Rembrandt: Studies in his Varied Approaches to Italian Art explores his engagement with imagery by Italian masters. His references fall into three categories: pragmatic adaptations, critical commentary, and conceptual rivalry. These are not mutually exclusive but provide a strategy for discussion. This study also discusses Dutch artists' attitudes toward traveling south, surveys contemporary literature praising and/or criticizing Rembrandt, and examines his art collection and how he used it. It includes an examination of the vocabulary used by Italians to describe Rembrandt's art, with a focus on the patron Don Antonio Ruffo, and closes by considering the reception of his works by Italian artists.

In Applied Emblems in the Cathedral of Lugo, Carme Lopez Calderon explores the emblematic programme found in the Chapel of Nuestra Senora de los Ojos Grandes (Galicia, Spain), consisting of fifty-eight emblems painted c. 1735. Making use of a wide range of printed sources, the author delves into the meaning of each emblem and provides an all-encompassing interpretation of this cycle, which can rightly be described as the richest and most complete programme of Marian applied emblematics in the Iberian Peninsula.

Based on Guilliam Forchondt's surviving business documentation in Antwerp and applying an aggregate and data-driven approach, Connecting Art Markets focuses on the role of art dealers in mediating the supply and demand for art, behaving in particular ways as to influence the markets for artworks in which they were strategically invested. Van Ginhoven presents her findings on Guilliam Forchondt's workshop production volumes and transatlantic art trade flows, and evaluates the relationship between the production of paintings in the Southern Netherlands, their local, regional and overseas distribution channels, and the markets for these works in Europe and the Americas during the seventeenth century.

"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.

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.

Baroque depictions of violence are often dismissed as 'over the top' and 'excessive'. Their material richness and exciting visual complexity, together with the visceral engagement they demand from beholders, are usually explained in literature as reflecting the presumed violence of early modern society. This book explores the intersection between materiality, excess, and violence in seventeenth-century paintings through a close analysis of some of the most iconic works of the period. Baroque paintings expose or reference their materiality by insisting on various physical changes wrought through violence. This study approaches violence as the work of materiality, which has the potential to analogously stage pictorial surfaces as corporeal surfaces, where paint becomes flayed flesh, canvas threads ruptured skin, and red paint spilt blood.

The Baroque is back in contemporary culture. The ten essays authored by international scholars, and three interventions by artists, examine the return of the baroque as Neo-Baroque through interdisciplinary perspectives. Understanding the Neo-Baroque as transcultural (between different cultures) and transhistorical (between historical moments) the contributors to this volume offer diverse perspectives that suggest the slipperiness of the Neo-Baroque may best be served by the term 'Neo-Baroques'. Case studies analysed reflect this plurality and include: the productions of Belgian theatre company Abattoir Ferme; Claire Denis' French New Extremist film Trouble Every Day; the novel Lujuria tropical by exiled El Salvadorian Quijada Urias; the science fiction blockbuster spectacles The Matrix and eXistenZ; and the spectacular grandeur of early Hollywood movie palaces and the contemporary Las Vegas Strip. Contributors: Jens Baumgarten, Marjan Colletti, Bolivar Echeverria, Rita Eder, Hugh Hazelton, Monika Kaup, Peter Krieger, Patrick Mahon, Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, Richard Reddaway, Karel Vanhaesebrouck, Saige Walton.

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.

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.

Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in Motion examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of motion in early modern Europe.

Millions of paintings were produced in the Dutch Republic. The works that we know and see in museums today constitute only the tip of the iceberg - the top-quality part. But what else was painted? This book explores the low-quality end of the seventeenth-century art market and outlines the significance of that production in the genre of history paintings, which in traditional art historical studies, is usually linked to high prices, famous painters, and elite buyers. Angela Jager analyses the producers, suppliers, and consumers active in this segment to gain insight into this enormous market for cheap history paintings. What did the supply consist of in terms of quantity, quality, price, and subject? Who produced all these works and which production methods did these painters employ? Who distributed these paintings, to whom, and which strategies were used to market them? Who bought these paintings, and why?

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.

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.

Romeyn de Hooghe was the most inventive and prolific etcher of the later Dutch Golden Age. The producer of wide-ranging book illustrations, newsprints, allegories, and satire, he is best known as the chief propaganda artist working for stadtholder and king William III. This study, the first book-length biography of de Hooghe, narrates how his reputation became badly tarnished when he was accused of pornography, fraud, larceny, and atheism. Traditionally regarded as a godless rogue, and more recently as an exponent of the Radical Enlightenment, de Hooghe emerges in this study as a successful entrepreneur, a social climber, and an Orangist spin doctor. A study in seventeenth-century political culture and patronage, focusing on spin and slander, this book explores how artists, politicians, and hacks employed literature and the visual arts in political discourse, and tried to capture their readership with satire, mockery, fun, and laughter.

