"Medieval renaissance Baroque" celebrates Marilyn Aronberg Lavin's breakthrough achievements in both the print and digital realms of art and cultural history. Fifteen friends and colleagues present tributes and essays that reflect every facet of this renowned scholar's brilliant career. Tribute presenters include Ellen Burstyn, Langdon Hammer, Phyllis Lambert, and James Marrow. Contributors include Kirk Alexander, Horst Bredekamp, Nicola Courtright, David Freedberg, Jack Freiberg, Marc Fumaroli, David A. Levine, Daniel T. Michaels, Elizabeth Pilliod, Debra Pincus, and Gary Schwartz. 79 illustrations, bibliography of Marilyn Lavin's works, index.

Examined through the lens of cutting-edge scholarship, Artemisia Gentileschi clears a pathway for non-specialist audiences to appreciate the artist's pictorial intelligence, as well as her achievement of a remarkably lucrative and high-profile career. Bringing to light recent archival discoveries and newly attributed paintings, this book highlights Gentileschi's enterprising and original engagement with emerging feminist notions of the value and dignity of womanhood. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Artemisia Gentileschi brings to life the extraordinary story of this Italian artist, placing her within a socio-historical context. Sheila Barker weaves the story with in-depth discussions of key artworks, examining them in terms of their iconographies and technical characteristics in order to portray the developments in Gentileschi's approach to her craft and the gradual evolution of her expressive goals and techniques.

This beautifully illustrated monograph presents the first overview in English of the life and work of Luisa Roldan (1652-1706), a prolific and celebrated sculptor of the Spanish Golden Age. The daughter of Pedro Roldan, a well-known sculptor from Seville, she developed her talent in her father's workshop. Early in her career she produced large polychromed wooden sculptures for churches in Seville, Cadiz, and surrounding towns. She spent the second half of her career in Madrid, where she worked in both polychromed wood and polychromed terracotta, developing new products for a domestic, devotional market. In recognition of her talent, she was awarded the title of Sculptor to the Royal Chambers of two kings of Spain, Charles II and Philip V. This book places Roldan within a wider historical and social context, exploring what life would have been like for her as a woman sculptor in early modern Spain. It considers her work alongside that of other artists of the Baroque period, including Velazquez, Murillo, and Zurbaran. Reflecting on the opportunities available to her during this time, as well as the challenges she faced, Catherine Hall-van den Elsen weaves the narrative of Roldan's story with analysis, revealing the complexities of her oeuvre. Every year, newly discovered sculptures in wood and in terracotta enter into Roldan's oeuvre. As her artistic output begins to attract greater attention from scholars and art lovers, Luisa Roldan provides invaluable insights into her artistic achievements.

This beautifully illustrated catalogue presents a selection of exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch drawings from the Peck Collection in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Featuring many previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works, the catalogue brings together examples by some of the best-known artists of the era such as Rembrandt, Jacques de Gheyn II, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Frans van Mieris. The collection was donated to the museum in 2017 by the late Drs. Sheldon and Leena Peck. The transformative gift is comprised of over 130 largely seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings, establishing the Ackland as one of a handful of university art museums in the United States where northern European drawings can be studied in depth. Drawn to Life presents around 70 works from this exceptional and diverse group of drawings amassed by the Pecks over four decades. Featuring new research and fresh insights into seventeenth-century drawing practice, the catalogue and accompanying exhibition celebrates the creativity and technical skills of Dutch artists who explored the beauty of the natural world and the multifaceted aspects of humanity. The catalogue features a broad selection of scenes of everyday life, landscapes, biblical and historical scenes, portraits, and preparatory studies, forming a dynamic and representative group of Dutch drawings made by some of the most outstanding artists of the period, including Abraham Bloemaert, Jacob van Ruisdael, Esaias van de Velde, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Pieter Molijn, Aelbert Cuyp, Adriaen van Ostade, Ferdinand Bol, Nicolaes Maes, Jan Lievens, Gerard ter Borch, Adriaen van de Velde, Nicolaes Berchem, and Cornelis Dusart. Key sheets of remarkable quality by lesserknown artists such as Guillam Dubois, Herman Naiwincx, Willem Romeyn, and Jacob van der Ulft, also comprise a core strength of the collection, and serve as a testament to the visual acuity of the Pecks as collectors. At the heart of the Peck Collection are several sheets by Rembrandt, including the sublime Noli me Tangere; a beautifully rendered late landscape, Canal and Boats with a Distant View of Amsterdam; and the superbly charming Studies of Women and Children, which was the last of Rembrandt's seventeen known drawings with an inscription in his own hand to reach a public collection. Meticulously researched and written by Robert Fucci, Ph.D., Drawn to Life introduces both scholars and drawings enthusiasts to the depth and beauty of the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum.

