In the summer of 1648, yellow fever appeared for the first time on the Yucatán Peninsula, claiming the lives of roughly one-third of the population. To combat this epidemic, Spanish colonial authorities carried a miracle-working Marian icon in procession from Itzmal to the capital city of Mérida and back again as a means of invoking divine intercession. Idolizing Mary uses this event and this icon to open a discussion about the early and profound indigenous veneration of the Virgin Mary. Amara Solari argues that particular Marian icons, such as the Virgin of Itzmal, embodied an ideal suite of precontact numinous qualities, which Maya neophytes reframed for their community’s religious needs. Examining prints, paintings, and early modern writings about the Virgin of Itzmal, Solari takes up various topics that contributed to the formation of Yucatán Catholicism—such as indigenous Maya notions of sacrality, ritual purity, and the formal qualities of offering vessels—and demonstrates how these aligned with the Virgin of Itzmal in such a way that the icon came to be viewed by the native populations as a deity of a new world order. Thoroughly researched and convincingly argued, Idolizing Mary will be welcomed by scholars and students interested in religious transformation and Marian devotion in colonial Spanish America.

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.

Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724-1796) was an Austrian fresco painter known for his bold use of color. Although he has been recognized in the Central European regions where he worked, Maulbertsch has remained outside the general canon of art history. With Painterly Enlightenment, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann recovers the story of Maulbertsch, offering the first comprehensive English-language study of the long-neglected artist. Kaufmann situates Maulbertsch as a fresco painter at a time of transition to easel painting, a colorist at a time when color was not fully appreciated by contemporary observers, and an interpreter of religious themes at a time when secular subjects were becoming more popular. In this analysis, he is shown caught between the intellectual forces of the Enlightenment and the waning power of the traditional church, thus helping to illuminate the relationship between the Enlightenment and the arts. Kaufmann provides a thorough foundation for the fresh recognition of one of the great painters of eighteenth-century Europe, a leading fresco painter who is a colorist worthy of comparison to the best of his contemporaries, including the celebrated Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Tiepolo.

Is it possible to talk about Dutch art after 1680 outside the prevailing critical framework of the "age of decline"? Although an increasing number of studies are being published on the art and society of this period, genre painting of this era continues to be dismissed as an uninspired repetition of the art of the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century, known as the Dutch Golden Age. In this stunningly illustrated study, Aono reconsiders the long-dismissed genre painting from 1680-1750. Grounded in close analysis of a range of paintings and primary sources, this study illuminates the main features of genre painting, highlighting the ways in which these elements related to the painters' close connections to, on the one hand, collectors, and on the other, to classicism, one of the dominant artistic styles of that time. Three case studies, richly supplemented by a catalogue of 29 selected painters and their work, offer the first clear picture of the genre painting of the period while providing new insights into painters' activities, collectors' tastes and the contemporary art market.

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces - the closet, the gallery, the library - and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses. -- .

In this lucid, witty book, the eminent art historian Jonathan Brown examines links between his personal life and his study of Hispanic art of the Golden Age. His adventures are offered as a model for understanding how art history is shaped by life experiences, and he describes the influence of his parents, Jean and Leonard Brown, noted collectors of documentation of 20th-century avant-garde movements.His turn to research on the Golden Age of Spanish art was motivated by a year in Madrid, 1958-59. Art history in Spain was modeled on the policies of the Franco regime, and Brown sought to find different ways to interpret Spanish painting. His approach is demonstrated by fresh insight into painters, including Velazquez. A new interpretation of Las Meninas is proposed and the perils of attribution are examined. Later in his career, Brown began to study the transformation of Spanish art in the Americas. The book originated as a series of six lectures delivered at the Museo Nacional del Prado in 2012.

In the eighteenth century, New Spaniards (colonial Mexicans) so lauded their nuns that they developed a local tradition of visually opulent portraits, called monjas coronadas or “crowned nuns,� that picture their subjects in regal trappings at the moment of their religious profession and in death. This study identifies these portraits as markers of a vibrant and changing society that fused together indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions and ritual practices to construct a new and complex religious identity that was unique to New Spain. To discover why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in New Spain, this book offers a pioneering interpretation of these works as significant visual contributions to a local counter-colonial discourse. James M. Córdova demonstrates that the portraits were a response to the Spanish crown’s project to modify and modernize colonial society—a series of reforms instituted by the Bourbon monarchs that threatened many nuns’ religious identities in New Spain. His analysis of the portraits’ rhetorical devices, which visually combined Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred, shows how they promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client-patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Combining visual evidence from images of the “crowned nun� with a discussion of the nuns’ actual roles in society, Córdova reveals that nuns found their greatest agency as Christ’s brides, a title through which they could, and did, challenge the Church’s authority when they found it intolerable.

