Celebrates one of the greatest and most beloved painters of the Early Renaissance with luxurious, large-format images Sandro Botticelli, one of the greatest painters of the Italian High Renaissance, enjoyed the patronage of the greatest Florentine families. He spent most of his career in the humanist circle of the Medici, for whom he painted such masterpieces as Primavera and Venus and Mars, works that combine a decorative use of line with Classical elements in harmonious and supple compositions. This sumptuously produced volume features an updated, full-colour selection of the artist's works made for the original 1937 edition by Ludwig Goldscheider, co-founder of Phaidon Press. The original essay by Lionello Venturi is accompanied by a new introduction from Renaissance specialist Alessandro Cecchi, putting Botticelli and his school into a contemporary context. Elegant design, fine papers and tipped-on image plates make this a true collector's edition.

"Renaissance Art Reconsidered" showcases the aesthetic principles and the workaday practices guiding daily life through these years of extraordinary human achievement.
A major new anthology, bringing to life the places, works, media, and issues that define Renaissance art
Ideal for use on Renaissance studies courses and for reference by students of art history
Moves beyond the borders of Italy to consider European, Mediterranean, and post Byzantine art, widening the traditional focus of Renaissance art
Includes letters, treatises, contracts, inventories, and other public documents, many of which are translated into English for the first time in this volume
Showcases the aesthetic principles and the workaday practices guiding daily life through these years of extraordinary human achievement, providing crucial insight into the art and the context in which it was produced.

Explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the pre-modern world.   The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance. Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls “the racial matrix� and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race�—a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library—as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.

This book seeks to broaden the comprehension of the student of Italian Renaissance painting by concentrating not on the works of art themselves, but on the various artistic theories which influenced them or were expressed by them. Taking Alberti's treatises as his starting-point, Anthony Blunt traces the development of artistic theory from Humanism to Mannerism. He discusses the writings of Leonardo, Savonarola, Michelangelo, and Vasari, examines the effect of the Council of Trent on religious art, and chronicles the successful struggle of the painters and sculptors themselves to elevate their status from craftsmen to creative artists.

This book is not only a fascinating biography of one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century but also a social history of the colorful extended family to which he belonged and of the town life of the period. It explores a series of distinct worlds: Delft's Small-Cattle Market, where Vermeer's paternal family settled early in the century; the milieu of shady businessmen in Amsterdam that recruited Vermeer's grandfather to counterfeit coins; the artists, military contractors, and Protestant burghers who frequented the inn of Vermeer's father in Delft's Great Market Square; and the quiet, distinguished "Papists Corner" in which Vermeer, after marrying into a high-born Catholic family, retired to practice his art, while retaining ties with wealthy Protestant patrons. The relationship of Vermeer to his principal patron is one of many original discoveries in the book.

After the death of Raphael in 1520, the next generation in Italy was to see the rise of the complex and refined sensibility summed up in the term "Mannerism." In this uniquely comprehensive guide to sixteenth-century Renaissance art, Linda Murray examines the manifold achievements of Italian artists and identifies the individual forms taken by artists in Northern Europe and in Spain, including Durer, Bruegel and El Greco.

Featuring detailed scenes of court pageantry and life-size portraits of members of the French Valois dynasty woven in wool, silk, and precious metal-wrapped threads, the Valois Tapestries are one of the most extravagant sets of hangings produced in the 16th century. The precise circumstances surrounding the tapestries' commission and their arrival at the Medici court in Florence, as well as the significance of the specific scenes depicted, however, have eluded scholars for years. Presenting new research into the political maneuvering of the Valois and Medici courts and providing extensive physical analysis gathered during a recent cleaning of the tapestries, this volume offers brand new insight into why these magnificent works were made and what they represent. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art (11/18/18-01/21/19)

The gods of Olympus died with the advent of Christianity - or so we have been taught to believe. But how are we to account for their tremendous popularity during the Renaissance? This illustrated book, now reprinted in a new, larger paperback format, offers the general reader a multifaceted look at the far-reaching role played by mythology in Renaissance intellectual and emotional life. After a discussion of mythology in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Jean Seznec traces the fate of the gods from Botticelli and Raphael to their function and appearance in Ronsard's verses and Ben Jonson's masques.