This book examines the intersections between the ways that marriage was represented in eighteenth-century writing and art, experienced in society, and regulated by law. The interdisciplinary and comparative essays explore the marital experience beyond the 'matrimonial barrier' to encompass representations of married life including issues of spousal abuse, parenting, incest, infidelity and the period after the end of marriage, to include annulment, widowhood and divorce. The chapters range from these focuses on legal and social histories of marriage to treatments of marriage in eighteenth-century periodicals, to depictions of married couples and families in eighteenth-century art, to parallels in French literature and diaries, to representations of violence and marriage in Gothic novels, and to surveys of same-sex partnerships. The volume is aimed towards students and scholars working in the long eighteenth century, gender studies, women's writing, publishing history, and art and legal historians.

Elisabetta Sirani of Bologna (1638-1665) was one of the most innovative and prolific artists of the Bolognese School. Not only a painter, she was also a printmaker and a teacher. Based on extensive archival documentation and primary sources — including inventories, sale catalogues and her work diary — Elisabetta Sirani provides an overview of the life, work, critical fortune and legacy of this successful Baroque artist. Placing her within the context of the post-Tridentine society that both inhibited and supported her, Modesti examines Sirani's influence on many of the artists studying at Bologna's school for professional women artists, as well as her significance in the professionalisation of women’s artistic practice in the seventeenth century. Beautifully illustrated throughout, Elisabetta Sirani focuses on women’s agency. More specifically, it explores Sirani’s identity as both a woman and an artist, including her professional ambition, self-fashioning and literary construction as Bologna’s pre-eminent cultural heroine.

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.

Bernini and His World is a unique exploration of Gian Lorenzo Bernini the sculptor, offering new insights and including discussions of the artist's stylistic innovations and the ways in which he approached sculpture. Placing his life and work within a social, anthropological and historical context, Livio Pestilli gives a fascinating and in-depth account, from the Rome in which Bernini lived and its reception of foreign sculptors to the myth-making narrative of his biographers, and the judgements of his critics. Beautifully illustrated and engagingly written, this book draws on a deep familiarity with both historic and modern Italian culture to give readers a vivid account of sculpture and sculptors in early modern Rome, and of Bernini's lasting legacy.

Francine Prose's life of Caravaggio evokes the genius of this great artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio defied the aesthetic conventions of his time; his use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed-street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged-was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. His insistence on painting from nature, on rendering the emotional truth of experience, whether religious or secular, makes him an artist who speaks across the centuries to our own time. In "Caravaggio", Francine Prose presents the brief but tumultuous life of one of the greatest of all painters with passion and acute sensitivity.

The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture explores the re-invention of the early European Baroque within the philosophical, cultural, and literary thought of postmodernism in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Gregg Lambert argues that the return of the Baroque expresses a principle often hidden behind the cultural logic of postmodernism in its various national and cultural incarnations, a principal often in variance with Anglo-American modernism. Writers and theorists examined include Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Octavio Paz, and Cuban novelists Alejo Carpentier and Severo Sarduy. A highly original and compelling reinterpretation of modernity, The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture answers Raymond WilliamsGCO charge to create alternative national and international accounts of aesthetic and cultural history in order to challenge the centrality of Anglo-American modernism.

From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."

Building or rebuilding their houses was one of the main concerns of the English nobility and gentry, some might say their greatest achievement. This is the first book to look at the building of country houses as a whole. Creating Paradise shows why owners embarked on building programmes, often following the Grand Tour or excursions around other houses in England; where they looked for architectural inspiration and assistance; and how the building work was actually done. It deals not only with great houses, including Holkham and Castle Howard, but also the diversity of smaller ones, such as Felbrigg and Dyrham, and shows the cost not only of building but of decorating and furnishing houses and of making their gardens. Creating Paradise is an important and original contribution to its subject and a highly readable account of the attitude of the English ruling class to its most important possession.