"A beautiful, intricate meditation on creativity and discovery, on fire and rebirth." --Elizabeth Gilbert

Awestruck at the sight of a Grinling Gibbons carving in a London church, David Esterly chose to dedicate his life to woodcarving--its physical rhythms, intricate beauty, and intellectual demands. Forty years later, he is the foremost practitioner of Gibbons's forgotten technique, which revolutionized ornamental sculpture in the late 1600s with its spectacular cascades of flowers, fruits, and foliage.

After a disastrous fire at Henry VIII's Hampton Court Palace, Esterly was asked to replace the Gibbons masterpiece destroyed by the flames. It turned out to be the most challenging year in Esterly's life, forcing him to question his abilities and delve deeply into what it means to make a thing well. Written with a philosopher's intellect and a poet's grace, "The Lost Carving" explores the connection between creativity and physical work and illuminates the passionate pursuit of a vocation that unites head and hand and heart.

Signs of Power in Habsburg Spain and the New World explores the representation of political, economic, military, religious, and juridical power in texts and artifacts from early modern Spain and her American viceroyalties. In addition to analyzing the dynamics of power in written texts, chapters also examine pieces of material culture including coats of arms, coins, paintings and engravings. As the essays demonstrate, many of these objects work to transform the amorphous concept of power into a material reality with considerable symbolic dimensions subject to, and dependent on, interpretation. With its broad approach to the discourses of power, Signs of Power brings together studies of both canonical literary works as well as more obscure texts and objects. The position of the works studied with respect to the official center of power also varies. Whereas certain essays focus on the ways in which portrayals of power champion the aspirations of the Spanish Crown, other essays attend to voices of dissent that effectively call into question that authority.

An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.
The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn't alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.
Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others-no one knows the precise number-have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.
Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ-its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.
Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning "A Civil Action," The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. The fascinating details of Caravaggio's strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages. Harr's account is not unlike a Caravaggio painting: vivid, deftly wrought, and enthralling.
." . . Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . .in truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling nonfiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, "A Civil Action," was made into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up hi tale. He almost never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined details just for color's sake. . .if you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk. . .[you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when--one of my favorite moments in the whole book--Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but not inconsiderable." --"The New York Times Book Review"

"Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste--and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. It is as perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read." --"The Economist"

"From the Hardcover edition."

This new title in the highly regarded Art & Ideas series presents a thorough introduction to the Baroque and Rococo styles. Encompassing architecture, interior design, furniture, ceramics, garden landscaping and theatrical spectaculars, as well as the masterpieces of this prolific period in the Fine Arts, these styles were global and had enormous impact on the history of art. Gauvin Bailey clarifies the essence of the styles and examines their complexities and contradictions, and their applications against the backdrop of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, Latin America and Asia. With 250 illustrations, well-known sculptures by Bernini, paintings by Caravaggio and Rembrandt, and some of the most famous buildings in the world are set in their creative milieu with succinct analysis and broad clarity. Lesser known examples from across the world demonstrate how the aesthetic trends of the styles were concurrent throughout continents, and enlightens and refreshes the implications of the terms.

"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"--

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), sculptor, architect, painter, and playwright, was the most influential artist of seventeenth-century Rome and, indeed, one of the leading creative forces in European art for most of that century. He is universally recognized as one of the creators of the vastly popular Roman Baroque style, which was quickly disseminated throughout all of Europe. His influence lasted well beyond his death, and the popularity of his numerous works--fountains, statues, churches, and public squares--is today as great as it was during his own lifetime, if not more so. Domenico Bernini (1657-1723) was the artist's youngest child. Domenico's full-length biography of his famous father represents one of the most important and most intimate primary sources for the artist's life and work.

In this edition, Franco Mormando presents the first critical translation in any language of the complete Italian text, together with annotated translations of two other significant but brief biographical sketches. Mormando provides a lengthy Introduction that closely examines the author and his career, his editorial agenda and critical reception, Baroque biography as a literary genre, the other extant primary sources, and the artistic vocabulary of early modern Europe, among other relevant topics. Extensive commentary accompanies and illuminates the text from a multiplicity of historical, linguistic, and cultural perspectives. This edition is, in effect, a one-volume encyclopedia on the artist's life and work. As such, it stands alone within the immense bibliography of Bernini scholarship.

