This book provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the Neapolitan Baroque, through original and in-depth interpretations of pivotal masterpieces of Neapolitan art, literature, philosophy, theater. The book also presents the city of Naples as a cultural space in which the body functions as a visual, literary, and urban metaphor. By examining the works of Giordano Bruno, Caravaggio, Giambattista Basile, Silvio Fiorillo and Raimondo di Sangro, Principe di San Severo, the essays comprising this volume show the contribution of these world renowned figures to the Baroque imagery of Naples, but also highlight the impact the city had on their work. Finally, the book stirs reflection on the enduring presence and current revival of the Neapolitan Baroque, by looking at contemporary culture and the cinematic adaptation of baroque works, such as Matteo Garrone's Tale of Tales.

The major topics painted and sculpted during the 17th century are featured here. Baroque artists chose stories not only from the Bible but also from mythology; these are not included in art history texts. In this volume, one finds the primary sources: The Golden Legend, the Bible, Ovid, and Plutarch, to name a few. Each entry concludes with an example of a work depicting the topic under examination (Diana Hunting, Lot and His Daughters, for instance) along with a readily available source where the work is pictured. The only reference of its type for art students, this is a companion piece for the author's earlier (Greenwood, 1987). The turbulent 17th century resulted in two main artistic styles: an expressionistic, sensual kind of emotional outpouring and a silent, classical mode of the highest possible decorum. These styles focused on topics that were mostly mythological or religious: maenads, satyrs, and nymphs pouring wine, carrying baskets of flowers, and lounging at a mythological event; angels shown in the heavens or with the characters on earth. Art students until now have not had a single source that attempts to describe the topics of this intensely artistic age with artists as different in approach as Bernini and Rembrandt. Direct quotes from primary sources including the ^IBible^R and Ovid enrich the descriptive material. Extensive cross-referencing adds to the user-friendly aspect of the dictionary.

One of the most visible, popular, and significant artists of his generation, William Hogarth (1697-1764) is best known for his acerbic, strongly moralising works, which were mass-produced and widely disseminated as prints during his lifetime. This volume is a fascinating look into the notorious English satirical artist's life, presenting Anecdotes of William Hogarth, Written by Himself-a collection of autobiographical vignettes supplemented with short texts and essays written by his contemporaries, first published in 1785.

The Rococo emerged in France around 1700 as a playful revolt against the grandeur of the Baroque and the solemnity of Classicism. It flourished during the reign of Louis XV and began to go out of fashion in the second half of the 18th century. During this brief period of less than a century, it spread throughout the courts and cities of Europe, with significant regional variations on the style developing in Bavaria, Potsdam, Venice, and Great Britain. The period produced an extraordinary number of artistic innovators, who challenged received conventions, developed novel subject categories, and eroded hierarchical distinctions between the arts. The Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art covers all aspects of Rococo art history through a chronology, an introductory essay, a review of the literature, an extensive bibliography, and over 350 cross-referenced dictionary entries on prominent Rococo painters, sculptors, decorative artists, architects, patrons, theorists, and critics, as well as major centers of artistic production. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Rococo art.

Europe Views the World examines the wide diversity of images that Europeans produced to represent the wide variety of peoples and places around the globe during and after the so-called 'Age of Exploration'. Beginning with the medieval imagery of Europe's imagined alien races, and with an emphasis on the artists of Northern Europe, Larry Silver takes the reader on a tour across continents, from the Americas to Africa and Asia. Encompassing works such as prints, paintings, maps, tapestries and sculptural objects, this book addresses the overall question of an emerging European self-definition through the evidence of visual culture, however biased, about the wider world in its component parts. Unique to this book, each chapter concludes with an 'in response', analysing representations of Europeans by indigenous peoples of each continent to give a deeper and more multi-faceted account of the impact of Europe's view of the world.

