Digitised facsimiles, with notes and transcription, of the earliest printed texts produced in Scotland. In 1508 the partnership of Andrew Myllar and Walter Chepman brought printing to Scotland. Their early publications brought into print works by two of medieval Scotland's most celebrated poets, Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy and Robert Henryson; they also contain less well-known but important poems and prose in Scots and in English by other writers. The prints feature a wide variety of genres: romance; fable; advice to princes; chivalrictreatise; lyric; dream vision; along with a classic example (by Dunbar and Walter Kennedy) of the Scots genre of `flyting', a stylised but scurrilous exchange of poetic insults. In celebration of the anniversary, the Scottish Text Society, in association with the National Library for Scotland, has published a DVD of prints produced by Chepman and Myllar in or close to 1508, containing digitised facsimiles of each of the twenty printed items. Eachfacsimile is accompanied by a headnote, explaining the print's literary significance and technical features, and a transcription. There is also an introduction by the general editor, SALLY MAPSTONE, which sets the Chepman and Myllar press within the context of early sixteenth-century Scotland and Scottish book history. The edition thus gives readers informative access to Scotland's earliest texts; easily navigable, it will become a vital teaching and research tool. CONTRIBUTORS: PRISCILLA BAWCUTT, A.S.G. EDWARDS, JANET HADLEY WILLIAMS, RALPH HANNA, BRIAN HILLYARD, LUUK HOUWEN, EMILY LYLE, SALLY MAPSTONE, JOANNA MARTIN, NICOLE MEIER, RHIANNON PURDIE

This beautiful and extensively illustrated catalogue presents in-depth case studies of twenty-four rare and remarkable Late Medieval panel paintings, many from the German-speaking regions of Europe, but also from Spain, France and the Southern Netherlands. These works - often fragments of larger altarpieces designed for liturgical performance and communal or private devotion - can be monumental and dramatic or small and intimate, but all on close examination prove to be rich in meaning - even in cases where the painters remain anonymous, and the precise contexts of their creation have become obscured or fragmented. The collected essays will encompass a broad spectrum of artistic styles, techniques, and interests, including in some instances the works' original frames, and the attendant meanings they give to the imagery housed within. The group will also be augmented by a rare and important small-scale tapestry altarpiece with close links to panel painting. The inclusion of such a piece, one of the many newly resurfaced works to be included in the catalogue, will offer an innovative approach to the scholarship of Medieval paintings, and enrich our understanding of the cross-pollination of ideas between mediums and the role played by painters in tapestry production at the turn of the sixteenth century. The book, a follow-up to Susie Nash's important 2011 catalogue, considers the physical history, original form, condition and technique of the assembled works, using wood analysis and dendrochronology, paint samples, infra-red, x-rays and macro photography to document the materials and methods involved in their making and the alterations and transformations they have undergone with time. This new information is combined with close readings of their imagery and its presentation to explore issues of meaning, creative process, patronal intervention and artistic intention, leading in many cases to new reconstructions, attributions, dates and iconographic readings. The text is extensively illustrated with a series of images of all of the works, along with technical photographs and comparative material.

Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Secrets in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 is the companion volume to Intersections 65.1, Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700. Whereas the latter volume focused on sacramental mysteries, the current one examines a wider range of secret subjects. The book examines how secret knowledge was represented visually in ways that both revealed and concealed the true nature of that knowledge, giving and yet impeding access to it. In the early modern period, the discursive and symbolical sites for the representation of secrets were closely related to epistemic changes that transformed conceptions of the transmissibility of knowledge. Contributors: Monika Biel, Alicja Bielak, C. Jean Campbell, Tom Conley, Ralph Dekoninck, Peter G.F. Eversmann, Ingrid Falque, Agnes Guiderdoni, Koenraad Jonckheere, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Stephanie Leitch, Carme Lopez Calderon, Mark A. Meadow, Walter S. Melion, Eelco Nagelsmit, Lars Cyril Norgaard, Alexandra Onuf, Bret L. Rothstein, Xavier Vert, Madeleine C. Viljoen, Mara R. Wade, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Caecilie Weissert.