Renaissance Papers is a collection of the best scholarly essays on all aspects of the Renaissance submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, organized originally in the early 1950s by scholars at Duke University and the universities of North and South Carolina. This year's annual volume, the forty-sixth to be published by the Conference and the fourth by Camden House, is the most substantial ever, containing twelve articles. Five articles on Shakespeare range from alchemy and hermaphroditism in Sonnet 20 to Leontes and skepticism in The Winter's Tale. There are two pieces on Milton, one involving his feminine representation of himself as author, the other attempting a breakthrough in interpretation of Samson Agonistes. There are also literary studies of Mucedorus, the most popular play in the English Renaissance, and of Spenser's two female protagonists, Britomart and Amoret. There are also an examination of the power struggles in an Italian convent, a new assessment of Stephen Gardiner's role in the Counter-Reformation in England, and a study of the early characteristics of Cromwell in the press of the English Civil War.

Cambridge University Library's collection of illuminated manuscripts is of international significance. It originates in the medieval university and stands alongside the holdings of the colleges and the Fitzwilliam Museum. The University Library contains major European examples of medieval illumination from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, with acknowledged masterpieces of Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance book art, as well as illuminated literary texts, including the first complete Chaucer manuscript. This catalogue provides scholars and researchers easy access to the University Library's illuminated manuscripts, evaluating the importance of many of them for the very first time. It contains descriptions of famous manuscripts, for example the Life of Edward the Confessor attributed to Matthew Paris, as well as hundreds of lesser-known items. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the catalogue contains descriptions of individual manuscripts with up-to-date assessments of their style, origins and importance, together with bibliographical references.

How did maps of the distant reaches of the world communicate to the public in an era when exploration of those territories was still ongoing and knowledge about them remained incomplete? And why did Renaissance rulers frequently commission large-scale painted maps of those territories when they knew that they would soon be proven obsolete by newer, more accurate information? The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy addresses these questions by bridging the disciplines of art history and the histories of science, cartography, and geography to closely examine surviving Italian painted maps that were commissioned during a period better known for its printed maps and atlases. Challenging the belief that maps are strictly neutral or technical markers of geographic progress, this well-illustrated study investigates the symbolic and propagandistic dimensions of these painted maps as products of the competitive and ambitious European court culture that produced them.

This beautifully illustrated and exquisitely designed volume of paintings, sculpture, medals, and drawings celebrates the extraordinary flowering of female portraiture, mainly in Florence, beginning in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Included are many of the finest portraits of women (and a few of men) by Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Verrocchio, and Leonardo da Vinci--whose remarkable double-sided portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, which departs notably from tradition, is the focus of special attention.

It was in Florence during this period that portraiture expanded beyond the realm of rulers and their consorts to encompass women of the merchant class. This phenomenon, long known to scholars, is here presented to a larger audience for the first time. The catalogue, which accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, traces how the humanist praise of women influenced and enlivened their depiction. It also considers how meaningful costumes and settings were chosen. Works from outside Florence by such masters as Pisanello, Rogier van der Weyden, and Ercole Roberti shed additional light on the evolution of female portraiture during the century from c. 1440 to c. 1540.

An introduction by editor and exhibition organizer David Alan Brown and four engaging essays by other experts on Renaissance art--Dale Kent, Joanna Woods-Marsden, Mary Westerman Bulgarella and Roberta Orsi Landini, and Victoria Kirkham--perfectly complement the more than one hundred illustrations, which include ninety-seven full-color plates. The catalogue entries are concise while revealing the key aspects of each portrait--from style and sources to ongoing scholarly debates. This elegant, enlightening book is itself a telling portrait not only of the art but also of the broader issues of women's freedom, responsibility, and individuality in a most exceptional era.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
September 30, 2001-January 6, 2002

A gloriously illustrated volume that looks at the remarkable armor of a key Habsburg commander and its relationship to contemporary Renaissance fashion This sumptuously illustrated book celebrates a curious masterpiece of German Renaissance art--the Landsknecht armor of Wilhelm von Rogendorf (1523). Recently conserved to its original glory, this magnificent suit of armor, made for a trusted courtier, diplomat, and commander of infantry units for the Habsburgs, deceives the eye: the steel sleeves drape in graceful folds, with cuts in the surface, suggesting the armor is made from cloth rather than metal. The author of this fascinating volume explores the question: why does the armor look this way? Stefan Krause delves back five centuries to the political, social, and cultural context in which von Rogendorf lived. Among other key venues in the Holy Roman Empire, this story takes the reader to the court of Emperor Charles V in Spain and to Augsburg, the leading center of armor making, where Rogendorf was introduced to the court armorer of Charles V, Kolman Helmschmid (1471-1532). Helmschmid was famous for his inventive and masterfully sculptured works, and this book elaborates on his unique contributions to the history of armor, and how and why von Rogendorf's suit was informed by contemporary fashion. Distributed for the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

