Although Bosch's known works amount to no more than two dozen paintings and a handful of drawings, the artist had an enormous impact on religious imagery during his lifetime and for centuries afterward. His enigmatic and mind-bending depictions of humans, animals, and nature undoubtedly influenced the surrealist movement of the 20th century. This book explores Bosch's works in terms of medieval morality, the religious beliefs of his time, and the Northern Renaissance in general. This elegant volume offers exquisite, full-colour reproductions that afford readers the opportunity to linger over the works' amazing details. The accompanying text examines Bosch's singular place in the canon of Western art, as a revolutionary portrayer of the imagination, and as a pioneer in the depiction of heaven and hell.

Unprecedented in scope, this fifth volume in the Architecture in Context series traces the rediscovery of Classical ideas and the emergence of the great artists and architects of late 15th- and early 16th-century Italy that led to the cultural peak characterized as the High Renaissance. It begins with a definition of Mannerism, the seminal development from the High Renaissance and the Baroque, associated with such dominant and influential figures as Raphael, Michelangelo, Vignola, Romano and Palladio. The political context within which Mannerism and its variants developed - from the Reformation to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War - is outlined before the major figures and achievements of Italian architecture in the period are explored in great depth and breadth. The journey then moves to France and architects and thinkers such as Pierre Lescot, Philibert de l'Orme, J.A. du Cerceau and Salomon de Brosse. These two major traditions - with the intercession of architects from the Netherlands who had ideas of their own - had a huge impact in central Europe, the ideas spreading across a vast area including modern-day Germany, Austria and Poland. After a digression to the notably eclectic England of Elizabeth I and James I, where pioneers such as Robert Smythson were overshadowed by the towering figure of Inigo Jones, Reformations ends with a survey of architecture in the Iberian peninsula and the colonies of Spain and Portugal, where the powerful influence of the Italian masters met a strong vernacular tradition. Profusely illustrated and with many specially drawn plans, this is a wide-ranging and detailed guide to the architecture of a period that continues to fascinate and engage us today.

Abstraction haunts medieval art, both withdrawing figuration and suggesting elusive presence. How does it make or destroy meaning in the process? Does it suggest the failure of figuration, the faltering of iconography? Does medieval abstraction function because it is imperfect, incomplete, and uncorrected-and therefore cognitively, visually demanding? Is it, conversely, precisely about perfection? To what extent is the abstract predicated on theorization of the unrepresentable and imperceptible? Does medieval abstraction pit aesthetics against metaphysics, or does it enrich it, or frame it, or both? Essays in this collection explore these and other questions that coalesce around three broad themes: medieval abstraction as the untethering of the image from what it purports to represent; abstraction as a vehicle for signification; and abstraction as a form of figuration. Contributors approach the concept of medieval abstraction from a multitude of perspectives-formal, semiotic, iconographic, material, phenomenological, epistemological.

The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757): The Queen of Pastel is the first extensive biographical narrative in English of Rosalba Carriera. It is also the first scholarly investigation of the external and internal factors that helped to create this female painter's unique career in eighteenth-century Europe. It documents the difficulties, complications, and consequences that arose then -- and can also arise today -- when a woman decides to become an independent artist. This book contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the interplay between society's expectations, generally accepted codices for gendered behaviour, and one single female painter's astute strategies for achieving success, as well as autonomy in her professional life as a famed artist. Some of the questions that the author raises are: How did Carriera manage to build up her career? How did she run her business and organize her own workshop? What kind of artist was Carriera? Finally, what do her self-portraits reveal in terms of self-enactment and possibly autobiographical turning points?

Rubens: The Two Great Landscapes is a handsomely illustrated monograph that examines in depth Rubens's two greatest landscape paintings: A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning and The Rainbow Landscape. Painted as pendants, the pair have been in London since 1803, when they were separated, the former eventually entering the collection of the National Gallery and the latter that of the Wallace Collection. The book puts the creation of these two landscapes into the full context of Rubens's later life and his semi-retirement. It demonstrates how they are the zenith of his achievements as a landscape painter and explores how he drew skilfully on Flemish influences, including Bruegel, in creating two highly original compositions. Written to engage and appeal to the non-specialist reader and academic alike, the book makes an important contribution to scholarship in the field, including original technical research and new photography that show how these complex compositions evolved iteratively as the panels onto which they were painted were expanded. It also presents an updated and almost complete history of the provenance of the two paintings describing their passage through eminent collections from the time of Rubens's death until they reached their respective collections in London, separated by less than a mile.

