Hardly any other epoch in art history has been marked by as many profound changes as the Late Gothic was in the fifteenth century. Inspired by Netherlandish role models, depictions of light and shadow, body and space, became increasingly more realistic. Everyday life found entry into the arts. With the invention of printing, images and texts were distributed to an extent previously unheard of. Artists such as Nicolaus Gerhaert and Martin Schongauer became widely known and influenced the development of the visual arts throughout Europe and across all genres. Featuring a wide selection of works, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin present the first extensive exhibition of Late Gothic art in the German-speaking regions. Its comparison and contrast of the various genres turns the catalogue into a handbook for the arts at the threshold of the modern era.

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR AN OBSERVER BEST ART BOOK OF 2021 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2022 'This is a wonderful book. A lyrical journey into the natural and unnatural world' Patti Smith 'Everything Philip Hoare writes is bewitching' Olivia Laing An illuminating exploration of the intersection between life, art and the sea from the award-winning author of Leviathan. Albrecht Durer changed the way we saw nature through art. From his prints in 1498 of the plague ridden Apocalypse - the first works mass produced by any artist - to his hyper-real images of animals and plants, his art was a revelation: it showed us who we are but it also foresaw our future. It is a vision that remains startlingly powerful and seductive, even now. In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Durer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Durer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions. What is natural or unnatural? Is art a fatal contract? Or does it in fact have the power to save us? With its wild and watery adventures, its witty accounts of amazing cultural lives and its delight in the fragile beauty of the natural world, Albert & the Whale offers glorious, inspiring insights into a great artist, and his unerring, sometimes disturbing gaze.

Did the invention of movable type change the way that the word was perceived in the early modern period? In his groundbreaking essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the cultural critic Walter Benjamin argued that reproduction drains the image of its aura, by which he means the authority that a work of art obtains from its singularity and its embeddedness in a particular context. The central question in The Aura of the Word in the Early Age of Print (1450-1600) is whether the dissemination of text through print had a similar effect on the status of the word in the early modern period. In this volume, contributors from a variety of fields look at manifestations of the early modern word (in English, French, Latin, Dutch, German and Yiddish) as entities whose significance derived not simply from their semantic meaning but also from their relationship to their material support, to the physical context in which they are located and to the act of writing itself. Rather than viewing printed text as functional and lacking in materiality, contributors focus on how the placement of a text could affect its meaning and significance. The essays also consider the continued vitality of pre-printing-press kinds of text such as the illuminated manuscript; and how new practices, such as the veneration of handwriting, sprung up in the wake of the invention of movable type.

In this visually stunning and much anticipated book, acclaimed art historian Joseph Koerner casts the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in a completely new light, revealing how the painting of everyday life was born from what seems its polar opposite: the depiction of an enemy hell-bent on destroying us. Supreme virtuoso of the bizarre, diabolic, and outlandish, Bosch embodies the phantasmagorical force of painting, while Bruegel, through his true-to-life landscapes and frank depictions of peasants, is the artistic avatar of the familiar and ordinary. But despite their differences, the works of these two artists are closely intertwined. Bruegel began his career imitating Bosch's fantasies, and it was Bosch who launched almost the whole repertoire of later genre painting. But Bosch depicts everyday life in order to reveal it as an alluring trap set by a metaphysical enemy at war with God, whereas Bruegel shows this enemy to be nothing but a humanly fabricated mask. Attending closely to the visual cunning of these two towering masters, Koerner uncovers art history's unexplored underside: the image itself as an enemy. An absorbing study of the dark paradoxes of human creativity, Bosch and Bruegel is also a timely account of how hatred can be converted into tolerance through the agency of art. It takes readers through all the major paintings, drawings, and prints of these two unforgettable artists--including Bosch's notoriously elusive Garden of Earthly Delights, which forms the core of this historical tour de force. Elegantly written and abundantly illustrated, the book is based on Koerner's A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, a series given annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.

This book employs a new approach to the art of sixteenth-century Europe by incorporating rhetoric and theory to enable a reinterpretation of elements of Mannerism as being grounded in sixteenth-century spirituality. Lynette M. F. Bosch examines the conceptual vocabulary found in sixteenth-century treatises on art from Giorgio Vasari to Federico Zuccari, which analyses how language and spirituality complement the visual styles of Mannerism. By exploring the way in which writers from Leone Ebreo to Gabriele Paleotti describe the interaction between art and spirituality, Bosch establishes a religious base for the language of art in sixteenth-century Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, religious studies, and religious history.