An important reassessment of the later career and life of a beloved baroque artist Hailed as one of the most influential and expressive painters of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-ca. 1656) has figured prominently in the art historical discourse of the past two decades. This attention to Artemisia, after many years of scholarly neglect, is partially due to interest in the dramatic details of her early life, including the widely publicized rape trial of her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi, and her admission to Florence's esteemed Accademia del Disegno. While the artist's early paintings have been extensively discussed, her later work has been largely dismissed. This beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book provides a revolutionary look at Artemisia's later career, refuting longstanding assumptions about the artist. The fact that she was semi-illiterate has erroneously led scholars to assume a lack of literary and cultural education on her part. Stressing the importance of orality in Baroque culture and in Artemisia's paintings, Locker argues for her important place in the cultural dialogue of the seventeenth century.

This book, now in its second revised edition, studies the mechanics of patronage of Roman Baroque sculpture produced for the Knights of the Order of St John and discusses the extent of such patronage together with the artistic and historical importance of the works commissioned. Leading artists such as Alessandro Algardi, Ciro Ferri and Melchiorre Cafa are thoroughly examined and new attributions to others are made. Moreover, Sciberras research sheds light on the lesser known aspects of the artistic liaisons between Malta and Rome, on who took care of the Orders artistic affairs in Rome and on how these works traveled to Malta. The book divides the sculptural works of art into three categories: Those which glorified the Orders patron St John the Baptist, the funerary monuments of the Grand Masters, and those made for the service and adoration of the Eucharist. Roman Baroque Sculpture for the Knights of Malta is an outstanding work of intense research which provides exhaustive detailed information. It is also a tribute to Maltas most magnificent artistic period and to an Order that made it possible. The book is published in collaboration with the Department of History of the University of Malta.

Charles II's reign was a period of revolutionary experimentation: in science, art and sexual etiquette. For the first time in British history, Royal mistresses - such as Nell Gwyn - played an active, public role in court life. Women sensed new possibilities and freedoms, appearing on stage, managing their own financial, matrimonial - and extra-marital - affairs. Encouraged by a licentious King, 'being beautiful' could get you what you wanted. But if beauty was admired and revered, praised by poets and idealised by artists, it was also distrusted and feared, pursued and possessed. Beautiful women were chased and abused, pilloried as whores. This equivocal nature of beauty explains the lives of some of the most charismatic and controversial men and women in British history - those Restoration mistresses and degenerate libertines who lived, loved and died amidst the bespangled luxury of the late Stuart Court. This beautiful book, published to accompany an exhibition at Hampton Court Palace, traces the rise and fall of the 'beautiful revolution' from the Restoration of Charles II to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. It is also a book about beauty itself: its ambiguity, its authority and its transience. This is a timeless tale about our continuing obsession with beauty, celebrity, power and love.

Published on the occasion of a major exhibition bringing together the best Rembrandt paintings from American collections. The great seventeenth-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn is one of the most important painters in the history of European art. This richly illustrated volume gathers some fifty of the finest paintings by the Dutch master and his followers from private and public collections across America, including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Rembrandt had an uncanny ability to depict light and shadow, and to capture the emotions of his sitters. In addition to his portraits, he is also known for historical scenes. Highlighting the authentic Rembrandts in America during the late nineteenth century's Gilded Age, a time when American tycoons cultivated a passion for collecting European masterpieces, the book also features fifteen to twenty works that were originally attributed to the master's hand but are now recognized as paintings by his successors, contemporary followers, and later imitators.
An introduction focusing on Rembrandt as a cultural phenomenon is followed by essays devoted to his life, the controversy associated with his workshop, and the pursuit of Rembrandt in America. Published in association with the Cleveland Museum of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

"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.

Rembrandt, Vermeer et le Siecle d'or hollandais presente les pieces les plus remarquables de l'une des collections particulieres les plus importantes dans ce domaine, la collection Leiden, New York, ainsi qu'un choix d' uvres provenant du Louvre. Ce catalogue d'exposition met en lumiere l'extraordinaire epanouissement de l'art au dix-septieme siecle, pendant la periode appelee Siecle d'or hollandais, marquee par une prosperite sans precedent. Pionniers de la nature morte, du realisme, du portrait, du paysage, de la peinture de genre, des artistes tels que Rembrandt, Vermeer, Jan Lievens, Gerard Dou, Frans van Mieris ou Frans Hals ont insuffle une vie nouvelle dans l'art hollandais, suscitant un reveil artistique national. Leurs uvres reunies ici donnent un apercu du Siecle d'or hollandais, ce temps ou l'ouverture vers de nouveaux horizons engendra des formes d'expression artistique captivantes.