The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire is the first complete catalogue of the glass in the county predating the Gothic Revival. The book presents important and well-known glazing schemes, such as those at Thornhill (adjudged by some the best and most important in any church outside York), Elland, and Normanton, alongside glazing that was previously very little known, such as that at Methley and Ripponden. It draws on dispersed information to give accounts of lost and excavated glass, and offers the first overview of stained glass in the region, placing the schemes in the contexts of donors, makers, and post-installation histories. The volume is complemented with an account of some post-medieval glass-painters whose work is found in the county.

One of the most significant features of the religious spirit of the Counter-Reformation was Spanish mysticism, a vital aspect of which was visionary experience. In this exploration of the relationship between the ecstatic experience of the Sacred and the art of painting in the Golden Age, Victor I. Stoichita starts from the premise that visionary experience is in fact the apprehension of an image, for a vision implies the manifestation of the Divinity itself. Although painters in Spain before the late sixteenth century had shown little interest in depicting visions, in the seventeenth it was a crucial topos: at this time a number of artists sought to include in their paintings both the vision itself and the visionary saint at the moment of ecstasy. Further, they explored ways of implicating the beholder of the work as a privileged witness to the 'reality' of the event represented, and also of means to make the work itself serve as a vision-inducing agent. The challenges that beset artists were considerable. How, for example, was one to portray the unrepresentable, or develop a readable figurative code of ecstatic gesture? Further, Spanish visionary literature included criticisms of the employment of paintings in the exercise of religious devotion, while writings on religious art and Christian iconography were also often at odds. The author's insights into the ways that painters responded to the celebrated visions of popular saints, and of how the role of the beholder of works of art - works often bewildering in their multiple 'realities' - was manipulated, insistently demonstrate that the art of devotion in the Golden Age continued throughout as cerebral as it was impassioned.

Around 1500, Lucas Cranach the Elder steps onto the world stage - in Vienna. The publication explores this, the artist's earliest period of work and presents all the paintings he produced during this time, their expressiveness radically different from the courtly-elegant compositions he subsequently produced as court painter in Wittenberg. Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) produced his earliest works around 1500 in Vienna, shortly before moving to Wittenberg to become court painter to the Elector of Saxony. These brilliant paintings, drawings, and woodcuts document both the thirty-year-old's close contacts with the humanist circles of Konrad Celtis and Johannes Cuspinian, and identify him as a precursor of the so-called Danube School.

"Singularly interesting and stimulating. . . . A passionate and original work of scholarship."--Richard Wollheim, "Times Literary Supplement "
"With the publication [of "Rembrandt's Enterprise"], Svetlana Alpers has firmly established herself in the front ranks of art historians at work today. . . . The book is not a long one. Yet, there is more perceptive scholarship packed into its four chapters than is typically found in a whole shelf of the more common outpourings of academic writers. "Rembrandt's Enterprise" is less a book of archival discoveries than of fresh interpretation of the revered artist and his milieu. . . . Alpers makes us see how Rembrandt's complex and enormously popular art has embedded itself in our ways of thinking about who we are and how we live, even in the late 20th century."--Christopher Knight, "Los Angeles Herald Examiner "

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility-not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry. In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This substantial and beautifully illustrated volume documents the National Gallery's unrivaled collection of Venetian paintings created between 1540 and 1600, including some of the greatest works commissioned by the city from Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, and the Bassano family. The collection is so rich and varied that the book serves as an introduction to all the major types of painting produced in Venice during this period--the altarpiece, portrait, confraternity chapel decoration, ceiling and furniture painting, and paintings for the portego (long central hall) of a palace. Among the many important works included are Titian's Vendramin Family Venerating a Relic of the True Cross, Veronese's Family of Darius and four Allegories, and Tintoretto's Origin of the Milky Way. Nicholas Penny provides comprehensive and detailed information reflecting the most up-to-date scholarship on the paintings--many of which have passed through some of the greatest collections in Europe--along with a thorough discussion of their provenance. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

Drawing on a broad theoretical range from speculative realism to feminist psychoanalysis and anti-colonialism, this book represents a radical departure from traditional scholarship on maritime archaeology. Shipwreck Hauntography asserts that nautical archaeology bears the legacy of Early Modern theological imperialism, most evident through the savior-scholar model that resurrects-physically or virtually-ships from wrecks. Instead of construing shipwrecks as dead, awaiting resurrection from the seafloor, this book presents them as vibrant if not recalcitrant objects, having shaken off anthropogenesis through varying stages of ruination. Sara Rich illustrates this anarchic condition with 'hauntographs' of five Age of 'Discovery' shipwrecks, each of which elucidates the wonder of failure and finitude, alongside an intimate brush with the eerie, horrific, and uncanny.