"Using the palace records from the Vatican's Secret Archives, Ruprecht demonstrates that the Vatican museum was the brainchild of J.J. Winckelmann, the so-called father of Art History. Tracing both Winckelmann's secret involvement in the emergence of modern art museums and modern art history and their emergence from within religious institutions, the author offers a new perspective on the relationship of religion and art in the modern world"--

This catalogue will be published to accompany the fi rst ever exhibition of Golden Age Dutch pictures in the collection of the National Trust, which will be shown at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, the Holburne Museum in Bath and at Petworth House in West Sussex (2018-19). Celebrating the enduring British taste for collecting Dutch paintings from the long seventeenth century, the publication will explore why and how this particular type of art was desired, commissioned and displayed through the consideration of masterpieces from a number of National Trust houses. It will feature portraits, still lifes, religious pictures, maritime paintings, landscapes, genre paintings and history pictures, painted by celebrated artists such as Rembrandt, Lievens, Hobbema, Cuyp, Hondecoeter, De Heem, Ter Borch and Metsu, as well as less well-known artists such as De Baen and Van Diest. With over 350 heritage properties in the UK, the National Trust cares for one of the world's largest and most signifi cant holdings of art and its collection of Dutch Old Masters is particularly impressive. The catalogue will include essays by Quentin Buvelot (chief curator at the Mauritshuis) and David Taylor (curator of pictures and s culpture at the National Trust). The authors will also discuss other aspects of the infl uence of Dutch culture in British country houses (using National Trust examples) - on furniture, garden design and print and ceramics collecting.

This beautiful publication accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum of the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). It is the most important study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation. In a letter written near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi explained to his sister that he had lived away from his native Venice because he could find no patrons there willing to support “the sublimity of my ideas.� He resided instead in Rome, where he became internationally famous working as a printmaker, designer, architect, archaeologist, theorist, dealer, and polemicist. While Piranesi’s lasting fame is based above all on his etchings, he was also an intense, accomplished, and versatile draftsman, and much of his work was first developed in vigorous drawings. The Morgan Library& Museum holds what is arguably the largest and most important collection of these works, more than 100 drawings that include early architectural caprices, studies for prints, measured design drawings, sketches for a range of decorative objects, a variety of figural drawings, and views of Rome and Pompeii. These works form the core of the book, which will be published on the occasion of the Morgan’s Spring 2023 exhibition of Piranesi drawings. More than merely an exhibition catalogue or a study of the Morgan’s Piranesi holdings, however, this publication is a monograph that offers a complete survey of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman. It includes discussion of Piranesi’s drawings in public and private collections worldwide, with particular attention paid to the large surviving groups of drawings in New York, Berlin, Hamburg, and London; it also puts the large newly discovered cache of Piranesi material in Karlsruhe in context. The most comprehensive study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation, the book includes more than 200 illustrations, and while focused on the drawings it offers insights on Piranesi’s print publications, his church of Santa Maria del Priorato, and his work as a designer and dealer. In sum, the present work offers a new account of Piranesi’s life and work, based on the evidence of his drawings.

Originally published London, 1924. Contents Include: The Serenade at Caserta - "Les Indes Galantes" - The King and the Nightingale - Biography etc. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

