Volume 2 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.

In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency. Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age's baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media's weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.

During the period 1000-1700 major transformations took place in material culture. Quite simply, more objects were manufactured and used than ever before and many objects travelled across geographic, political, religious, linguistic, class and cultural boundaries. By starting with a focus on past objects, this volume brings together essays from art historians, historians, archaeologists, literary scholars and museum curators to reveal the different disciplinary approaches and methods taken to the study of objects and what this can reveal about transformations in material culture 1000-1700. Contributors: Katherine A. Wilson, Leah R. Clark, Alison M. Leonard, Steven P. Ashby, Michael Lewis, Robert Maniura, Sarah Hinds, Christina Antenhofer, Alexandra van Dongen, Bettina Bildhauer, Julie De Groot, Jennifer Hillman, Ruth Whelan, Christopher Donaldson, Thomas Pickles.

2013 will mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of the artist Mattia Preti (1613-1699), who spent forty years of his working life in Malta. Midsea Books, in collaboration with the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta, are working together to publish an outstanding book that discusses critically the artist s oeuvre in Malta. Research for this superb book is co-ordinated by Professor Keith Sciberras, who is also the author of the two critical essays which compose the first part of the book. Over 150 catalogue entries are co-authored by Professor Sciberras and Ms Jessica Borg M.A. The book will include over 270 paintings. The images of the paintings in Malta are being taken purposely for this book by master photographer Mr Joe P. Borg. Born in Taverna, Calabria, in 1613, Mattia Preti emerged as a leading exponent of the forceful Baroque of mid-17th century Italy, working in a tradition which brilliantly captured the characteristics of monumental dynamism and theatrical appeal. An extraordinary draughtsman and painterly virtuoso, he was quick with his brush and produced hundreds of pictures which spanned a career of some seventy years. His life-story can be easily and neatly divided in an early training and first maturity in Rome, his mid-years in Naples, and the nearly four decades that he spent on Malta between 1661 and his death in 1699. An artist-knight, his life was also conditioned by his membership in the chivalric Order of St John of Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta. Preti s works for St John s Conventual Church inspired a major transformation within the church. The Baroque re-decoration programme which Preti was to direct transformed the interior of the Conventual Church into one of the most important nodes of Baroque art South of Rome. Preti was to assume responsibility of painting the entire ceiling and many altar paintings and lunettes. Moreover, he produced designs for the carved decoration that spread throughout the church walls, the inlaid marble slabs for the flooring and ephemera. Preti s residency on the island did not go unnoticed and his circle of admirers grew beyond the circle of the Knights of Malta. The church and private patrons were attracted to his work. Owning a painting by the artist grew to become a desideratum. The artist s technique and method of painting was fast and he could rapidly execute large scale works. His inventive genius kept up with the pace of his technique and the artist thus produced a large corpus of paintings. This lavish publication, which will mark the 400th anniversary from the master s birth, will be another outstanding contribution to all enthusiast of Maltese art and history."

This new edition of Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Leicester is the most comprehensive scholarly edition of any of Leonardo's manuscripts. It contains a high-quality facsimile reproduction of the Codex, a new transcription and translation, accompanied by a paraphrase in modern language and a page-by-page commentary, and a series of interpretative essays. This important endeavour introduces important new research into the interpretation of the texts and images, on the setting of Leonardo's ideas in the context of ancient and medieval theories, and above all into the notable fortunes of the Codex within the sciences of astronomy, water, and the history of the earth, opening a new field of research into the impact of Leonardo as a scientist after his death.

Gender, Space, and Experience at the Renaissance Court investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. It examines the ceremonial use and artistic reception of the Palazzo Te from the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530 to the Sack of Mantua in 1630. This book further proposes that we conceptualise the built environment as a performative space, a space formed by the gendered relationships and actors of its time. The Palazzo Te was constituted by the gendered behaviors of sixteenth-century courtiers, but it was not simply a passive receptor of gender performance. Through its multivalent form and ceremonial function, Maria F. Maurer argues that the palace was an active participant in the construction and perception of femininity and masculinity in the early modern court.

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.

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.

The fourteen essays in this collection explore the dominance of patronage in Renaissance politics, religion, theatre, and artistic life. Originally published in 1982. 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.