Seventeenth-century authors so thoroughly imbued the language and imagery of the Bible in vernacular translation that their texts are to be read as attempts to inscribe themselves within the realm of the sacred. This book analyzes how three seventeenth-century English authors fashion themselves as a specific biblical figure, and how they fashion themselves in their works in order to bring their spiritual lives in line with the narrative arch of a biblical type.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the notion of world was dramatically being reshaped, leaving no aspect of human experience untouched. The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art examines how sacred art and artefacts responded to the demands of a world stage in the age of reform. Essays by leading scholars explore how religious objects resulting from cross-cultural contact defied national and confessional categories and were re-contextualised in a global framework via their collection, exchange, production, management, and circulation. In dialogue with current discourses, papers address issues of idolatry, translation, materiality, value, and the agency of networks. The Nomadic Object demonstrates the significance of religious systems, from overseas logistics to philosophical underpinnings, for a global art history. Contributors are: Akira Akiyama, James Clifton, Jeffrey L. Collins, Ralph Dekoninck, Dagmar Eichberger, Beate Fricke, Christine Goettler, Christiane Hille, Margit Kern, Dipti Khera, Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato, Urte Krass, Evonne Levy, Meredith Martin, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Rose Marie San Juan, Denise-Marie Teece, Tristan Weddigen, and Ines G. Zupanov.

Patronage, in its broadest sense, has been established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. This collection examines the role it played in the Italian Renaissance, focusing particularly upon Florence. Traditionally viewed simply as the context for the extraordinary artistic creativity of the Renaissance, patronage has more recently been examined by historians as a comprehensive system of patron-client structures which permeated society and social relations. The scattered research so far done on this broader concept of patronage is drawn together and extended in this new volume, derived from a conference held in Melbourne as part of 'Renaissance Year' in 1983. The essays, by art historians as well as historians, explore our new understanding of Renaissance Italy as a 'patronage society', and consider its implications for the study of art patronage and patron-client structures wherever they occur.

A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy will provide readers unfamiliar with Southern Italy with an introduction to different aspects of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history and culture of this vast and significant area of Europe, situated at the centre of the Mediterranean. Commonly regarded as a backward, rural region untouched by the Italian Renaissance, a team of specialists presents a general survey of the most recent research on the centers of southern Italy, as well as insights into the ground-breaking debates on wider themes, such as the definition of the city and continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the effects of dynastic changes from the Angevin and Aragonese Kingdom to the Spanish Viceroyalty. Contributors: Giancarlo Abbamonte, David Abulafia, Guido Cappelli, Chiara De Caprio, Bianca de Divitiis, Fulvio Delle Donne, Teresa D'Urso, Dinko Fabris, Guido Giglioni, Antonietta Iacono, Fulvio Lenzo, Lorenzo Miletti, Francesco Montuori, Pasquale Palmieri, Eleni Sakellariou, Francesco Senatore, Francesco Storti, Pierluigi Terenzi, Carlo Vecce, Giuliana Vitale, and Andrea Zezza.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700. The seventeen essays ask how landscape, construed as the description of place in image and/or text, more than merely inviting close viewing, was often seen to call for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Contributors: Boudewijn Bakker, William M. Barton, Stijn Bussels, Reindert Falkenburg, Margaret Goehring, Andrew Hui, Sarah McPhee, Luke Morgan, Shelley Perlove, Kathleen P. Long, Lukas Reddemann, Denis Ribouillault, Paul J. Smith, Troy Tower, and Michel Weemans.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a remarkable knowledge of the science of his era. His poems also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's characterisation of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante's ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which it took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante's acts of seeing. On earth his visual perceptions are conducted according to optical rules, while in heaven the poet's human senses are overwhelmed by light of divine origin, which does not obey his rules of mathematical optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists' striving to portray unseeable brightness. Raphael shows himself to be the greatest master of spiritual radiance, while Correggio works his radiant magic in his dome illusions in Parma Cathedral. When Gaulli evokes the glories of the name of Jesus in the huge vault of the Jesuit Church in Rome he does so with an ineffable light that explodes though encircling clusters of glowing angels, whose pink bodies are bleached by the extreme luminosity of the light source. Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, this hugely original book combines a close reading of Dante's poetry with analysis of early optics and the art of the Renaissance and Baroque to create a fascinating, wide-ranging and visually exciting study.