This beautiful and extensively illustrated catalogue presents in-depth case studies of twenty-four rare and remarkable Late Medieval panel paintings, many from the German-speaking regions of Europe, but also from Spain, France and the Southern Netherlands. These works - often fragments of larger altarpieces designed for liturgical performance and communal or private devotion - can be monumental and dramatic or small and intimate, but all on close examination prove to be rich in meaning - even in cases where the painters remain anonymous, and the precise contexts of their creation have become obscured or fragmented. The collected essays will encompass a broad spectrum of artistic styles, techniques, and interests, including in some instances the works' original frames, and the attendant meanings they give to the imagery housed within. The group will also be augmented by a rare and important small-scale tapestry altarpiece with close links to panel painting. The inclusion of such a piece, one of the many newly resurfaced works to be included in the catalogue, will offer an innovative approach to the scholarship of Medieval paintings, and enrich our understanding of the cross-pollination of ideas between mediums and the role played by painters in tapestry production at the turn of the sixteenth century. The book, a follow-up to Susie Nash's important 2011 catalogue, considers the physical history, original form, condition and technique of the assembled works, using wood analysis and dendrochronology, paint samples, infra-red, x-rays and macro photography to document the materials and methods involved in their making and the alterations and transformations they have undergone with time. This new information is combined with close readings of their imagery and its presentation to explore issues of meaning, creative process, patronal intervention and artistic intention, leading in many cases to new reconstructions, attributions, dates and iconographic readings. The text is extensively illustrated with a series of images of all of the works, along with technical photographs and comparative material.

First detailed exploration of the role played by Bohemian tradition and customs in the court of Richard II. Bohemian culture exercised an important influence on the court of King Richard II, but it has been somewhat overlooked, with previous scholarship on its writers and artists generally confined to the role played by the French courtof King Charles V and the Italian city states of Milan and Florence. This book aims to fill that gap. It argues that Richard's marriage to Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, one of the greatest rulersand patrons of the age, exposed England to the full extent of this international court culture. Ricardian writers, including Chaucer, Gower and the Gawain-poet, wrote in their native language not because they felt "English" in the modern national sense but because they aspired to be part of a burgeoning vernacular European culture stretching from Paris to Prague and from Brabant to Brandenburg; thus, one of the major periods of English literature can only be properly understood in relation to this larger European context.

This book focuses on the Ashburnham Pentateuch, an early medieval illuminated manuscript of the Old Testament whose pictures are among the earliest surviving and most extensive biblical illustrations. Dorothy Verkerk shows how the lively and complex illustrations of Genesis and Exodus, which incorporate references to contemporary life, were used to explain important church teachings. She provides a key to understanding the relationship between the text and pictures. Verkerk also argues that the manuscript was created in Italy, thereby solving a mystery that has baffled scholars for the last century and demonstrating that early medieval Italian artists were capable of complex innovations in the field of the visual arts.

Cupid became a popular figure in the literary and visual culture of post-Reformation England. He served to articulate and debate the new Protestant theory of desire, inspiring a dark version of love tragedy in which Cupid kills. But he was also implicated in other controversies, as the object of idolatrous, Catholic worship and as an adversary to female rule: Elizabeth I's encounters with Cupid were a crucial feature of her image-construction and changed subtly throughout her reign. Covering a wide variety of material such as paintings, emblems and jewellery, but focusing mainly on poetry and drama, including works by Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, Kingsley-Smith illuminates the Protestant struggle to categorise and control desire and the ways in which Cupid disrupted this process. An original perspective on early modern desire, the book will appeal to anyone interested in the literature, drama, gender politics and art history of the English Renaissance.

A groundbreaking work on how the topic of scale provides an entirely new understanding of Inca material culture Although questions of form and style are fundamental to art history, the issue of scale has been surprisingly neglected. Yet, scale and scaled relationships are essential to the visual cultures of many societies from around the world, especially in the Andes. In Scale and the Incas, Andrew Hamilton presents a groundbreaking theoretical framework for analyzing scale, and then applies this approach to Inca art, architecture, and belief systems. The Incas were one of humanity's great civilizations, but their lack of a written language has prevented widespread appreciation of their sophisticated intellectual tradition. Expansive in scope, this book examines many famous works of Inca art including Machu Picchu and the Dumbarton Oaks tunic, more enigmatic artifacts like the Sayhuite Stone and Capacocha offerings, and a range of relatively unknown objects in diverse media including fiber, wood, feathers, stone, and metalwork. Ultimately, Hamilton demonstrates how the Incas used scale as an effective mode of expression in their vast multilingual and multiethnic empire. Lavishly illustrated with stunning color plates created by the author, the book's pages depict artifacts alongside scale markers and silhouettes of hands and bodies, allowing readers to gauge scale in multiple ways. The pioneering visual and theoretical arguments of Scale and the Incas not only rewrite understandings of Inca art, but also provide a benchmark for future studies of scale in art from other cultures.