This beautiful book in the "500" series celebrates the extraordinary talent of Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, arguably the most renowned artist of the Italian Renaissance. 500 years ago, he was 46 years old. He had already completed the Statue of David, the Doni Tondo, the Vatican Pieta, and the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He would later paint the Last Judgement, the frescoes of the Pauline Chapel, and complete the Tomb of Julius II. This book celebrates his magisterial accomplishments throughout his lifetime, and includes his less celebrated works, architectural projects, lost works, and attributions. Text in English and Italian.

This volume is dedicated to Taddeo di Bartolo (c. 1362-1422), painter of Sienese origin who, as the travelling master he was, spent a good part of his career moving between Tuscany, Liguria and Umbria, serving politically and economically powerful families, public authorities, large religious orders and brotherhoods. He was responsible for imposing altar polyptychs, a sacred art form of which he was the undisputed master: the re-composition of some of these apparatuses, such as the now dismembered altarpiece of San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, constitutes the fulcrum of the studies gathered in these pages. The book also documents Taddeo's other fields of activity: from the creation of processional banners to small tables of private devotion, up to the important role as fresco painter with the decoration of the chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. With historical essays and documentary apparatuses, the volume edited by Marco Pierini and Gail Solberg - the painter's most accredited scholar - is therefore a complete and updated monograph on the figure of the artist. Authors of the essays: Gail Solberg, Marco Pierini, Emanuele Zappasodi, Veruska Picchiarelli, Donal Cooper, Alberto Sartore, Machtelet Bruggen Istraels, Christa Gardner von Teuffel, Daniele Costanti. Text in English and Italian.

This ambitious work lifts the veil on a pivotal chapter in the history of art and its social meaning. This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within an environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery - the mainstay of museums - traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome. Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy. With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history - even the emergence of the modern category of fine art - was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.

Visual arts in Britain between 1550 and 1650 have long been considered part of the classical Italian Renaissance canon. Now a distinguished group of scholars demonstrates that attitudes to classical art were in fact somewhat ambivalent during this period in Britain (or, as it is called poetically, Albion). For town halls and funeral monuments, for paintings and theatrical works, British artists, patrons, and builders made informed choices from the classical vocabulary while continuing to work within systems and circumstances quite distinct from those of classicism. The authors focus on the ways that local influences, habits, and visual sensibilities interacted with classicism and the work and methods of such masters as Inigo Jones in the evolution of British art, architecture, and literature in this era. Introduced and edited by Lucy Gent, this handsome book was written by contributors who come from the fields of history, art and architectural history, literary criticism, and emblematics. The book consists of essays by Lisa Jardine, Maurice Howard, Deborah Howard, Michael Bath, Paula Henderson, Nigel Llewellyn, Susan Foister, Margaret Aston, Keith Thomas, Christy Anderson, Ellen Chirelstein, Thomas Greene, Sasha Roberts, Alice Friedman, Gloria Kury, and Catherine Belsey. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

Bosch lived and worked over 500 hundred years ago in the Netherlands' town of 's Hertogenbosch, from which he takes his name. He is best known for his fantastical, wondrous art full of strange creatures both grotesque and heavenly. The work he has left behind still defies the imagination. Taking account of the latest research, Hieronymus Bosch: Masterpieces of Art gives an overview of what is known of this elusive painter and draughtsman, and reproduces his (and some of his followers') impressive work, from traditional Biblical stories with a Boschian twist, such as the Adoration of the Magi, to his apocalyptic Four Visions of the Hereafter. His diptychs and triptychs, such as the famously complex Garden of Earthly Delights are covered as well as his stunning line drawings, such as The Wood Has Ears, The Field Has Eyes.

In this beautifully illustrated overview, Renee Worringer provides a clear and comprehensive account of the longevity, pragmatism, and flexibility of the Ottoman Empire in governing over vast territories and diverse peoples. A Short History of the Ottoman Empire uses clear headings, themes, text boxes, primary source translations, and maps to assist students in understanding the Empire's complex history.

