A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art provides a diverse, fresh collection of accessible, comprehensive essays addressing key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700, a period that might be termed the beginning of modern history. * Presents a collection of original, in-depth essays from art experts that address various aspects of European visual arts produced from circa 1300 to 1700 * Divided into five broad conceptual headings: Social-Historical Factors in Artistic Production; Creative Process and Social Stature of the Artist; The Object: Art as Material Culture; The Message: Subjects and Meanings; and The Viewer, the Critic, and the Historian: Reception and Interpretation as Cultural Discourse * Covers many topics not typically included in collections of this nature, such as Judaism and the arts, architectural treatises, the global Renaissance in arts, the new natural sciences and the arts, art and religion, and gender and sexuality * Features essays on the arts of the domestic life, sexuality and gender, and the art and production of tapestries, conservation/technology, and the metaphor of theater * Focuses on Western and Central Europe and that territory's interactions with neighboring civilizations and distant discoveries * Includes illustrations as well as links to images not included in the book

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Though famed for his dramatic use of color, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio's boundary-breaking naturalism which scorched his name into the annals of art history. From the dirtied soles of feet to the sexualized languor of bare flesh, the artist allowed even sacred and biblical scenes to unfold with a startling, often visceral humanity. This vivid pictorial world was accompanied by an equally intense personal biography, scored by gambling, debts, drunken brawls, and even a murder charge. This book brings together more than 50 of Caravaggio's most famous and revolutionary works to explore how and why this artist is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period and one of the defining influences of art history, without whom Ribera, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet could never have painted the way they did. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist's approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600-08), this volume highlights Rubens's high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters - the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing - a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles. Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens's early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens's Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens's commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens's intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.

A beautiful, lively tour through the portraits of one of the most celebrated painters of 17th century Europe In this sumptuously illustrated volume, eminent art historian Sir Christopher White places the portraiture of renowned Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) in context among the work of his contemporaries working in and around the courts of seventeenth-century Europe. Van Dyck's artistic development is charted through his travels, beginning in his native Antwerp, then to England, Italy, Brussels, the Hague, and back again. Combining historical insights with a discerning appreciation of the work, White brings Van Dyck's paintings to life, showing how the virtuoso not only admired his artistic predecessors and rivals but refashioned what he learned from them into new kind of portraiture. Beautifully produced and a pleasure to read, this book is an important contribution to the literature on a celebrated painter. Distributed for Modern Art Press

Rubens and the Eloquence of Drawing re-examines the early graphic practice of the preeminent northern Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish, 1577-1640) in light of early modern traditions of eloquence, particularly as promoted in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Flemish, Neostoic circles of philologist, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606). Focusing on the roles that rhetorical and pedagogical considerations played in the artist's approach to disegno during and following his formative Roman period (1600-08), this volume highlights Rubens's high ambitions for the intimate medium of drawing as a primary site for generating meaningful and original ideas for his larger artistic enterprise. As in the Lipsian realm of writing personal letters - the humanist activity then described as a cognate activity to the practice of drawing - a Senecan approach to eclecticism, a commitment to emulation, and an Aristotelian concern for joining form to content all played important roles. Two chapter-long studies of individual drawings serve to demonstrate the relevance of these interdisciplinary rhetorical concerns to Rubens's early practice of drawing. Focusing on Rubens's Medea Fleeing with Her Dead Children (Los Angeles, Getty Museum), and Kneeling Man (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen), these close-looking case studies demonstrate Rubens's commitments to creating new models of eloquent drawing and to highlighting his own status as an inimitable maker. Demonstrating the force and quality of Rubens's intellect in the medium then most associated with the closest ideas of the artist, such designs were arguably created as more robust pedagogical and preparatory models that could help strengthen art itself for a new and often troubled age.

By the age of just twenty-two, Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) had produced over 160 paintings, many of them ambitious compositions of remarkable quality. This book offers an in-depth study of the artist's early career, spanning the eight years between 1613, when the artist was just fourteen, to his departure for Italy from Antwerp in October 1621. Were the paintings he created during these years his only legacy, he would still be recognized as one of the greatest artists of the 17th century. Van Dyck's precocious talents are brilliantly demonstrated in the many important works reproduced here, among them such strikingly original masterpieces as The Betrayal of Christ and Saint Jerome in the Wilderness. Others - The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem and The Lamentation, for example - reveal Van Dyck at his most experimental, in search of new ways of increasing the visual impact of his compositions. Van Dyck was also one of the first painters to rise to the challenge of Rubens' omnipresent influence, evident in works such as Christ Crowned with Thorns.