In his joint capacities of Premier peintre du roi, director of the Gobelins manufactory and rector of the Academie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Le Brun exercised a previously unprecedented influence on the production of the visual arts - so much so that some scholars have repeatedly described him as 'dictator' of the arts in France. The Sovereign Artist explores how Le Brun operated in his diverse fields of activities, linking and juxtaposing his portraiture, history painting and pictorial theory with his designs for architecture, tapestries, carpets and furniture. It argues that Le Brun sought to create a repeatable and easily recognizable visual language associated with Louis XIV, in order to translate the king's political claims for absolute power into a visual form. How he did this is discussed through a series of individual case studies ranging from Le Brun's lost equestrian portrait of Louis XIV, and his involvement in the Querelle du coloris at the Academie, to his scheme for 93 Savonnerie carpets for the Grande Galerie at the Louvre, his Histoire du roy tapestry series, his decoration of the now destroyed Escalier des Ambassadeurs at Versailles and the dramatic destruction of the Sun King's silver furniture. One key theme is the relation between the unity of the visual arts, to which Le Brun aspired, and the strong hierarchical distinctions he made between the liberal arts and the mechanical crafts: while his lectures at the Academie advocated a visual and conceptual unity in painting and architecture, they were also a means by which he attempted to secure the newly gained status of painting as a liberal art, and therefore to distinguish it from the mechanical crafts which he oversaw the production of at the Gobelins. His artistic and architectural aspirations were comparable to those of his Roman contemporary Gianlorenzo Bernini, summoned to Paris in 1665 to design the Louvre's East facade and to create a portrait bust of Louis XIV. Bernini's failure to convince the king and Colbert of his architectural scheme offered new opportunities for Le Brun and his French contemporaries to prove themselves capable of solving the architectural problems of the Louvre and to transform it into a palace appropriate "to the grandeur and the magnificence of the prince who [was] to inhabit it" (Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Nicolas Poussin in 1664). The comparison between Le Brun and Bernini not only illustrates how France sought artistic supremacy over Italy during the second half of the 17th century, but further helps to demonstrate how Le Brun himself wanted to be perceived: beyond acting as a translator of the king's artistic ambition, the artist appears to have sought his own sovereign authority over the visual arts.

Although women painters and sculptors have often been the focus of academic research, they have not been fully integrated into traditional lower-division art history surveys. Politically Incorrect: Women Artists and Female Imagery in Early Modern Europe celebrates women who met the challenge of being female professionals and succeeded as artists at a time when such accomplishments were not expected or encouraged. Concentrating on social history as well as the history of art, the book inspires students to think about the context in which the women of Early Modern Europe lived. Part I focuses on creativity and the creative process. Part II is chronologically based and examines women artists of the latter Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, and 18th century. Part III is thematically constructed and investigates female imagery and how women were perceived. Developed and class-tested for 30 years, the materials in the text enhance and amplify views of women and female artists. Politically Incorrect can be used as the basis for art history courses of the Renaissance and Baroque. It can also be employed at higher levels as an introduction to more scholarly research on the topic. Additionally, the book is an excellent supplement to many women's studies, gender studies, and early modern European history courses.

Salomon de Caus has been viewed as, variously, a Protestant martyr, the unsung inventor of the steam engine, one of the most important early hydraulic engineers, and a garden designer whose work was influenced by astrology and hermeticism. The first comprehensive book on this protean figure, Nature as Model sifts through historical material, Caus's own writings, and his extant landscape designs to determine what is fact and what is fiction in the life of this polymathic and prolific figure. In doing so, it clarifies numerous hitherto unresolved problems in his biography and historiography. As Luke Morgan shows, Caus made important contributions to some of the most significant landscape projects of his period, including the gardens of Coudenberg Palace in Brussels, Richmond Palace, Hatfield House, Somerset House, Greenwich Palace in London, as well as, most famously, the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, which he designed for the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, and his wife, Elisabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England. In his work, Caus drew on his intimate knowledge of the late sixteenth-century Italian garden, and through his commissions the design principles and motifs of the late Renaissance garden were transmitted across Europe. The book is a masterful exercise in historical reconstruction, showing how Caus has been read by subsequent generations intent on nationalism, romance, or magic. Morgan investigates the ways in which the early modern garden actually generated meaning through conventional motifs rather than through esoteric narrative programs.

The recent rediscovery of Rubens's Massacre of the Innocents (bought by Lord Thomson for GBP50 million in 2002) offers an important opportunity to reassess the painter's early career. Of Rubens's works immediately following his return to Antwerp in 1608, it is the most assured, achieving a remarkable complexity both compositionally and emotionally. David Jaffe, Senior Curator at the National Gallery, London, considers the work in its context, discussing the numerous sources and influences - both visual and literary - from which Rubens drew. He also compares it to contemporary works by the artist, such as the London National Gallery's Samson and Delilah, and publishes new research illuminating the career and profile of the Massacre's first owner, the Milanese merchant resident in Antwerp Jacopo Carenna. In association with the Thomson Collection, the Art Gallery of Ontario and Skylet.