Henry VIII had extravagant ideas of image and authority and loved his possessions. He owned over 2000 pieces of tapestry and 2028 items of gold and silver plate. This work is not only a catalogue, but also a source of information for the study of Tudor society. In its listings the inventory provides information about Henry's personal and declining health problems, for example his bandages for ulcers are listed.;The original inventory is in two parts: one in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries and the other in the Harley Collection of the British Library. Volume one is a transcription of the inventory itself. The second and third volumes include explanatory essays by experts together with illustrations. In addition, the authors provide evaluations of the objects in monetary and social terms.

This volume examines works of art in a variety of media produced in Florence during the period from 1300 to 1600. Chronologically organized, each chapter examines works of art and architecture within the context of the major political, social, economic, and cultural events of the period. Patterns of patronage, both secular and religious, that accompanied changes in political authority as power shifted from Republican regimes to rule by the Medici family and back are also assessed. The volume follows the movements and trends that were initiated by Florentine artists beginning with Giotto in the fourteenth century; then followed a century later by Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Michelangelo; and finally the achievements of sixteenth-century artists such as Cellini, Bronzino, and Vasari. The book is lavishly illustrated in both black and white and color.

In a major analysis of pictorial forms from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Christopher Braider argues that the painted image provides a metaphor and model for all other modes of expression in Western culture--particularly literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Because critics have conventionally explained visual images in terms of verbal texts (Scripture, heroic poetry, and myth), they have undervalued the impact of the pictorial naturalism practiced by painters from the fifteenth century onward and the fundamentally new conception of reality it conveys. By reinterpreting modern Western experience in light of northern "descriptive art," the author enriches our understanding of how both painted and written cultural texts shape our perceptions of the world at large. Throughout Braider draws on works by such painters as van der Weyden, Bruegel the Elder, Steen, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Poussin, and addresses such topics as the Incarnation of the Word in Christ, the elegiac foundations of Enlightenment aesthetics, and the rivalry between northern and southern art. His goal is not only to reexamine important aesthetic issues but also to offer a new perspective on the general intellectual and cultural history of the modern West. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Folly of the Cross is the fourth book in Richard Viladesau's series examining the aesthetics and theology of the cross through Christian history. Previous volumes have brought the story up through the Baroque era. This new book examines the reception of the message of the cross from the European Enlightenment to the turn of the twentieth century. The opening chapters set the stage in the transition from the Baroque to the Classical eras, describing the changing intellectual and cultural paradigms. Viladesau examines the theology of the cross in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the aesthetic mediation of the cross in music and the visual arts. He shows how the aesthetic treatment of the cross widely replaced the dogmatic treatment in the post-Enlightenment era, and how this thought was translated into popular spirituality, piety, and devotion. The Folly of the Cross shows how classical theology responded to the critiques of modern science, history, Biblical scholarship, and philosophy, and how both classical and modern theology served as the occasion for new forms of representation of Christ's passion in the arts and music.

Analyzing convent culture in sixteenth-century Italy through the medium of three unpublished nuns' chronicles, this study examines the nuns' intellectual and imaginative achievements to determine how they preserved individual and convent identities by writing chronicles. The chronicles reveal many examples of the nuns' achievements, especially with regard to cultural creativity, and demonstrate that convent traditions ultimately determined the cultural priorities that dictated convent ceremonial life.

Cambridge University Library's collection of illuminated manuscripts is of international significance. It originates in the medieval university and stands alongside the holdings of the colleges and the Fitzwilliam Museum. The University Library contains major European examples of medieval illumination from the ninth to the sixteenth centuries, with acknowledged masterpieces of Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance book art, as well as illuminated literary texts, including the first complete Chaucer manuscript. This catalogue provides scholars and researchers easy access to the University Library's illuminated manuscripts, evaluating the importance of many of them for the very first time. It contains descriptions of famous manuscripts, for example the Life of Edward the Confessor attributed to Matthew Paris, as well as hundreds of lesser-known items. Beautifully illustrated throughout, the catalogue contains descriptions of individual manuscripts with up-to-date assessments of their style, origins and importance, together with bibliographical references.

"The art historian after Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich is not only participating in an activity of great intellectual excitement; he is raising and exploring issues which lie very much at the centre of psychology, of the sciences and of history itself. Svetlana Alpers's study of 17th-century Dutch painting is a splendid example of this excitement and of the centrality of art history among current disciples. Professor Alpers puts forward a vividly argued thesis. There is, she says, a truly fundamental dichotomy between the art of the Italian Renaissance and that of the Dutch masters. . . . Italian art is the primary expression of a 'textual culture, ' this is to say of a culture which seeks emblematic, allegorical or philosophical meanings in a serious painting. Alberti, Vasari and the many other theoreticians of the Italian Renaissance teach us to 'read' a painting, and to read it in depth so as to elicit and construe its several levels of signification. The world of Dutch art, by the contrast, arises from and enacts a truly 'visual culture.' It serves and energises a system of values in which meaning is not 'read' but 'seen, ' in which new knowledge is visually recorded."--George Steiner, "Sunday Times"
"There is no doubt that thanks to Alpers's highly original book the study of the Dutch masters of the seventeenth century will be thoroughly reformed and rejuvenated. . . . She herself has the verve, the knowledge, and the sensitivity to make us see familiar sights in a new light."--E. H. Gombrich, "New York Review of Books"