Artemisia Gentileschi, widely regarded as the most important woman artist before the modern period, was a major Italian Baroque painter of the seventeenth century and the only female follower of Caravaggio. This first full-length study of her life and work shows that her powerfully original treatments of mythic-heroic female subjects depart radically from traditional interpretations of the same themes.

An investigation into how landscape drawing informed a new Dutch identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, amid enormous expansion in global commerce and colonization, landscape drawing played a key role in forging Dutch national identity. Featuring works on paper by Rembrandt, Bruegel, and Ruisdael, among dozens of other artists, this study examines how a hyperlocal impulse in many of these drawings inspired domestic pride and a sense of connection to the land, as they also reflected aspects of the broader ecological and social change taking place. Incisive essays offer close readings that push our understandings of these artists and their work in important new directions, including eco-criticism, land use and environmentalism, race, and class. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums Exhibition Schedule: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (May 21-August 14, 2022)

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.

An in-depth examination of the crucial role that Amsterdam played in Rembrandt's evolution as an artist Around the age of 25, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) moved from his hometown of Leiden to Amsterdam, which was the commercial capital of northern Europe at that time. Considered a bold step for a fledgling artist, this change demonstrates that Rembrandt wanted to benefit financially from Amsterdam's robust art market. He soon married the cousin of a successful art dealer, and came into frequent contact with wealthy and sophisticated patrons who eagerly commissioned him to paint their portraits. The artist's style quickly evolved from the small, meticulous panels of his Leiden period to the broadly brushed, dramatically lit, and realistically rendered canvases for which he is renowned. Rembrandt in Amsterdam explores this pivotal transition in the artist's career and reveals how the stimulating and affluent environment of Amsterdam inspired him to reach his full potential. Lavishly illustrated, this volume offers a fascinating look into Amsterdam's unparalleled creative community and its role in Rembrandt's development of a wide-ranging brand that comprised landscapes, genre scenes, history paintings, portraits, and printmaking. Distributed for the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (May 14-September 6, 2021) Stadel Museum, Frankfurt am Main (Fall 2021)

The legendary splendor of Genoese baroque art Genoa completed its transformation from a faded maritime power into a thriving banking center for Europe in the seventeenth century. The wealth accumulated by its leading families spurred investment in the visual arts on an enormous scale. This volume explores how artists both foreign and native created a singularly rich and extravagant expression of the baroque in works of extraordinary variety, sumptuousness, and exuberance. This art, however, has remained largely hidden behind the facades of the city's palaces, with few works, apart from those by the school's great expatriates, found beyond its borders. As a result, the Genoese baroque has been insufficiently considered or appreciated. Lavishly illustrated, A Superb Baroque is comprehensive, encompassing all the major media and participants. Presented are some 140 select works by the celebrated foreigners drawn to the city and its flourishing environment-from Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Giulio Cesare Procaccini to Pierre Puget, Marcantonio Franceschini, and Francesco Solimena; by the major Genoese masters active for much of their careers in other settings-Bernardo Strozzi, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Filippo Parodi, and Alessandro Magnasco; and above all by the brilliantly synthetic but unfamiliar masters who worked primarily in Genoa itself-Gioacchino Assereto, Valerio Castello, Domenico Piola, and Gregorio De Ferrari. Offering three levels of exploration-essays that frame and interpret, section introductions that characterize principal currents and stages, and texts that elucidate individual works-this volume is by far the most extensive study of the Genoese baroque in the English language. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome March 4-June 19, 2022

The Dresden collection's singular group of Rembrandt works - about 20 drawings attributed to the master today and the nearly complete oeuvre of etchings- will provide the basis for this remarkable publication. It will have a particular focus on Rembrandt's narrative compositions, printed self-portraits, studies of his wife Saskia, and will include works from all periods of his oeuvre plus prints and drawings by artists from his workshop and followers. The list of artists who understood Rembrandt as a dynamic authority and source of inspiration is long, reaching from his immediate followers to masters of the 18th century, from Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione to Jonathan Richardson to the kindred spirit Francisco de Goya, into the 20th century and up to the present day. Examples include Edouard Manet, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, Lovis Corinth, Kathe Kollwitz, Max Beckmann, Pablo Picasso, as well as Marlene Dumas and William Kentridge and artists from the GDR such as A.R. Penck. By including works by these artists, the exhibtion and catalogue foreground Rembrandt as one of the most important 'artists' artist' of all time. Select juxtapositions will help the reader better understand the fi reworks of creativity that Rembrandt not only lit in his own time but those he continues to ignite today. Rembrandt remains eternally captivating, not only because of his radical choices and unconventional interpretations of Christian and profane pictorial subjects, but also because of his joy in experimentation, especially in the use of printing and drawing techniques, and his refl ective, humorous intellect, complemented by his sensually direct approach to the world. With a light hand, he broke open the conventions of his era. The pictorial worlds that he created with his free, decisive mark convey his near inexhaustible interest in nature as creation, whether it be the human exterior or interior, and off er a wealth of connecting points and constellations for other artists as well as for the viewer.