Extensively illustrated, this is the first accessible publication on the history of tapestry in over two decades. Woven with dazzling images from history, mythology and the natural world, and breath-taking in their craftsmanship, tapestries were among the most valuable and high-status works of art available in Europe from the medieval period to the end of the eighteenth century. Over 600 historic examples hang in National Trust properties in England and Wales - the largest collection in the UK. This beautifully illustrated study by tapestry expert Helen Wyld, in association with the National Trust, offers new insights into these works, from the complex themes embedded in their imagery, to long-forgotten practices of sacred significance and ritual use. The range of historical, mythological and pastoral themes that recur across the centuries is explored, while the importance of the 'revival' of tapestry from the late nineteenth century is considered in detail for the first time. Although focussed on the National Trust's collection, this book offers a fresh perspective on the history of tapestry across Europe. Both the tapestry specialist and the keen art-history enthusiast can find a wealth of information here about woven wall hangings and furnishings, including methods of production, purchase and distribution, evolving techniques and technologies, the changing trends of subject matter across time, and how tapestries have been collected, used and displayed in British country houses across the centuries.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni takes up the question of the issues involved in the formation of recent saints - or Beati moderni (modern Blesseds) as they were called - by the Jesuits and Oratorians in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. Ruth Noyes focuses particularly on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, the so-called Beati moderni, such as Jesuit founders Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, and Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is the question of the fate and meaning of the two altarpiece paintings commissioned by the Oratorians from Peter Paul Rubens. The Congregation rejected his first altarpiece because it too specifically identified Filippo Neri as a cult figure to be venerated (before his actual canonization) and thus was caught up in the politics of cult formation and the papacy's desire to control such pre-canonization cults. The book demonstrates that Rubens' second altarpiece, although less overtly depicting Neri as a saint, was if anything more radical in the claims it made for him. Peter Paul Rubens and the Crisis of the Beati Moderni offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian images of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies. It is also the first work to examine provocative Philippine imagery and demonstrate how its bold promotion specifically triggered the first wave of curial censure in 1602.

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.

This book focuses on key monuments of the Baroque style, which varies in different European contexts. It is intended to affirm the existence of individual genius, identifiable styles of art, and historical periods that produced them.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ's post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have had a lasting impact upon the intellectual landscape of the post-classical world. As well as provoking historical debate and reflection, they have proved an enduring yardstick by which succeeding generations have measured the architectural and cultural accomplishments of their own eras. Focusing particularly upon the Renaissance and Baroque periods, this book looks at how the Wonders of the World were represented in art, architecture and sculpture, and the ways that European courts could evoke them as a useful image of power. Within this artistic culture, special attention is paid to the recreations and constructions generated between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in the sphere of ephemeral art, especially those linked to court celebrations in the principal European states. This approach provides a framework to analyse and evaluate the claims of other European Renaissance and Baroque architecture to Wonder status, an approach bolstered by the use of the Palace of El Escorial as a case study of a modern 'Eighth Wonder'.

First published in 1951 Arnold Hauser's commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced. This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hauser's narrative and serves as a critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.

The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo establishes a fundamental relationship between the Franciscan humility of Archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo and the Roman sacred works of Caravaggio. This is the first book to consider and focus entirely upon these two seemingly anomalous personalities of the Counter-Reformation. The import of Caravaggio's Lombard artistic heritage has long been seen as pivotal to the development of his sacred style, but it was not his only source of inspiration. This book seeks to enlarge the discourse surrounding Caravaggio's style by placing him firmly in the environment of Borromean Milan, a city whose urban fabric was transformed into a metaphorical Via Crucis. This book departs from the prevailing preoccupation - the artist's experience in Rome as fundamental to his formulation of sacred style - and toward his formative years in Borromeo's Milan, where humility reigned supreme. This book is intended for a broad, yet specialized readership interested in Counter-Reformation art and devotion. It serves as a critical text for undergraduate and graduate art history courses on Baroque art, Caravaggio, and Counter-Reformation art.

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.

Vermeer and the Art of Love is about the emotions evoked in those elegant interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter's attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary. In this engaging and beautifully illustrated book, Georgievska-Shine uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries to give the reader a fascinating insight into his unique understanding and interpretation of the subject.

Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture argues that theatre, and the new genre of opera in particular, played a key role in creating a new vision of landscape during the long seventeenth century in Italy. It explores how the idea of gardens as theatres emerged at the same time as opera was developed in Italian courts around the turn of the seventeenth century. During this period landscape painting emerged as a genre and the aesthetic of designed landscapes and gardens was wholly transformed, which resulted in a reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and landscape. The importance of theatre as a key cultural expression in Italy is widely recognised, but the visual culture of theatre and its relationship to the broader artistic culture is still being untangled. This book argues that the combination of narratives playing out in natural settings (Arcadia, Parnassus, Alcina), the emotional responses elicited by sets and special effects (the apparent magical manipulation of the laws of nature), and, the way that garden theatres were used for displays of power and to enact princely virtue and social order, all contributed to this shifting idea of landscape in the seventeenth century.