The Armada Portrait is perhaps the most immediately recognisable depiction of Elizabeth I and, arguably, of any British monarch. It captures both the drama of a pivotal moment in Britain's history - the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 - and the majesty of the Tudor monarchy. But while the image it presents is one of assuredness, success and might, the portrait both overstates English power and downplays the real dangers the Armada presented to England and its queen. By understanding the portrait and its symbolism, the history of the Armada and the turbulent Elizabethan age come to life.

This collection of essays examines the vogue for games and game playing as expressed in art and literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Focusing on games as a leitmotif of creative expression, these scholarly inquiries are framed as a response to two main questions: how were games used to convey special meanings in art and literature, and how did games speak to greater issues in European society? In chapters dealing with chess, playing cards, board games, dice, gambling, and outdoor and sportive games, essayists show how games were used by artists, writers, game makers and collectors, in the service of love and war, didactic and moralistic instruction, commercial enterprise, politics and diplomacy, and assertions of civic and personal identity. Offering innovative iconographical and literary interpretations, their analyses reveal how games"played, written about, illustrated and collected"functioned as metaphors for a host of broader cultural issues related to gender relations and feminine power, class distinctions and status, ethical and sexual comportment, philosophical and religious ideas, and conditions of the mind.

Images play a key role in political communication and the ways we come to understand the power structures that shape society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of empire building, in which visual language has long been a highly effective means of overpowering another culture with one's own values and beliefs. Visualizing Portuguese Power examines the visual arts within the Portuguese empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. With a focus on the appropriation of Portuguese-Christian art within the colonies, the book looks at how these and other objects could be staged to generate new layers of meaning.

This is an updated version of the enduring classic that first introduced the concept of "imperfect beauty" to the West. Text, images, and book design seamlessly meld into a wabi-sabi-like experience.

"Wabi-sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete . . .
. . . wabi-sabi could even be called the "Zen of things," as it exemplifies many of Zen's core spiritual-philosophical tenets . . .
Wabi-sabi is the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of what we think of as traditional Japanese beauty. It occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West . . .
Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about the delicate traces, the faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness . . ."

Author Leonard Koren was trained as an architect but never built anything--except an eccentric Japanese tea house--because he found large, permanent objects too philosophically vexing to design. Instead he created "WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing," one of the premier avant-garde magazines of the 1970s. Subsequently Koren has produced unusual books about design- and aesthetics-related subjects. Koren resides in both America and Japan. For more information, visit www.leonardkoren.com.

The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State R^ constitutes a genealogy of the academic, confraternal, and guild practices of artists in Florence, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. It examines the institution's everyday practices, for which its daily transactions, expenses, sources of income, and seemingly inconsequential rulings provides an index, along with its official statutes, public mandates, and "extraordinary" proceedings, many of which have remained unpublished until now. Together with theoretical, critical and historiographical primary sources, these documents provide a picture of the operations and work of the Florentine Academy and the processes that governed the gestures, dictated the behaviors, and shaped the thought of those who moved within its walls. Looking diachronically at identity formation within a particular institution of the Medici state, this study also examines the connections between the Academy and an emergent public sphere within which modern bourgeois subjectivity took shape.

This book is the first detailed investigation to focus on the late medieval use of Tree of Jesse imagery, traditionally a representation of the genealogical tree of Christ. In northern Europe, from the mid-fifteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, it could be found across a wide range of media. Yet, as this book vividly illustrates, it had evolved beyond a simple genealogy into something more complex, which could be modified to satisfy specific religious requirements. It was also able to function on a more temporal level, reflecting not only a clerical preoccupation with a sense of communal identity, but a more general interest in displaying a family's heritage, continuity and/or social status. It is this dynamic and polyvalent element that makes the subject so fascinating.

New interpretations of an art form ubiquitious in the Middle Ages. English alabasters played a seminal role in the artistic development of late medieval and early modern Europe. Carvings made of this lustrous white stone were sold throughout England and abroad, and as a result many survived the iconoclasm that destroyed so much else from this period. They are a unique and valuable witness to the material culture of the Middle Ages. This volume incorporates a variety of new approaches to these artefacts, employing methodologies drawn from a number of different disciplines. Its chapters explore a range of key points connected to alabasters: their origins, their general history and their social, cultural, intellectual and devotional contexts. ZULEIKA MURAT is a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the History of Medieval Art at the University of Padua. Contributors: Jennifer Alexander, Jon Bayliss, Claire Blakey, Stephanie De Roemer, Rachel King, AndrewKirkman, Aleksandra Lipinska, Zuleika Murat, Luca Palozzi, Sophie Phillips, Nigel Ramsay, Christina Welch, Philip Weller, Kim Woods, Michaela Zoeschg