Romeyn de Hooghe was the most inventive and prolific etcher of the later Dutch Golden Age. The producer of wide-ranging book illustrations, newsprints, allegories, and satire, he is best known as the chief propaganda artist working for stadtholder and king William III. This study, the first book-length biography of de Hooghe, narrates how his reputation became badly tarnished when he was accused of pornography, fraud, larceny, and atheism. Traditionally regarded as a godless rogue, and more recently as an exponent of the Radical Enlightenment, de Hooghe emerges in this study as a successful entrepreneur, a social climber, and an Orangist spin doctor. A study in seventeenth-century political culture and patronage, focusing on spin and slander, this book explores how artists, politicians, and hacks employed literature and the visual arts in political discourse, and tried to capture their readership with satire, mockery, fun, and laughter.

Always recognised as a master print from the moment of its appearance around 1649, the Hundred Guilder Print is one of Rembrandt's most compositionally complex and visually beautiful works. This book gives a full overview of the fascinating story surrounding this print, from its genesis and market value to attitudes towards it in the present day. Focusing on the tradition of printmaking as well as the reception of the print in Rembrandt's time, Golahny explores the ways the artist made visual references to the work of such masters as Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, while uniquely combining aspects of Christ's ministry. Placing the work within its wider cultural and historical context, Rembrandt's Hundred Guilder Print offers an original and engaging approach to current Rembrandt scholarship and is essential reading for anyone interested in the work of one of the most famous artists of the Dutch Global Age.

Even during the artist's lifetime, contemporary art lovers considered Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) to be an exceptional artist. In this revelatory sequel to the acclaimed Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, renowned Rembrandt authority Ernst van de Wetering investigates the painter's considerations that determined the striking changes in his development from an early age onwards. This gorgeously illustrated book explores how Rembrandt achieved mastery by systematic exploration of the 'foundations of the art of painting'. According to written sources from the seventeenth century, which were largely misinterpreted until now, these 'foundations' were considered essential at that time. From his first endeavours in painting, Rembrandt embarked on a journey past these foundations, thus becoming the 'pittore famoso', whom Count Cosimo the Medici visited at the end of his life. Rembrandt never stopped searching for solutions to the pictorial problems that confronted him; this led over time to radical changes that cannot simply be attributed to stylistic evolution or natural development. In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist's, Van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the revolutionary painter that would continue to fascinate the art world. This ground breaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt's theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist's exceptional accomplishments and on the theory and practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age.

Even during the artist's lifetime, contemporary art lovers considered Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) to be an exceptional artist. In this revelatory sequel to the acclaimed Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, renowned Rembrandt authority Ernst van de Wetering investigates the painter's considerations that determined the striking changes in his development from an early age onwards. This gorgeously illustrated book explores how Rembrandt achieved mastery by systematic exploration of the 'foundations of the art of painting'. According to written sources from the seventeenth century, which were largely misinterpreted until now, these 'foundations' were considered essential at that time. From his first endeavours in painting, Rembrandt embarked on a journey past these foundations, thus becoming the 'pittore famoso', whom Count Cosimo the Medici visited at the end of his life. Rembrandt never stopped searching for solutions to the pictorial problems that confronted him; this led over time to radical changes that cannot simply be attributed to stylistic evolution or natural development. In a quest as rigorous and novel as the artist's, Van de Wetering reveals how Rembrandt became the revolutionary painter that would continue to fascinate the art world. This ground breaking exploration reconstructs Rembrandt's theories and methods, shedding new light both on the artist's exceptional accomplishments and on the theory and practice of painting in the Dutch Golden Age. Everyone who is interested in the art of painting should read this phenomenal book, because it was written with incredible knowledge and experience on the subject. It shows in a clear and simple way how Rembrandt worked and the things he had to take into account. At the same time it offers a fantastic sample of Rembrandt's life's work, thanks to the well-chosen selection of illustrations. David Rijser, NRC Handelsblad

Through historical coincidence that almost takes on a mythical character, 'Michelangelo' was the given name not only of the Florentine sculptor, but also of the painter who grew up in Caravaggio, a provincial town in Lombardy, about 25 miles east of Milan. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, commonly called by reference to his hometown, produced revolutionary paintings whose impact was as great - at the beginning of the 1600s - as the other Michelangelo's art had been a century earlier. In this book, author Bette Talvacchia explores the significant, but little-discussed, connection between the 'two Michelangelos'. She exposes the dynamic relationship between their work through looking at the ways in which Caravaggio creatively responded to the art of his namesake from the start of his youthful arrival in Rome. In addition, she suggests how Michelangelo's overwhelming achievement was a model that helped to drive the young Caravaggio's powerful ambition and shape his identity as an artist. With lucid and intelligent prose, this fascinating book sheds light on the similar 'artistic temperament' constructed in the biographies of each artist - glorifying their rebellious, anti-social behaviour and uncompromising artistic principles - examined both in its historical and contemporary configurations. Why does our culture find these two artists so compelling, and how were they seen in their time and in the intervening centuries until our own day? Linking the past to the present, Talvacchia encourages readers to appreciate more fully the individual works discussed, and to reflect upon the continuing relevance of these two artists to the culture of the present day.

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.