporary; and he was followed in this by another Florentine, the theorist Raffaele Borghini. But the most striking record of the impact of Veronese's art on his countrymen is the extensive biography by his fellow Venetian, Carlo Ridolfi. Entirely original in the seriousness and passion with which he approached his subject, Ridolfi permanently changed the course of writing about art. This is the first translation of his work into English. Translated and introduced by Xavier F. Salomon, curator of Veronese: Renaissance Magnificence at the National Gallery, London. Fifty pages of colour illustrations cover the span of Veronese's breath-taking career.
An essential visual overview for students and readers with an interest in Sienese art, history and Renaissance culture. For two centuries, the city-republic of Siena was home to a brilliant succession of painters who created some of the greatest masterpieces of all time; an imagery unmatched in colouristic intensity and spatial experimentation. This overview, now revised and updated, is an essential introduction to this extraordinary artistic tradition. Taking a broadly chronological approach, it moves from the 14th-century Siena of Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers, to the 15th-century city of Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo. Perceptive visual analysis of the distinctive styles and conventions of Sienese painting is combined with clear explanations of traditional techniques such as fresco and tempera. The works are also placed in their social and religious context through discussion of Siena's system of government, its civic consciousness, the importance of the Franciscan movement and the cults of local saints. An accomplished writer as well as a practising artist, Timothy Hyman brings breadth of knowledge and experience to this extensively illustrated book, brilliantly conveying his personal enthusiasm for Sienese art.
Reference materials on European painting of the seventeenth century are generally restricted to a roster of a few dozen great masters such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Caravaggio, and Velazquez, but this Golden Age produced hundreds of prodigiously talented painters. Almost 300--mainly Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish--are here given biographical coverage based on an extensive bibliography of contemporaneous, later, and recent scholarship. Attention is focused on training, travel, commissions, stylistic influences and legacy, and pupils. For each artist, the oeuvre is analyzed with reference to major works, and a detailed list of additional works with museum holdings is appended. References are keyed to the backmatter bibliography, and museum citations refer to a list of 183 collections around the world. An appendix groups the featured artists by nationality, and an index completes the volume.
Titian (c. 1488-1576) was recognised very early on as the leading painter of his generation in Venice. Starting in the studio of the aged Giovanni Bellini, Titian, with his contemporary Giorgione, almost immediately started to expand the range of what was possible in painting, converting Bellini's statuesque style into something far more impressionistic and romantic. This restless spirit of innovation and improvisation never left him, and during his long life he experimented with a number of different styles, the brushwork of his last great paintings showing a mysterious poetry that has never been equalled. This volume in the series Lives of the Artists collects the major writings about Titian by his contemporaries and near contemporaries. The centrepiece is the biography by Vasari, who as a Florentine found Titian's very Venetian sense of colour and transient forms a challenge to his concept of art as design. The poet Ariosto and sparkling letter writer Aretino had a more nuanced view of their friend's work, and Priscianese's account of a dinner party with Titian, and the contributions by Speroni and Dolce, and the slightly later Tuscan critic Borghini, round out the picture of this hugely thoughtful, intellectual artist, whose paintings remain some of the most sensual and affecting in all of Western art. Mostly unavailable in any form for many years, these writings have been newly edited for this edition. They are introduced by the scholar Carlo Corsato, who places each in its artistic and literary context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations cover the full range of Titian's great oeuvre.
In early modern Europe, discernment emerged as a key notion at the intersection of various domains in both learned and artisanal cultures. Often used synonymously with judgment, ingenuity, and taste, discernment defined the ability to perceive and understand the secrets of nature and art, and became explicitly connected with a kind of knowledge available only to experts in the respective fields. With contributions by historians of art and historians of science, and with geographic coverage focusing on the Low Countries and their multiple connections to different parts of the world, this volume reframes recent scholarship on what the editors term 'cultures of knowledge and discernment' in the early modern period. The collection is innovative in its focus on investigating types of knowledge linked to what was then called the 'science' (scientia) of art, to artistic expertise and connoisseurship, and to 'secrets of art and nature.'
Michelangelo was recognised as a great artist early in his long life. Along with a small number of contemporaries he was responsible for Renaissance Florence becoming the artistic fountainhead of western culture. This comprehensive new book offers a wide range of his art, with details and panoramas, some well known, others less so, but each one illuminating the grand eloquence of one of the worlds greatest artists.
Raphael (1483-1520) was for centuries considered the greatest artist who ever lived. Much of what we know about him comes from this biography, written by the Florentine painter Giorgio Vasari and first published in 1550. Vasari's Lives of the Painters was the first attempt to write a systematic history of Italian art. The Life of Raphael is a key text not only for the appreciation of Raphael's own art - whose development and chronology Vasari describes in detail, together with the spectacular social career of the first painter to be mooted, it was claimed, as a Cardinal - but also for its unprecedented attention to theoretical issues.
Think of the Renaissance and you might only picture the work of fine artists such as Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Van Eyck. Or architecture could spring to mind and you might think of St Peter's in Rome and the Doge's Palace in Venice. Or you might consider scientists like Galileo and Copernicus. But then let's not forget the contribution of thinkers like Machiavelli, Thomas More or Erasmus. Someone else, though, might plump for music or poets and dramatists - after all, there was Dante and Shakespeare. Because when it comes to the Renaissance, there's an embarrassment of riches to choose from. From art to architecture, music to literature, science to medicine, political thought to religion, The Renaissance expertly guides the reader through the cultural and intellectual flowering that Europe witnessed from the 14th to the 17th centuries. Ranging from the origins of the Renaissance in medieval Florence to the Counter- Reformation, the book explains how a revival in the study in Antiquity was able to flourish across the Italian states, before spreading to Iberia and north across Europe. Nimbly moving from perspective in paintings to Copernicus's understanding of the Universe, from Martin Luther's challenge to the Roman Catholic Church to the foundations of modern school education, The Renaissance is a highly accessible and colourful journey along the cultural contours of Europe from the Late Middle Ages to the early modern period.
Verrocchio was arguably the most important sculptor between Donatello and Michelangelo but he has seldom been treated as such in art historical literature because his achievements were quickly superseded by the artists who followed him. He was the master of Leonardo da Vinci, but he is remembered as the sulky teacher that his star pupil did not need. In this book, Christina Neilson argues that Verrocchio was one of the most experimental artists in fifteenth-century Florence, itself one of the most innovative centers of artistic production in Europe. Considering the different media in which the artist worked in dialogue with one another (sculpture, painting, and drawing), she offers an analysis of Verrocchio's unusual methods of manufacture. Neilson shows that, for Verrocchio, making was a form of knowledge and that techniques of making can be read as systems of knowledge. By studying Verrocchio's technical processes, she demonstrates how an artist's theoretical commitments can be uncovered, even in the absence of a written treatise. |
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