The World Created in the Image of Man investigates the development of the third dimension in painting from the dramatic moment when spatial construction becomes charged with an external force antagonistic to the effort of forms, or human figures, to preserve their permanence. The competitive contact between the external and internal worlds represented in the picture brings a vital element to the unfolding of art as it occurs in both the West and the East. As the analysis of masterpieces from different historical periods and cultures demonstrates here, this vital impulse becomes a necessary part of pictorial composition and the measure of the quality of the work of art. It can reveal itself in a limitless and disparate variety of subject matter: a scene from Japanese court life, as depicted in the illustrations of the early twelfth century to the novel The Tale of Genji; a representation of the maternal feeling of the Virgin anticipating the fate of her child in Byzantine icon painting; Raphael's "universal interior" in The School of Athens; Rembrandt's allegory of historic continuity in Aristotle with the Bust of Homer. The progression of this dynamic eventually leads to the surrender of form to space with the Impressionists; and to the conclusion of the book, which considers Postmodern art in the form of the installation, where the emphasis is put on the unprecedented role of the viewer as a component of the work, and which suggests an environment that is totally alien, or even hostile to him. Art historians, students of art history and the educated general reader with an interest in painting will find this book a rewarding and stimulating read.

The baroque period deals with the art created roughly between the end of the 16th and the early years of the 18th centuries. The masters of the era include Caravaggio, Gianlorenzo Bernini, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Diego Velazquez, and Nicolas Poussin. The Historical Dictionary of Baroque Art and Architecture, Second Edition covers the most salient works of baroque artists, the most common themes depicted, historical events and key figures responsible for shaping the artistic vocabulary of the era, and definitions of terms pertaining to the topic at hand. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Baroque Art and Architecture contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on famous artists, sculptors, architects, patrons, and other historical figures, and events. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Baroque art.

Die Burgerbibliothek Zürich wurde 1629 gegründet und ging 1631 in die Hände des Staates über, der durch die Bibliothek die Wissenschaften fördern wollte. 1645 gab der Bibliotheksrat der Burgerbibliothek ein Neujahrsblatt heraus, das den Kindern der Stadtbürger verteilt wurde. Daraus entstand die Tradition der Neujahrsblätter der Burgerbibliothek, die bis 1939 gepflegt wurde. Die Neujahrsblätter sind als Machtinstrumente des Staates einmalige Zeitzeugen von besonderer Bedeutung und geben Aufschluss über theologische, politische, soziale und historische Gegebenheiten der Zeit. Diese Arbeit analysiert 15 ausgewählte Blätter aus den Jahren 1645 bis 1672, die alle vom renommierten Künstler Conrad Meyer und dem ebenso bekannten Dichter und Theologen Johann Wilhelm Simler geschaffen wurden. Diese Blätter sind von besonderer Bedeutung, da die beiden Autoren erstmals die Kombination von Text und Bild zu erbaulichen Zwecken einsetzten. Ziel dieser Untersuchung ist es, den Begriff der Erbauung näher zu beschreiben und damit die Funktion jedes einzelnen dieser Blätter genau zu definieren.

Artemisia Gentileschi was the greatest female artists of the Baroque age. In Artemisia Gentileschi, critic and historian Jonathan Jones discovers how Artemisia overcame a turbulent past to become one of the foremost painters of her day. As a young woman Artemisia was raped by her tutor, and then had to endure a seven-month-long trial during which she was brutally examined by the authorities. Gentileschi was shamed in a culture where honour was everything. Yet she went on to become one of the most sought-after artists of the seventeenth century. Yet she went on to become one of the most sought-after artists of the seventeenth century. Gentileschi's art communicated a powerful personal vision. Like Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois or Tracey Emin, she put her life into her art. 'Lives of the Artists'is a new series of brief artists biographies from Laurence King Publishing. The series takes as its inspiration Giorgio Vasari's five-hundred-year-old masterwork, updating it with modern takes on the lives of key artists past and present. Focusing on the life of the artist rather than examining their work, each book also includes key images illustrating the artist's life.

This book focuses on key monuments of the Baroque style, which varies in different European contexts. It is intended to affirm the existence of individual genius, identifiable styles of art, and historical periods that produced them.

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.

This volume brings together the papers presented at a conference entitled 'Experiencing the Garden in the Eighteenth Century', held at the Institute of Romance Studies, Senate House, University of London on 13 March 2004. Speakers came from Europe, the United States and New Zealand, and each gave a very different perspective on the eighteenth-century landscape garden in England, France and elsewhere in Europe. The papers focused on the theme of experience, an especially important aspect of eighteenth-century garden design. Landscape gardens were created for visitors to move through on a journey from one place to the next: the garden would not be seen all at once, but would be experienced as a story unfolding. The visitor would follow a circuit around the garden, moving from light to shade, being given suggestive prompts with statues, temples and viewpoints, as if on a sensory, emotional and intellectual journey.