Rubens: The Two Great Landscapes is a handsomely illustrated monograph that examines in depth Rubens's two greatest landscape paintings: A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning and The Rainbow Landscape. Painted as pendants, the pair have been in London since 1803, when they were separated, the former eventually entering the collection of the National Gallery and the latter that of the Wallace Collection. The book puts the creation of these two landscapes into the full context of Rubens's later life and his semi-retirement. It demonstrates how they are the zenith of his achievements as a landscape painter and explores how he drew skilfully on Flemish influences, including Bruegel, in creating two highly original compositions. Written to engage and appeal to the non-specialist reader and academic alike, the book makes an important contribution to scholarship in the field, including original technical research and new photography that show how these complex compositions evolved iteratively as the panels onto which they were painted were expanded. It also presents an updated and almost complete history of the provenance of the two paintings describing their passage through eminent collections from the time of Rubens's death until they reached their respective collections in London, separated by less than a mile.

A comprehensive survey examining the vibrant and sumptuous art of illumination during a period of profound intellectual and cultural transformation Hand-painted illumination enlivened the burgeoning culture of the book in the Italian Renaissance, spanning the momentous shift from manuscript production to print. This major survey, by a leading authority on medieval and renaissance book illumination, gives the first comprehensive account in English of an immensely creative and relatively little-studied art form. Jonathan J. G. Alexander describes key illuminated manuscripts and printed books from the period and explores the social and material worlds in which they were produced. Renaissance humanism encouraged wealthy members of the laity to join the clergy as readers and book collectors. Illuminators responded to patrons' developing interest in classical motifs, and celebrated artists such as Mantegna and Perugino occasionally worked as illuminators. Italian illuminated books found patronage across Europe, their dispersion hastened by the French invasion of Italy at the end of the 15th century. Richly illustrated, The Painted Book in Renaissance Italy is essential reading for all scholars and students of Renaissance art.

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

2019, 450 years after the Old Master's death, will be celebrated as the Year of Bruegel, culminating in the exhibition 'The Age of Bruegel' at The Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA), Antwerp. In the run up to the numerous exhibitions and festivities that are planned for next year, Lannoo Publishers releases this glossy guidebook. It contains images of the Old Master's paintings with astonishing detail. It contains expert commentary by Till-Holger Borchert, director of all Bruges-based museums. Also available in the series: Masterpiece: Peter Paul Rubens (ISBN: 9789401441612) and Masterpiece: Jan Van Eyck (ISBN: 9789401441629).

Influenced by a revival of interest in Greco-Roman ideals and sponsored by a newly prosperous merchant class, fifteenth-century artists produced works of astonishingly innovative content and technique. The International Gothic style of painting, still popular at the beginning of the century, was giving way to the influence of Early Netherlandish Flemish masters such as Jan van Eyck, who emphasized narrative and the complex use of light for symbolic meaning. Patrons favored paintings in oil and on wooden panels for works ranging from large, hinged altarpieces to small, increasingly lifelike portraits.
In the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Mantua, artists and architects alike perfected existing techniques and developed new ones. The painter Masaccio mastered linear perspective; the sculptor Donatello produced anatomically correct but idealized figures such as his bronze nude of David; and the brilliant architect and engineer Brunelleschi integrated Gothic and Renaissance elements to build the self-supporting dome of the Florence Cathedral.
This beautifully illustrated guide analyzes the most important people, places, and concepts of this early Renaissance period, whose explosion of creativity was to spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century.

The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757): The Queen of Pastel is the first extensive biographical narrative in English of Rosalba Carriera. It is also the first scholarly investigation of the external and internal factors that helped to create this female painter's unique career in eighteenth-century Europe. It documents the difficulties, complications, and consequences that arose then -- and can also arise today -- when a woman decides to become an independent artist. This book contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the interplay between society's expectations, generally accepted codices for gendered behaviour, and one single female painter's astute strategies for achieving success, as well as autonomy in her professional life as a famed artist. Some of the questions that the author raises are: How did Carriera manage to build up her career? How did she run her business and organize her own workshop? What kind of artist was Carriera? Finally, what do her self-portraits reveal in terms of self-enactment and possibly autobiographical turning points?

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.

This is a fascinating volume that uses illustrated manuscripts to gain a unique insight into the gardens of the Renaissance. Whether part of a grand villa or an extension of a common kitchen, gardens in the Renaissance were planted and treasured in all reaches of society. Illuminated manuscripts of the period offer a glimpse into how people at the time pictured, used, and enjoyed these idyllic green spaces. Drawn from a wide range of works in the Getty Museum's permanent collection, this gorgeously illustrated volume explores gardens on many levels, from the literary Garden of Love and the biblical Garden of Eden to courtly gardens of the nobility, and reports on the many activities - both reputable and scandalous - that took place there.