In this ambitious study, Richard Wendorf establishes the grounds of comparison between two arts that have often been linked in a casual way but whose historical interrelations remain almost completely unexplored. By focusing on the great age of English portraiture - from the arrival of Van Dyck to the publication of Boswell's Life of Johnson - the author shows that, despite their obvious differences, visual and verbal portraits often shared similar assumptions about the representation of historical character. Grounded in modern theory devoted to the comparison of literature and painting and to the problem of representation, this book examines each form of portraiture in terms of the other. Among those writers considered are Izaak Walton, John Evelyn, John Aubrey, Roger North, Goldsmith, Johnson, Mrs Piozzi, Boswell; among the artists are Van Dyck, Lely, Samuel Cooper, Jonathan Richardson, Hogarth and Reynolds. The careers of `double agents' (painters, like Richardson and Reynolds, who experimented with biographical writing) are also discussed. The Elements of Life is a ground-breaking critical history of biography and portrait-painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

This new edition of an established survey of the Golden Age of Dutch painting has been revised, corrected, and updated in the text, notes, and bibliography as a result of new scholarship. The author has written a new preface to this edition. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Ruisdael, Cuyp, de Witte, van Goyen, van de Velde, Hobbema, Fabritius, de Hooch, and Saenrendam are some of the painters included and discussed.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was one art form in which English artists excelled above all their continental European counterparts: the painting of miniatures. This fascinating book explores the genre with special reference to two of its most accomplished practitioners, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, whose astounding skill brought them international fame and admiration. Four centuries ago, England was famous primarily for its literary culture - the dram a of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the works of the great lyrical and metaphysical poets. When it came to the production of visual art, the country was seen as something of a backwater. However, there was one art form for which English artists of this period were renowned: portrait miniature painting, or as it was known at the time, limning. Growing from roots in manuscript illumination, it was brought to astonishing heights of skill by two artists in particular: Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619) and Isaac Oliver (c .1565-1617). In addition to exhibiting the exquisite technique of the artists, portrait miniatures express in a unique way many of the most distinctive and fascinating aspects of court life in this period: ostentatious secrecy, games of courtly love, arcane symbolism, a love of intricacy and decoration. Bedecked in elaborate lace, encrusted in jewellery and sprinkled with flowers, court ladies smile enigmatically at the viewer; their male counterparts rest on grassy banks or lean against trees, sighing over thwarted love, or more modestly express their hopes in Latin epigrams inscribed around their heads. Often set in richly enamelled and jewelled gold lockets, or beautifully turned ivory or ebony boxes, such miniatures could be concealed or revealed, exchanged or kept, as part of elaborate processes of friendship, love, patronage and diplomacy at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I /VI. This richly illustrated book, like the exhibition it accompanies, explores what the portrait miniature reveals about identity, society and visual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici's impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman's contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family's domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi's Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi's painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de' Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women's agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

This book explores how the Medici Grand Dukes pursued ways to expand their political, commercial, and cultural networks beyond Europe, cultivating complex relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Islamicate regions, and looking further east to India, China, and Japan. The chapters in this volume discuss how casting a global, cross-cultural net was part and parcel of the Medicean political vision. Diplomatic gifts, items of commercial exchange, objects looted at war, maritime connections, and political plots were an inherent part of how the Medici projected their state on the global arena. The eleven chapters of this volume demonstrate that the mobility of objects, people, and knowledge that generated the global interactions analyzed here was not unidirectional-rather, it went both to and from Tuscany. In addition, by exploring evidence of objects produced in Tuscany for Asian markets,this book reveals hitherto neglected histories of how Western cultures projected themselves eastwards.

Pioneering investigation of the popular "double tomb" effigies in the Middle Ages. 2022 Historians of British Art Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period before 1600 2021 International Center of Medieval Art Annual Book Prize Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying side-by-side, and hand in hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Philip Larkin's poem An Arundel Tomb later described as their "stone fidelity". This first full account of the "double tomb" places its rich tradition into dialogue with powerful discourses of gender, marriage, politics and emotion during the Middle Ages. As well as offering new interpretations of some of the most famous medieval tombs, such as those found in Westminster Abbey and Canterbury Cathedral, it draws attention to a host of lesser-known memorials from throughout Europe, providing an innovative vantage point from which to reconsider the material culture of medieval marriage. Setting these twin effigies alongside wedding rings and dresses as the agents of matrimonial ritual and embodied symbolism, the author presents the "double tomb" as far more than mere romantic sentiment. Rather, it reveals the careful artifice beneath their seductive emotional surfaces: the artistic, religious, political and legal agendas underlying the medieval rhetoric of married love. Published with the generous financial assistance of the Henry Moore Foundation.