Around 1515, Raphael (1483-1520) designed a set of tapestries for Leo X, the first Medici pope. Each was sumptuously woven in gold, silver, and silk, and depicted scenes from classical mythology with inventive grotesques. Now lost, these spectacular, grand-scale textiles are reconstructed in Raphael's Tapestries and set among a series of unprecedented decorative projects that Pope Leo commissioned from the artist. Likely produced by the Brussels weaver Pieter van Aelst, the tapestries pioneered a new all'antica style analogous with contemporary painted and sculpted interior programs. Tapestries played a central role at Leo's court, as spectacle and as propaganda, and the Grotesques of Leo X would inform tapestry design for the next three centuries. Their beauty and complexity rivaled those of contemporary painting, and their luxurious materials made them highly prized. With this new study, the Grotesques take their rightful place as Renaissance masterworks and as documents of the fervent humanist culture of early 16th-century Rome.

In a major analysis of pictorial forms from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Christopher Braider argues that the painted image provides a metaphor and model for all other modes of expression in Western culture--particularly literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Because critics have conventionally explained visual images in terms of verbal texts (Scripture, heroic poetry, and myth), they have undervalued the impact of the pictorial naturalism practiced by painters from the fifteenth century onward and the fundamentally new conception of reality it conveys. By reinterpreting modern Western experience in light of northern "descriptive art," the author enriches our understanding of how both painted and written cultural texts shape our perceptions of the world at large. Throughout Braider draws on works by such painters as van der Weyden, Bruegel the Elder, Steen, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Poussin, and addresses such topics as the Incarnation of the Word in Christ, the elegiac foundations of Enlightenment aesthetics, and the rivalry between northern and southern art. His goal is not only to reexamine important aesthetic issues but also to offer a new perspective on the general intellectual and cultural history of the modern West. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Roston demonstrates that what emerges is not a fixed or monolithic pattern for each generation but a dynamic series of responses to shared challenges. The book relates leading English writers and literary modes to contemporary developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture, exploring by a close reading of the texts and the artistic works the insights such comparison offers.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility-not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry. In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The Florentine and Venetian Painters of the Renaissance is a compilation of 2 books written by Bernhard Berenson. The 2 great studies of the Venetian and Florentine painters of the Renaissance are brought together in this one book. Chapter 1 provides information about some of the best and most famous Florentine artist who ever lived: Leonarde da Vinci, Michelangelo, Giotti, Ridolpho Ghirlandajo and Fra Filippo Lippi. While, chapter 2 provides information about the famous Venetian artists such as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese.

Largely neglected for the four centuries after his death, the fifteenth century Italian artist Piero della Francesca is now seen to embody the fullest expression of the Renaissance perspective painter, raising him to an artistic stature comparable with that of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. But who was Piero, and how did he become the person and artist that he was? Until now, in spite of the great interest in his work, these questions have remained largely unanswered. Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man puts that situation right, integrating the story of Piero's artistic and mathematical achievements with the full chronicle of his life for the first time. Fortified by the discovery of over one hundred previously unknown documents, most unearthed by the author himself, James R. Banker at last brings this fascinating Renaissance enigma to life. The book presents us with Piero's friends, family, and collaborators, all set against the social background of the various cities and courts in which he lived - from the Tuscan commune of Sansepolcro in which he grew up, to Renaissance Florence, Ferrara, Ancona, Rimini, Rome, Arezzo, and Urbino, and eventually back to his home town for the final years of his life. As Banker shows, the cultural contexts in which Piero lived are crucial for understanding both the man and his paintings. From early masterpieces such as the Baptism of Christ through to later, Flemish-influenced works such as the Nativity, we gain a fascinating insight into how Piero's art developed over time, alongside his growing achievements in geometry in the later decades of his life. Along the way, the book addresses some persistent myths about this apparently most elusive of artists. As well as establishing a convincing case to clear up the long controversy over the year of Piero's birth, there are also answers to some big questions about the date of some of his major works, and a persuasive new interpretation of the much-debated Flagellation of Christ. This book is for all those who wish to know about the development of Piero as man, artist, and scholar, rather than simply to see him through a series of isolated great works. What emerges is a thoroughly intriguing Renaissance individual, firmly embedded in his social milieu, but forging an historic identity through his profound artistic and mathematical achievements.