George and Maida Abrams amassed perhaps the finest private collection of Dutch Old Master drawings in the world. This catalogue presents a selection of these superb works, and explores the role of drawing in the creative process in Rembrandt's studio and wider circle. The artists featured include Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Jan Lievens, and Nicolas Maes: the key figures in Rembrandt's circle, who at times were deeply influenced by his remarkable style and on other occasions explored different approaches. Their works range from figure studies to landscapes, from narrative and biblical scenes to lively genre scenes. At the heart of the catalogue are ten exceptional drawings by Rembrandt, including two highly finished landscape drawings and a variety of figure studies. The accompanying text is written by two leading scholars of Dutch art, both of whom have worked closely with the Abrams collection. Published in association with the Bruce Museum Exhibition Schedule: Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT (09/24/11-01/08/12)

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum's significant collection of French Rococo ebenisterie furniture. This catalogue focuses on French ebenisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum's founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976. The Museum's collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696-ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694-1763), and Jean-Francois Oeben (1721-1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste. The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection's acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer. www.getty.edu/publications/rococo

Pedro de Mena y Medrano (1628-1688) is the most highly regarded master of Spanish Baroque sculpture, on a par with his contemporaries, the great seventeenth-century painters Velazquez, Zurbaran and Murillo. Mena's contributions to Spanish Baroque sculpture are unsurpassed in both technical skill and expressiveness of his religious subjects. His ability to sculpt the human body was remarkable, and he excelled in creating figures and scenes for contemplation. This first monograph of Pedro de Mena shows incredible details and remarkable images of his hyper-realistic sculptures, full of passion. In addition to text by curator Xavier Bray, Pedro de Mena also features important contributions by Jose Luis Romeo Torres, curator of the exhibition Pedro de Mena, to be held in Malaga in 2019.

Mercurial, saturnine, scandalous and unpredictable, Caravaggio - as a man, as a character and as an artist - holds dramatic appeal. He spent a large part of his life on the run, leaving a trail of illuminated chaos wherever he passed, most of it recorded in criminal justice records. When he did settle for long enough to paint, he produced works of staggering creativity and technical innovation. He was famous throughout Italy for his fulminating temper, but also for his radical and sensitive humanisation of biblical stories, and in particular his decision to include the brutal and dirty life of the street in his paintings. Caravaggio was a rebel and a violent man, but he eyed the world with deep empathy, realism and an unrelenting honesty.

Accompanying an exhibition of drawings by Guercino from the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman offers an overview of the artist's graphic work, ranging from his early genre studies and caricatures, to the dense and dynamic preparatory studies for his paintings, and on to highly finished chalk drawings and landscapes that were ends in themselves. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (1591-1666), was arguably the most interesting and diverse draftsman of the Italian Baroque era, a natural virtuoso who created brilliant drawings in a broad range of media. The Morgan owns more than twenty-five works by the artist, and these are the subject of a focused exhibition, supplemented by a handful of loans from public and private New York collections, to be held at the Morgan in the autumn of 2019. This volume accompanies that exhibition. It includes an introductory essay on Guercino's work as a draftsman followed by entries on the Guercino drawings in the Morgan's collection. These include sheets from all moments of the artist's career. His early awareness of the work of the Carracci in Bologna is documented by figures drawn from everyday life as well as brilliant caricatures; two drawings for Guercino's own drawing manual are further testament to his interest in questions of academic practice. Following his career, a range of preparatory drawings includes studies made in connection with his earliest altarpieces as well as his mature masterpieces, including multiple studies for several projects, allowing the visitor to see Guercino's mind at work as he reconsidered his ideas. The Morgan's holdings also include studies for engravings as well as highly finished landscape and figure drawings that were independent works. Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman continues a series of exhibition catalogues focused on highlights from the Morgan's collection. Previous volumes include Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens and Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing, also published by Paul Holberton. While some of the Morgan's Guercino drawings are well known, they have never been exhibited or published as a group, and the selection includes a number of new acquisitions.