Visual Translation breaks new ground in the study of French manuscripts, contributing to the fields of French humanism, textual translation, and the reception of the classical tradition in the first half of the fifteenth century. While the prominence and quality of illustrations in French manuscripts have attracted attention, their images have rarely been studied systematically as components of humanist translation. Anne D. Hedeman fills this gap by studying the humanist book production closely supervised by Laurent de Premierfait and Jean Lebegue for courtly Parisian audiences in the first half of the fifteenth century. Hedeman explores how visual translation works in a series of unusually densely illuminated manuscripts associated with Laurent and Lebegue circa 1404-54. These manuscripts cover both Latin texts, such as Statius's Thebiad and Achilleid, Terence's Comedies, and Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline and Jurguthine War, and French translations of Cicero's De senectute, Boccaccio's De casibus virorum illustrium and Decameron, and Bruni's De bello Punico primo. Illuminations constitute a significant part of these manuscripts' textual apparatus, which helped shape access to and interpretation of the texts for a French audience. Hedeman considers them as a group and reveals Laurent's and Lebegue's growing understanding of visual rhetoric and its ability to visually translate texts originating in a culture removed in time or geography for medieval readers who sought to understand them. The book discusses what happens when the visual cycles so carefully devised in collaboration with libraries and artists by Laurent and Lebegue escaped their control in a process of normalization. With over 180 color images, this major reference book will appeal to students and scholars of French, comparative literature, art history, history of the book, and translation studies.

Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illuminates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800. While not encyclopedic, the selected topics greatly advance our sense of this trade picture. Throughout the book, multi-part trade structures are excavated; the presence of European powers within the Asian trade nexus features as part of this narrative. Visual goods are highlighted, including lacquerwares, paintings, prints, musical instruments, textiles, ivory sculptures, unfired ceramic portrait figurines, and Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian ceramic vessels. These essays underscore the significance of Asian industries producing multiples, and the rhetorical charge of these goods, shifting in meaning as they move. Everyday commodities are treated as well; for example, the trans-Pacific trade in contraband mercury, used in silver refinement, is spelled out in detail. Building reverberations between merchant networks, trade goods, and the look of the objects themselves, this richly-illustrated book brings to light the Asian trade engine powering the early modern visual cultures of East and Southeast Asia, the American colonies, and Europe.

This collection of essays offers a comparative perspective on religious materiality across the early modern world. Setting out from the premise that artefacts can provide material evidence of the nature of early modern religious practices and beliefs, the volume tests and challenges conventional narratives of change based on textual sources. Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World brings together scholars of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic and Buddhist practices from a range of fields, including history, art history, museum curatorship and social anthropology. The result is an unprecedented account of the wealth and diversity of devotional objects and environments, with a strong emphasis on cultural encounters, connections and exchanges.

Offers an exhaustive account of this unique human, artistic and intellectual adventure through a comprehensive and up-to-date art historical analysis of Leonardo's work. Accompanied by spectacular illustrations. In the Quattrocento, an era when the representation of the human figure was dominated by timeless images based on Botticelli's example, Leonardo worked with light and colour to achieve a modelling that would restore three-dimensionality to the face and soften the rigours of perspective in a misty landscape, no longer a mere backdrop but a vivid pictorial transposition of careful scientific studies and refined psychological analyses. In Leonardo's pictures, it is the changing atmospheric conditions that complement and breathe life into the delicate rendering of the forms and the emotional experiences of the subjects. Thus the artist created powerfully expressive religious pictures and secular portraits that have a modern and disquieting quality in which the faces are true 'windows of the soul', highlighting a silent psychological dialogue between the painting's subject and the observer. Artistic innovations are sustained by a new sensitivity, as well as by study of the refraction of colour, to which much space is dedicated in the Florentine master's theoretical writings. The present book offers an exhaustive account of this unique human, artistic, and intellectual adventure through a comprehensive and up-to-date art historical analysis of Leonardo's work accompanied by spectacular illustrations.

The Darnley jewel, a masterpiece of the goldsmith's art on display at Edinburgh's Holyrood Palace, has been deemed a love token, but has also been labelled an emblem of political ambition. Taking the shape of a heart, the jewel was produced at a moment (1565-75) when such objects worn by courtiers were a primary means of asserting status and proclaiming allegiances. With a deep medieval history - originally the fleshly power centre of the human body, the seat of the soul, and place of memory and emotion - the heart has many aspects to offer. This book shows how the understanding of the heart changed during the Middle Ages, from spiritual locus of the body, to source of devotion to country, and finally, to the font of love and sentimentality.