The concept of opposing forces of good and evil expressed in a broad range of moral qualities--virtues and vices--is one of the most dominant themes in the history of Christian art. The complex interrelationship of these moral traits received considerable study in the medieval period, resulting in a vast and elaborate system of imagery that has been largely neglected by modern scholarship. Rich resources for the study of this important subject are made available by this volume, which publishes the complete holdings of the more than 230 personifications of Virtues and Vices in the Index of Christian Art's text files. Ranging from Abstinence to Wisdom and from Ambition to Wrath, and covering depictions of the Tree of Virtues, the Tree of Vices, and the Conflict of Virtues and Vices, this is the largest and most comprehensive collection of such personifications in existence. The catalogue documents the occurrence of these Virtues and Vices in well over 1,000 works of art produced between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. The entries include objects in twelve different media and give detailed information on their current location, date, and subject.

This extract from the Index of Christian Art's files, the first to be published, is accompanied by six essays devoted to the theme of virtue and vice. They investigate topics such as the didactic function of the bestiaries and the "Physiologus," female personifications in the "Psychomachia of Prudentius," the Virtues in the Floreffe Bible frontispiece, and good and evil in the architectural sculpture of German sacramentary houses. The contributors are Ron Baxter, Anne-Marie Bouche, Jesse M. Gellrich, S. Georgia Nugent, Colum Hourihane, and Achim Timmerman."

For Italian city builders more than a thousand years ago, the urban realm was the great theater where their best aspirations were played out, the place where society said the most substantial things about who they were and what they longed for. In this masterful blend of art and cultural history, architect David Mayernik reveals how the very different cities of Venice, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Pienza were all literally designed to be both models of the mind and images of heaven. Mayernik takes the reader on a journey into the past in Timeless Cities, but he also explains why these city-building ideas remain relevant today. For those traveling on vacation or appreciating the art and architecture of Italy from home, Mayernik helps bring the wonder and beauty of the Renaissance mind a little closer.

Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and reimagining landscape as a mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, the internal and the external. The lens of the "unruly" reveals the latent landscapes that undergirded their conception, the elemental resources that resurfaced from the bowels of the earth, the staged topographies that unsettled the boundaries between nature and technology, and the fragile ecologies that undermined the status quo of human environs. Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature argues for an art history attentive to the vicissitudes of circumstance and attributes the regrounding of representation during a transitional age to the unquiet landscape.

"Singularly interesting and stimulating. . . . A passionate and original work of scholarship."--Richard Wollheim, "Times Literary Supplement "
"With the publication [of "Rembrandt's Enterprise"], Svetlana Alpers has firmly established herself in the front ranks of art historians at work today. . . . The book is not a long one. Yet, there is more perceptive scholarship packed into its four chapters than is typically found in a whole shelf of the more common outpourings of academic writers. "Rembrandt's Enterprise" is less a book of archival discoveries than of fresh interpretation of the revered artist and his milieu. . . . Alpers makes us see how Rembrandt's complex and enormously popular art has embedded itself in our ways of thinking about who we are and how we live, even in the late 20th century."--Christopher Knight, "Los Angeles Herald Examiner "

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

16th-century Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder redefined how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critical eye to mankind’s labours and pleasures, its foibles and rituals of daily life. Portraying landscapes, peasant life and biblical scenes in startling detail, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others. This superbly illustrated volume, now in paperback, examines how Bruegel’s art and ideas enabled people to ponder what it meant to be human. It will appeal to all those interested in art and philosophy, the Renaissance and the painting of the Dutch Golden Age.

For almost twenty years, new historicism has been a highly controversial and influential force in literary and cultural studies. In "Practicing the New Historicism, " two of its most distinguished practitioners reflect on its surprisingly disparate sources and far-reaching effects.
In lucid and jargon-free prose, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt focus on five central aspects of new historicism: recurrent use of anecdotes, preoccupation with the nature of representations, fascination with the history of the body, sharp focus on neglected details, and skeptical analysis of ideology. Arguing that new historicism has always been more a passionately engaged practice of questioning and analysis than an abstract theory, Gallagher and Greenblatt demonstrate this practice in a series of characteristically dazzling readings of works ranging from paintings by Joos van Gent and Paolo Uccello to "Hamlet" and "Great Expectations."
By juxtaposing analyses of Renaissance and nineteenth-century topics, the authors uncover a number of unexpected contrasts and connections between the two periods. Are aspects of the dispute over the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist detectable in British political economists' hostility to the potato? How does Pip's isolation in "Great Expectations" shed light on Hamlet's doubt?
Offering not only an insider's view of new historicism, but also a lively dialogue between a Renaissance scholar and a Victorianist, "Practicing the New Historicism" is an illuminating and unpredictable performance by two of America's most respected literary scholars.