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.

A unique seventeenth-century account of painting as it was practiced, taught, and discussed during a period of extraordinary artistic and intellectual ferment in the Netherlands. The only comprehensive work on painting written by a Dutch artist in the later seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstraten's Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, 1678) has long served as a source of valuable insights on a range of topics, from firsthand reports of training in Rembrandt's studio to contemporary engagements with perspective, optics, experimental philosophy, the economics of art, and more. Van Hoogstraten's magnum opus--here available in an English print edition for the first time--brings textual sources into dialogue with the author's own experience garnered during a multifaceted career. Presenting novel twists on traditional topics, he makes a distinctive case for the status of painting as a universal discipline basic to all the liberal arts. Van Hoogstraten's arguments for the authority of what painters know about nature and art speak to contemporary notions of expertise and to the unsettled relations between theory and practice, making this book a valuable document of the intertwined histories of art and knowledge in the seventeenth century.

This text explores three of Bernini's baroque chapels to show how Bernini achieved his effects. Careri examines the ways in which the artist integrated the disparate forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into a coherant space for devotion, and then shows how this accomplishment was understood by religious practitioners. In the Fonseca Chapel, the Albertoni Chapel and the church of Saint Andrea al Quirinale, all in Rome, Careri identifies three types of ensemble and links each to a particular spiritual journey. Using contemporary theories in anthropology, film and reception aesthetics, he shows how Bernini's formal mechanisms established an emotional dynamic between the beholder and a specific arrangement of forms.

Charles Le Brun's drawing manual on human emotions has been used for centuries by artists and students as a model for depicting facial expressions. In David Schutter's work, Le Brun's manual is set to a different direction--a series of abstract drawings recalling vestiges of the human face animated by emotion. But Schutter's drawings are neither copies nor portraiture. Rather, they are reflections on how Lebrun's renderings were made. Collected here, Schutter's work recreates not the subject matter but the very values of Lebrun's drawings--light, gesture, scale, and handling of materials. The cross-hatching in the original was used to make classical tone and volume, in Schutter's hand the technique makes for unstable impressions of strained neck and deeply furrowed brow, or for drawing marks and scribbles unto themselves. As such, these drawings end up denying a neat closure--unlike their academic source material--and render unsettling states of mind that require repeated viewing. Accompanied by essays from art critic Barry Schwabsky and Neubauer Collegium curator Dieter Roelstraete, The Escape will appeal to students, critics, and admirers of seventeenth-century, modern, and contemporary art alike.

Museum science, museum analysis, museum history, and museum theory all of these composite designations have come into our parlance in recent years. Above all, this expanding terminology underscores the growing scholarly interest in museums. In this new scholarship, a recurring assertion is that as an institution, the museum has largely functioned as a venue for the formation of specifically national identities. This volume, by contrast, highlights the museum as a product of transnational processes of exchange, focusing on the period from ca. 1750 to 1940."

Figuring Faith and Female Power in the Art of Rubens argues that the Baroque painter, propagandist, and diplomat, Peter Paul Rubens, was not only aware of rapidly shifting religious and cultural attitudes toward women, but actively engaged in shaping them. Today, Rubens's paintings continue to be used -- and abused -- to prescribe and proscribe certain forms of femininity. Repositioning some of the artist's best-known works within seventeenth-century Catholic theology and female court culture, this book provides a feminist corrective to a body of art historical scholarship in which studies of gender and religion are often mutually exclusive. Moving chronologically through Rubens's lengthy career, the author shows that, in relation to the powerful women in his life, Rubens figured the female form as a transhistorical carrier of meaning whose devotional and rhetorical efficacy was heightened rather than diminished by notions of female difference and particularity.

Invisible City analyzes conventual architecture in terms of the politics of sight, "the optics of power", the relationship between flesh and stone. It uncovers the connections between the bodies of the nuns and the walls that housed them, presenting the architecture of female convents as a metaphor for the body of the aristocratic female virgin nun.

Fashion ruled the courts of the "Sun King," Louis XIV (1638-1715), and his successor, Louis XV (1710-1774). The Sun King's quest for glory and love of conspicuous adornment manifested itself in his apparel, and he forced the courtiers of Versailles to adopt similarly grand Baroque styles. A lighter fashion sense prevailed at the court of Louis XV, who favored Rococo styles of exquisite refinement. This magnificently rendered, scrupulously researched coloring book features a wide spectrum of both fashion worlds, with detailed and informative captions for each illustration. Dover Original. 45 full-page black-and-white illustrations. 5 color illustrations on covers.