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.

"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 "

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.

Museum visitors today usually see pre-16th-century Italian painted altarpieces exhibited alone, as single paintings. Yet this beautiful catalogue shows that these works were once part of decorative, integrated schemes, and the original experience for viewers of the paintings was significantly different from our own. Focusing on Italian altarpieces from the second half of the 13th century to the very end of the 15th, the book investigates the original functions and locations of altarpieces as well as the circumstances of their dislocations, dismantlings, and reconstructions. Regional variations are also analyzed, and the author examines altarpieces' formal and typological development, taking into account the wealth of related scholarship undertaken in the past thirty years. Published by National Gallery Company / Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London (07/6/11-10/02/11)

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.

The invention of the printing press led to an explosion of cheap printed materials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ballads were no longer confined to the soapbox. Mass communication was now possible. The broadsides pasted on walls and disseminated among the masses, together with the written ballads hawked at street corners, represented the zeitgeist of popular culture in early modern Europe. Frequently designed in 'blackletter' gothic type and accompanied with distinctive woodcut illustrations, this dynamic, lively form encompassed the obsessions and characteristic humour of the times. This beautifully designed book with a foreword by Reece Shearsmith highlights some of the most striking and amusing examples from the British Library's collections and provides brief commentary on the political and social background of the times. Frequent topics of illustration include monsters, witches, criminals, drinking, war and politics.

Materials carried the meaning of early modern art. Transformed and crafted from the matter of nature, art objects were the physical embodiment of both the inherent qualities of materials and the forces of culture that used, refined and produced them. The study of materials offers a new approach to this important period in the history of art, science and culture, linking the close study of painting, sculpture and architecture to much wider categories of the everyday and the exotic. Drawing on new research and models from anthropology, material culture and the history of art, scholars in The matter of art explore topics as diverse as Inka stonework, gold in panel painting, cork platforms for shoes, and the Christian Eucharist. -- .

The monasteries and painted churches of Moldavia stand today as a testament to the rich cultural and spiritual heritage of the Romanian people. As the Romanians living in the historical provinces of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania, which today form modern Romania, struggled to maintain their autonomy against Ottoman expansion, their relative freedom allowed them to express themselves both artistically and culturally. Among their most remarkable creations are the monasteries and painted churches of Moldavia, in northeastern Romania, the subjects of this book. These monuments, unique in the world, reflect a cultural legacy inherited from Byzantium and the Roman Empire. After the fall of Byzantium and the expansion of Ottoman rule throughout the Balkan Peninsula, the Romanian principalities became the most important depository of the Byzantine heritage. It was here that this tradition was preserved, having been passed on to the Romanians of the Middle Ages by their ancestors. From here, this heritage continued to spread throughout Europe and influence European society and culture, creating the historical phenomenon that the great Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga would refer to as "Byzantium after Byzantium." The monasteries and painted churches of Northern Moldavia stand today as true revelations of Byzantium. This full-color album is written and photographed by Alan Ogden, the author of Romania Revisited: On the Trail of English Travellers, 1602-1941 and Fortresses of Faith: A Pictorial History of the Fortified Saxon Churches of Romania, both published by the Center for Romanian Studies. The author provides a comprehensive introduction discussing the art and architecture of the monasteries and painted churches of Northern Moldavia. Each church is then presented separately in words and pictures to reveal its own unique history and artistic beauty. Also included is an introduction to the history of Moldavia and Romanian lands during the Middle Ages by Kurt W. Treptow, a noted specialist on Romanian history and original illustrations by renowned artist, Octavian Ion Penda.

Caterina Vigri (later Saint Catherine of Bologna) was a mystic, writer, teacher and nun-artist. Her first home, Corpus Domini, Ferrara, was a house of semi-religious women that became a Poor Clare convent and model of Franciscan Observant piety. Vigri's intensely spiritual decoration of her breviary, as well as convent altarpieces that formed a visual program of adoration for the Body of Christ, exemplify the Franciscan Observant visual culture. After Vigri's departure, it was transformed by d'Este women patrons, including Isabella da Aragona, Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia. While still preserving Observant ideals, it became a more elite noblewomen's retreat. Grounded in archival research and extant paintings, drawings, prints and art objects from Corpus Domini, this volume explores the art, visual culture, and social history of an early modern Franciscan women's community.

Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 and remained there until his death in 1520, working as painter and architect for popes Julius II and Leo X and for the most prestigious patrons. Here the artist changed his painting style several times, looking at the works of Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo and the vast repertoire of ancient painting and sculpture. In the Eternal City Raphael practised architecture for the first time, designing buildings that reflected the models of Antiquity such as the Pantheon, the descriptions deriving from written sources such as Vitruvius' treaty on architecture, and the examples of modern architects like Donato Bramante. This guide supplies essential and up to date information on all the civil or religious buildings designed or built by Raphael in Rome, and the frescoes and paintings, housed in churches or museums, whether executed in the city or arrived there at a later stage.