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, which is the first dedicated to the graphic oeuvre of Antoine Caron (1521-1599). Bringing together a core group of drawings centred around the figures and deeds of the French Royal family, the Valois, this display highlights the role played by Catherine de' Medici (1519-1589). Featuring the Valois series, a set of drawings here reunited for the first time, the display showcases the way in which the powerful and influential Catherine promoted the success of her regency and future of her progeny by delivering a series of lavish courtly events that were meant to enhance the power and diplomacy of her family. The drawings represent jousts, tournaments, festivals and a mock naval battle, events that occurred at the French court during the reigns of Catherine's sons Charles IX and Henri III. Preparatory designs for a group of tapestries, these visual documents relate to actual events that were organised by the court, some of which took place at the French castles of Anet, Palace of Fontainebleau, Bayonne and at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Minutely designed, they thus allow a reconstruction of the visual testimony of those events, as they were documented in written contemporary sources.

This book is centered on the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), on his two-year stay in Sicily in 1492-4 to study the ancient Greek language under one of its most distinguished contemporary teachers, the Byzantine emigre Constantine Lascaris, and above all on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The more particular focus of this study is on the imaginative capacities that crucially shape Bembo's elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna adventure in his so-called De Aetna, published at the Aldine press in Venice in 1496. This work is cast in the form of a dialogue that takes place between the young Bembo and his father Bernardo (himself a prominent Venetian statesman with strong humanist involvements) after Pietro's return to Venice from Sicily in 1494. But De Aetna offers much more than a one-dimensional account of the facts, sights and findings of Pietro's climb. Far more important in the present study is his eye for creative elaboration, or for transforming his literal experience on the mountain into a meditation on his coming-of-age at a remove from the conventional career-path expected of one of his station within the Venetian patriciate. Three mutually informing features that are critical to the artistic originality of De Aetna receive detailed treatment in this study: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complex history of Mount Etna as treated in the Greco-Roman literary tradition from Pindar onwards; (ii) the striking novelty of De Aetna's status as the first Latin text produced at the nascent Aldine press in the prototype of what modern typography knows as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro's ingenious deployment of Etna as a powerful, multivalent symbol that simultaneously reflects the diverse characterizations of, and the generational differences between, father and son in the course of their dialogical exchanges within De Aetna.

This study presents the Tondo Doni to the new Florentine republic as a model of the 'great sacrament' of marriage from the New Testament book of Ephesians. Following fifteenth-century theology, Michelangelo portrayed Mary as a humble wife dominated and possessed by a virile guardian Joseph, the couple united as if 'two in one flesh'. To compensate for their symbolic propinquity, the painter cast her as a paragon of virginity, a muscular mulier fortis. In order to keep this virago in her place, Michelangelo coupled the Virgin in spiritual union with Christ, maenad-Psyche to bacchic Eros, attempting to mystify her social subordination into self-sacrificing love via Ficinian commentary and Saint Paul. Then, firing the Doni infant's vehemence with a distinctly violent strain of Christian love, the painter turned to Dante's rime petrose to continue the implied action and authorize a new painterly style, a sculptural stile aspro. Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 1

This study reexamines the invention of the emblem book and discusses the novel textual and pictorial means that applied to the task of transmitting knowledge. It offers a fresh analysis of Alciato's Emblematum liber, focusing on his poetics of the emblem, and on how he actually construed emblems. It demonstrates that the "father of emblematics" had vernacular forebears, most importantly Johann von Schwarzenberg who composed two illustrated emblem books between 1510 and 1520. The study sheds light on the early development of the Latin emblem book 1531-1610, with special emphasis on the invention of the emblematic commentary, on natural history, and on advanced methods of conveying emblematic knowledge, from Junius to Vaenius.

The Renaissance woman, whether privileged or of the artisan or the middle class, was trained in the expressive arts of needlework and painting, which were often given precedence over writing. "Pens and Needles" is the first book to examine all these forms as interrelated products of self-fashioning and communication.Because early modern people saw verbal and visual texts as closely related, Susan Frye discusses the connections between the many forms of women's textualities, including notes in samplers, alphabets both stitched and penned, initials, ciphers, and extensive texts like needlework pictures, self-portraits, poetry, and pamphlets, as well as commissioned artwork, architecture, and interior design. She examines works on paper and cloth by such famous figures as Elizabeth I, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Bess of Hardwick, as well as the output of journeywomen needleworkers and miniaturists Levina Teerlinc and Esther Inglis, and their lesser-known sisters in the English colonies of the New World. Frye shows how traditional women's work was a way for women to communicate with one another and to shape their own identities within familial, intellectual, religious, and historical traditions. "Pens and Needles" offers insights into women's lives and into such literary texts as Shakespeare's "Othello" and "Cymbeline" and Mary Sidney Wroth's "Urania."