Made in gold and enamel and decorated with precious stones, the Holy Thorn Reliquary depicts the salvation of mankind through the sacrifice of Christ. It was commissioned around 1400-10 by Jean, duc de Berry, a member of the French royal family, to house a single thorn from the relic of Christs Crown of Thorns. Having left the dukes possession, it was recorded in Vienna from around 1544 until the 1860s, eventually being acquired by a member of the wealthy Rothschild family, with its true identity remaining undiscovered until the twentieth century. This book explores the meaning and history of this fascinating object, and tells the tale of its remarkable survival and eventual passage to the British Museum.

Around 1505 Goossen Van der Weyden, Rogier's grandson, painted a monumental altarpiece depicting the various phases of Saint Dymphna's insane life. This Irish princess, who fled her incestuous father in the sixth century, was beheaded in the Kempen village of Geel. On account of her tragic end and uncompromising chastity, the princess was venerated from that moment on as the patron saint of the mentally ill. From the late Middle Ages, pilgrims flocked to Geel in large numbers to catch a glimpse of Saint Dymphna. They paid homage to the local celebrity in the hope that she would alleviate their mental problems. To this day, Geel is known for its unique treatment of the mentally ill, who are cared for at home by locals. Goossen Van der Weyden's altarpiece came into being at the height of Dymphna's popularity. The masterpiece was intended for the church of Tongerlo Abbey. Today this work is characterised by a remarkable iconography and an eventful history: a panel was lost and the triptych was even sawn into pieces. It ultimately came into the hands of a team of specialists from Belgium and abroad who subjected the altarpiece to a meticulous conservation over a period of three years, a colossal undertaking during which new techniques were used. This gave the conservators unprecedented insight into the mind, and workshop, of an early 16th century painter. This richly illustrated book is the result of years of research and contains essays by Till-Holger Borchert (Musea Brugge), Stephan Kemperdick (Gemaldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin), Katharina Van Cauteren (The Phoebus Foundation, Antwerp), Lucinda Timmermans (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), Patrick Allegaert (Dr. Guislain Museum, Ghent) and many others.

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.

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.

A New York Times best art book of 2022 Traces the history of lace in fashion from its sixteenth-century origins to the present   Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen offers a look at one of the world’s finest collections of historical lace. It traces the development of European lace from its emergence in the sixteenth century to the present, elucidating its important role in fashion. The book explores the longstanding connections between lace and status, addressing styles in lace worn at royal courts, including Habsburg Spain and Bourbon France, as well as lace worn by the elite ruling classes and Indigenous peoples in the Spanish Americas.   Featuring new research, the publication covers a range of topics related to lace production, lace in fashion and portraiture, lace revivals, the mechanization of the lace industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and contemporary innovations in lace. With a focus on lace techniques, women lace makers, and lace as a signifier of wealth and power, this richly illustrated book includes wide-ranging contributions by curators and experts from major museums and academic institutions.   Distributed for Bard Graduate Center   Exhibition Schedule:   Bard Graduate Center, New York (September 16, 2022–January 1, 2023)

In a major analysis of pictorial forms from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Christopher Braider argues that the painted image provides a metaphor and model for all other modes of expression in Western culture--particularly literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Because critics have conventionally explained visual images in terms of verbal texts (Scripture, heroic poetry, and myth), they have undervalued the impact of the pictorial naturalism practiced by painters from the fifteenth century onward and the fundamentally new conception of reality it conveys. By reinterpreting modern Western experience in light of northern "descriptive art," the author enriches our understanding of how both painted and written cultural texts shape our perceptions of the world at large. Throughout Braider draws on works by such painters as van der Weyden, Bruegel the Elder, Steen, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Poussin, and addresses such topics as the Incarnation of the Word in Christ, the elegiac foundations of Enlightenment aesthetics, and the rivalry between northern and southern art. His goal is not only to reexamine important aesthetic issues but also to offer a new perspective on the general intellectual and cultural history of the modern West. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Alberti wrote De Pictura in Latin in 1435 and in true Renaissance spirit made an Italian translation the following year.

He unfolds his theories step by step. In Book One he explains the process of vision, in Book Two he sets out ‘to instruct the painter how he can present with his hand what he has understood with his mind’. Book Three stipulates the moral and artistic prerequisites of the painter.

The genius of De Pictura surfaced almost immediately – signs are there in Ghiberti’s Baptistery Doors in Florence, in the paintings of Fra Angelico and Domenico Veneziano – and it remains a living classic of art theory.

This edition at last makes widely available Cecil Grayson’s translation from the Latin, the best English version of Alberti’s text. It contains diagrams integrated into the text and an introduction by Martin Kemp which discusses De Pictura in the light of Alberti’s life and philosophy.