In January of 1469, the accounts of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy record a payment to the scribe Nicolas Spierinc for having written "some prayers for my lord." Seven months later, the same account notes a payment to the illuminator Lievin van Lathem for twenty-five miniatures plus borders and decorated initials in the same manuscript. In this seminal study, the late Antoine de Schryver presents an argument that the documents refer to the exquisite prayer book of Charles the Bold now in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Ms. 37)--one of Charles's most splendid commissions, belonging to the greatest era of Netherlandish Burgundian book painting.
De Schryver's in-depth research opens a window onto the careers of the Van Lathem, who served three rulers of the Burgundian Netherlands over forty years, and Nicolas Spierinc, the most inventive and brilliant scribe of Charles's court. This volume reproduces all of the book's miniatures and some of its elegant calligraphic pages.

The Wellby Bequest, received by the Ashmolean Museum in 2013, consists of some 500 precious and exotic objects, mainly from Continental Europe, from the late medieval to the rococo, and is the most remarkable accession of this kind of material to any museum in the UK since the bequest of Ferdinand de Rothschild to the British Museum in 1898 (the Waddesdon Bequest). The collection was assembled by three generations of the Wellby family with an intention that it should reflect the great princely treasure chambers (Kunstkammer) preserved in Dresden, Vienna, Innsbruck, and elsewhere. Many of these objects have never been previously published. This beautiful and accessible book introduces over sixty of the prime pieces from this astonishing addition to the Ashmolean, presenting material of the type incomparably superior to anything in other UK museums outside London. Both authors are specialists in European decorative arts of the Renaissance and later periods.

This book provides a new perspective on Sienese painting after the Black Death, asking how social, religious, and cultural change affect visual imagery and style. Judith Steinhoff demonstrates that Siena's artistic culture of the mid and late fourteenth century was intentionally pluralistic, and not conservative as is often claimed. She shows that Sienese art both before and after the Black Death was the material expression of an artistically sophisticated population that consciously and carefully integrated tradition and change. Promoting both iconographic and stylistic pluralism, Sienese patrons furthered their own goals as well as addressed the culture's changing needs. Steinhoff presents both detailed case studies as well as a broader view of trends in artistic practice and patronage. She offers a new approach to interpreting artistic style in the Trecento, arguing that artists and patrons alike understood the potential of style as a vehicle that conveys specific meanings.

This book examines the art and ritual of flagellant confraternities in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Meeting regularly to beat themselves with whips, members of these confraternities concentrated on the suffering of Christ in the most extreme and committed way, and the images around them provided visual prompts of the Passion and the model suffering body. This study presents new findings related to a variety of artworks including altarpieces, banners, wall paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and paintings for the condemned, many from outside the Florence-Rome-Venice triangle.

Georges de La Tour's haunting depiction of a repentant Mary Magdalen gazing into a mirror by candlelight; Jean Simeon Chardin's perfectly balanced image of a young boy making a house of cards; Jean Honore Fragonard's monumental suite of landscapes showing aristocrats at play in picturesque gardens--these are among the familiar and beloved masterpieces in the National Gallery of Art, which houses one of the most important collections of French old master paintings outside France. This lavishly illustrated book, written by leading scholars and the result of years of research and technical analysis, catalogues nearly one hundred paintings, from works by Francois Clouet in the sixteenth century to paintings by elisabeth Louise Vigee Le Brun in the eighteenth.

French art before the revolution is characterized by an astonishing variety of styles and themes and by a consistently high quality of production, the result of an efficient training system developed by the traditional guilds and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648 by King Louis XIV. The National Gallery collection reflects this quality and diversity, featuring excellent examples by all the leading painters: ideal landscapes by Claude Lorrain and biblical subjects by Nicolas Poussin, two artists who spent most of their careers in Rome; deeply moving religious works by La Tour, Sebastien Bourdon, and Simon Vouet; portraits of the grandest format (Philippe de Champaigne's "Omer Talon") and the most intimate (Nicolas de Largillierre's "Elizabeth Throckmorton"); and familiar scenes of daily life by the Le Nain brothers in the seventeenth century and Chardin in the eighteenth. The Gallery's collection is especially notable for its holdings of eighteenth-century painting, from Jean Antoine Watteau to Hubert Robert, and including marvelous suites of paintings by Francois Boucher and Fragonard. All these works are explored in detailed, readable entries that will appeal as much to the general art lover as to the specialist."

Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low". Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries, intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time. In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social, aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.

"Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy" represents a departure from previous studies, both in its focus on demand and in its emphasis on the history of the material culture of the West. By demonstrating that the roots of modern consumer society can be found in Renaissance Italy, Richard Goldthwaite offers a significant contribution to the growing body of literature on the history of modern consumerism--a movement which he regards as a positive force for the formation of new attitudes about things that is a defining characteristic of modern culture.