Originally published in Dutch and translated to Spanish for the fourth centenary celebration of the death of El Greco in 2014, this book is a comprehensive study of the rediscovery of El Greco -- seen as one of the most important events of its kind in art history. The Nationalization of Culture versus the Rise of Modern Art analyses how changes in artistic taste in the second half of the nineteenth century caused a profound revision of the place of El Greco in the artistic canon. As a result, El Greco was transformed from an extravagant outsider and a secondary painter into the founder of the Spanish School and one of the principle predecessors of modern art, increasingly related to that of the Impressionists -- due primarily to the German critic Julius Meier-Graefe's influential History of Modern Art (1914). This shift in artistic preference has been attributed to the rise of modern art but Eric Storm, a cultural historian, shows that in the case of El Greco nationalist motives were even more important. This study examines the work of painters, art critics, writers, scholars and philosophers from France, Germany and Spain, and the role of exhibitions, auctions, monuments and commemorations. Paintings and associated anecdotes are discussed, and historical debates such as El Greco's supposed astigmatism are addressed in a highly readable and engaging style. This book will be of interest to both specialists and the interested art public.

Representations of political power play an important role in Western art history from the late Middle Ages up to modern times. This volume by leading experts is a wide-ranging survey of significant trends in the development of political imagery.

In this compelling book Nigel Saul opens up the world of medieval gentry families, using the magnificent brasses and monuments of the Cobham family as a window on to the social and religious culture of the middle ages.

This dictionary is a quick and useful reference source for identifying and understanding the Renaissance art of Italy and northern Europe. Arranged in alphabetical sequence, the more than eight hundred entries provide basic information about topics that were common subjects in painting, sculpture, and decorative arts of the period. Additionally, entries on characteristic schools, techniques, media, and other terminology have been included as background information as well as to provide an art history vocabulary necessary for comprehending or clarifying certain topics. Supplemental information on various related topics is cross-referenced for easy access, and the reader is provided with an even more complete location of topics and other entries with see references and a subject index. As an aid to further study, a list of northern and Italian Renaissance artists, which includes life dates and nationalities, has been included. A bibliography is also provided for further reference.

Tramelli considers three main areas of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo's studies: color, perspective and anatomy, investigating the types of theoretical and practical knowledge on these subjects conveyed in the Trattato dell'Arte della Pittura and how the context of Milan at the end of the sixteenth century shaped the material gathered in Lomazzo's books.

The Hamburg banker's son Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was one of the most influential art historians and cultural theorists of the 20th century. His life's work was devoted to tracing antique formulas of representation in the depiction of human passions in Renaissance art. For this epoch-spanning relationship, he developed the term 'pathos formula' (Pathosformel). In a lecture given in 1905 in the Konzerthaus in Hamburg, focusing on the young Albrecht Durer's Death of Orpheus, Warburg outlined his thoughts in front of the original drawing, which he had borrowed from the rich holdings of the Kunsthalle in order to better illustrate his idea. This drawing, pivotal in the young artist's development as an ambitious response to classical antiquity, was displayed during the lecture alongside a group of engravings and woodcuts which included not only some of Durer's own seminal later prints, such as Melencolia I, but also engravings by Andrea Mantegna which Durer copied in 1494, the same year he drew the Death of Orpheus. Warburg's 'pop-up exhibition' of eleven works has here been reconstructed and analyzed, using his fascinating lecture notes, sketches and slide lists. First developed by the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2011, subsequently on view in Cologne in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and now at The Courtauld Gallery, each institution has interpreted the material slightly differently, while retaining the core Warburg group. Aby Warburg aimed at unlocking the meaning of an art work by excavating its roots in its cultural context. By restaging his legendary display of 1905 with Durer's Death of Orpheus at its heart, the exhibition and accompanying book present some of the most skillful and ambitious works on paper ever produced and also seek to introduce into Warburg's rich intellectual universe to a broader public, hoping thereby to offer both sheer enjoyment and food for thought.