Most modern historians perpetuate the myth that Giuliano de' Medici (1479-1516), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was nothing more than an inconsequential, womanizing hedonist with little inclination or ability for politics. In the first sustained biography of this misrepresented figure, Josephine Jungic re-evaluates Giuliano's life and shows that his infamous reputation was exaggerated by Medici partisans who feared his popularity and respect for republican self-rule. Rejecting the autocratic rule imposed by his nephew, Lorenzo (Duke of Urbino), and brother, Giovanni (Pope Leo X), Giuliano advocated restraint and retention of republican traditions, believing his family should be "first among equals" and not more. As a result, the family and those closest to them wrote him out of the political scene, and historians - relying too heavily upon the accounts of supporters of Cardinal Giovanni and the Medici regime - followed suit. Interpreting works of art, books, and letters as testimony, Jungic constructs a new narrative to demonstrate that Giuliano was loved and admired by some of the most talented and famous men of his day, including Cesare Borgia, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Niccolo Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael. More than a political biography, this volume offers a refreshing look at a man who was a significant patron and ally of intellectuals, artists, and religious reformers, revealing Giuliano to be at the heart of the period's most significant cultural accomplishments.

Since the time of Aristotle, the making of knowledge and the making of objects have generally been considered separate enterprises. Yet during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the two became linked through a "new" philosophy known as science. In "The Body of the Artisan," Pamela H. Smith demonstrates how much early modern science owed to an unlikely source-artists and artisans.
From goldsmiths to locksmiths and from carpenters to painters, artists and artisans were much sought after by the new scientists for their intimate, hands-on knowledge of natural materials and the ability to manipulate them. Drawing on a fascinating array of new evidence from northern Europe including artisans' objects and their writings, Smith shows how artisans saw all knowledge as rooted in matter and nature. With nearly two hundred images, "The Body of the Artisan" provides astonishingly vivid examples of this Renaissance synergy among art, craft, and science, and recovers a forgotten episode of the Scientific Revolution-an episode that forever altered the way we see the natural world.

'art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake' In Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), a diffident Oxford don produced an audacious and incalculably influential defence of aestheticism. Through his highly idiosyncratic readings of some of the finest paintings, sculptures, and poems of the French and Italian Renaissance, Pater redefined the practice of criticism as an impressionistic, almost erotic exploration of the critic's aesthetic responses. At the same time, reclaiming the Hellenism that he saw as the most characteristic aspect of the Renaissance, he implicitly celebrated homoerotic friendship. Pater's infamous 'Conclusion', which forever linked him with the decadent movement, scandalized many with its insistence on making pleasure the sole motive of life, even as it charmed fellow aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde. This edition of Studies reproduces the text of the first edition, recapturing its initial impact, and the Introduction celebrates its doomed attempt to stand out against the processes of industrialization. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Difference exists; otherness is constructed. This book asks how important Western artists, from Giotto to Titian and Caravaggio, and from Bosch to D rer and Rembrandt, shaped the imaging of non-Western individuals in early modern art. Victor I. Stoichita's nuanced and detailed study examines images of racial otherness during a time of new encounters of the West with different cultures and peoples, such as those with dark skins: Muslims and Jews. Featuring a host of informative illustrations and crossing the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies, Darker Shades also reconsiders the Western canon's most essential facets: perspective, pictorial narrative, composition, bodily proportion, beauty, color, harmony, and lighting. What room was there for the "Other," Stoichita would have us ask, in such a crystalline, unchanging paradigm?