Swirling with gargoyles, devils, dragons, griffins, and other images that haunt both dreams and nightmares, this otherworldly assortment features illustrations from a rare 19th-century volume. Images include cartouches, frames, doors, trophies, cabinets, friezes for textiles and wallpaper, decorative scutcheons, stone balustrades, arabesques, roof cornices, and much more.

In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

Why did Hans Memling paint everything in such minute detail? How did Rubens, in just a few brushstrokes, create special effects that Steven Spielberg would envy? And why was the Southern Netherlands the artistic centre of the world for three centuries? From Memling to Rubens: The Golden Age of Flanders tells the story of Flemish art from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, as you've never read it before. It's a rollercoaster ride through 300 years of cultural history. Leading the charge are breathtaking masterpieces from the collection of The Phoebus Foundation, unknown gems by the likes of Hans Memling, Quinten Metsys, Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony Van Dyck that plunge you into a world full of folly and sin, fascination and ambition. Along the way you'll bump into dukes and emperors, rich citizens and poor saints, picture galleries like wine cellars, and Antwerp as Hollywood on the Scheldt. This is a stirring tale about the image and its meaning, and the link between culture and society. Above all, it's about us, and about who we are today - as people. Published on the occasion of the exhibition From Memling to Ruben - The Golden Age of Flanders,during Autumn 2020, in the Kadriorg Palace in Tallinn (Estonia).

"Seldom does a collection of art history essays leave readers yearning for a second volume..."-Barbara Wisch, Renaissance Quarterly Roman church interiors throughout the Early Modern age were endowed with rich historical and visual significance. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in anticipation of and following the Council of Trent, and in response to the expansion of the Roman Curia, the chapel became a singular arena in which wealthy and powerful Roman families, as well as middle-class citizens, had the opportunity to demonstrate their status and role in Roman society. In most cases the chapels were conceived not as isolated spaces, but as part of a more complex system, which involved the nave and the other chapels within the church, in a dialogue among the arts and the patrons of those other spaces. This volume explores this historical and artistic phenomenon through a number of examples involving the patronage of prominent Roman families such as the Chigis, Spadas, Caetanis, Cybos and important artists and architects such as Federico Zuccari, Giacomo della Porta, Carlo Maderno, Alessandro Algardi, Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Maratta.

The first volume to appear in the Natural History series catalogues a group of spectacular drawings of citrus fruit in watercolour and gouache, most of which were commissioned to illustrate Giovanni Battista Ferrari's Hesperides, an ambitious attempt at a complete taxonomy and classification of the entire citrological world, which was published in Rome in 1646. Cassiano dal Pozzo played a fundamental role in this project: it was he who commissioned and supplied most of the drawings and then arranged for them to be engraved for Ferrari's projected work. The citrus drawings - grouped in the Catalogue under the headings of citrons, lemons, oranges, pummelos, hybrids, monstrosities and unidentified citrus fruit - are reproduced in full colour and are accompanied by a wealth of comparative material which includes the Hesperides engravings, additional drawings and photographs of actual specimens, mainly of the monstrous kind. In addition to detailed scientific descriptions of the specimens themselves, the catalogue also gives art historical information on watermarks, annotations, types of mount, provenance and literature. The introductory essays explain Cassiano's method of gathering information from a network of correspondents around Europe and consider the relationship between these drawings and other natural history subjects commissioned by Cassiano. The authors discuss the work of the artists involved in the project and assess the major contribution made the classification of citrus fruit by the collaborative efforts of Cassiano of Ferrari.

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.

How do the formal properties of early modern texts, together with the materials that envelop and shape them, relate to the cultural, political, and social world of their production? Formal matters: Reading the materials of English Renaissance literature answers this question by linking formalist analysis with the insights of book history. It thus represents the new English Renaissance literary historiography tying literary composition to the materials and material practices of writing. The book combines studies of familiar and lesser known texts, from the poems and plays of Shakespeare to jests and printed commonplace books. Its ten studies make important, original contributions to research on the genres of early modern literature, focusing on the involvement of literary forms in the scribal and print cultures of compilation, continuation, translation, and correspondence, as well as in matters of political republicanism and popular piety, among others. Taken together, the collection's essays exemplify how an attention to form and matter can historicise writing without abandoning a literary focus. -- .

First full examination of the medieval livery collar, form, function, and significance. The livery collar had a pervasive presence in late-medieval England. Worn about the neck to denote service to a lord, references to the collar abound in government records, contemporary chronicles and correspondence, and many depictions of the collar can be found in illuminated manuscripts and on church monuments. From the fifteenth century the collar was regarded as a powerful symbol of royal power, the artefact associating the recipient with the king; it also played a significant function in the construction and articulation of political and other group identities during the period. This first book-length study of the livery collar examines its cultural and political significance from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, in particular between 1450 and 1500, the period associated with the Wars of the Roses. It explores the principal meanings bestowed on the collar, considers the item in its various political contexts, and places the collar within the sphere of medieval identity construction. It also investigates the motives which lay behind its distribution, shedding new light on the nature and understanding of royal power at the time.