Visual arts in Britain between 1550 and 1650 have long been considered part of the classical Italian Renaissance canon. Now a distinguished group of scholars demonstrates that attitudes to classical art were in fact somewhat ambivalent during this period in Britain (or, as it is called poetically, Albion). For town halls and funeral monuments, for paintings and theatrical works, British artists, patrons, and builders made informed choices from the classical vocabulary while continuing to work within systems and circumstances quite distinct from those of classicism. The authors focus on the ways that local influences, habits, and visual sensibilities interacted with classicism and the work and methods of such masters as Inigo Jones in the evolution of British art, architecture, and literature in this era. Introduced and edited by Lucy Gent, this handsome book was written by contributors who come from the fields of history, art and architectural history, literary criticism, and emblematics. The book consists of essays by Lisa Jardine, Maurice Howard, Deborah Howard, Michael Bath, Paula Henderson, Nigel Llewellyn, Susan Foister, Margaret Aston, Keith Thomas, Christy Anderson, Ellen Chirelstein, Thomas Greene, Sasha Roberts, Alice Friedman, Gloria Kury, and Catherine Belsey. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

Volume 1 of 2. Lorenzo Ghiberti, sculptor and towering figure of the Renaissance, was the creator of the celebrated Bronze Doors of the Baptistery at Florence, a work that occupied him for twenty years and became known (at Michelangelo's suggestion, according to tradition) as the Doors of Paradise. Here Richard Krautheimer takes what Charles S. Seymour, Jr., describes as "a fascinating journey into the mind, career, and inventiveness of one of the indisputably outstanding sculptors of all the Western tradition." This one-volume edition includes an extensive new preface and bibliography by the author. Richard Krautheimer, Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, currently lives in Rome. He is the author of numerous works, including the Pelican Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture and Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton). Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, 31. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Albrecht Durer's prints and drawings have inspired hundreds of artists, both during his life and after his death. Yet his talent as a painter and colorist, and his enthusiasm for the scientific world have not been widely appreciated. Durer's influence was both international and intergenerational-indeed Picasso claimed to have been inspired by the 16th-century artist. Reproduced in stunning detail and including illustrations of Durer's most famous prints and drawings, a catalog raisonne of his paintings, and biographical research, this book presents a Durer for the 21st century. Producing more self-portraits than any other artist of his day; mass marketing his best-selling prints; even inventing his own monogram logo; Albrecht Du rer was commercially astute long before today's generation of self-promoting and financially-savvy artists. There are 55 extant Durer paintings, of which 17 are in dispute. Using scientific research, this book puts all arguments to bed resulting in the definitive catalog raisonne of the paintings. Drawing on in-depth research, this book reveals the truth behind Durer and his art.

Saint Marks invokes and pluralizes the figure of Mark in order to explore relations between painting and writing. Emphasizing that the saint is not a singular biographical individual in the various biblical and hagiographic texts that involve someone so named, the book takes as its ultimate concern the kinds of material life that outlive the human subject. From the incommensurate, anachronic instances in which Saint Mark can be located-among them, as Evangelist or as patron saint of Venice-the book traces Mark's afterlives within art, sacred texts, and literature in conversation with such art historians and philosophers as Aby Warburg, Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman, T. J. Clark, Adrian Stokes, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Goldberg begins in sixteenth-century Venice, with a series of paintings by Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Tintoretto, and others, that have virtually nothing to do with biblical texts. He turns then to the legacy of John Ruskin's Stones of Venice and through it to questions about what painting does as painting. A final chapter turns to ancient texts, considering the Gospel of St. Mark together with its double, the so-called Secret Gospel that has occasioned controversy for its homoerotic implications. The posthumous persistence of a life is what the gospel named Mark calls the Kingdom of God. Saints have posthumous lives; but so too do paintings and texts. This major interdisciplinary study by one of our most astute cultural critics extends what might have been a purely theological subject to embrace questions central to cultural practice from the ancient world to the present.