The 16th century bronze plaques from the kingdom of Benin are among the most recognized masterpieces of African art, and yet many details of their commission and installation in the palace in Benin City, Nigeria, are little understood. The Benin Plaques, A 16th Century Imperial Monument is a detailed analysis of a corpus of nearly 850 bronze plaques that were installed in the court of the Benin kingdom at the moment of its greatest political power and geographic reach. By examining European accounts, Benin oral histories, and the physical evidence of the extant plaques, Gunsch is the first to propose an installation pattern for the series.

Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.

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.

Italian painter Caravaggio was recognized by his contemporaries as a dedicated practitioner of il naturalismo and a learned painter. His use of the chiaroscuro technique was skilled and his subject matter, still lifes and genre paintings, was unique. Through detailed analysis of works from Caravaggio's early Roman period, 1594-1602, this study places his art in a humanistic context, making it an expression of ""learned naturalism,"" a procedure committed to a close study of the phenomenal world and corresponding to contemporary ventures into empirical science. The work grounds Caravaggio's artistic techniques in cultural context and situates his subject matter within the interest of his patrons, influential Romans whose tastes reflected current Renaissance interests in humanistic studies, emblematic literature, and classical lore. The end result is to show an artist who was thoroughly grounded in the humanist milieu of his erudite patrons. Sources include writings addressing art's instructive purposes and the classical literary sources commonly manipulated in Caravaggio's time. The work is illustrated with Caravaggio's works as well as related images.

This accessible book demonstrates how ideas influenced and defined graphic design. Lavishly illustrated, it is both a great source of inspiration and a provocative record of some of the best examples of graphic design from the last hundred years. The entries, arranged broadly in chronological order, range from technical (overprinting, rub-on designs, split fountain); to stylistic (swashes on caps, loud typography, and white space); to objects (dust jackets, design handbooks); and methods (paper cut-outs, pixelation).

'Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art - a very important and under-appreciated text.' - Whitney Davis, John Evans Professor of Art History, Northwestern University

'It is no exaggeration to say that more than any other work Hauser's four volumes inspired my interest in art history.' - Alan Wallach, Ralph H Wark Professor of Art History, College of William and Mary

'This work has great value in a contemporary context. I look forward to seeing what Jonathan has done with the introduction, but I cannot think of anyone better suited to the task.' - Johanna Drucker, Professor of Art History, Yale University

Hauser's extraordinary energy and subtlety wave a brilliant synthesis of the interaction between the aesthetic and societal, giving us at one and the same time a wealth of artistic detail and a consistent and fully elaborated exposition of the social process. - Albert Boime, UCLA, author of The Social History of Modern Art, 1750-1989

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.

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?

Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666) was not only the first person to hold the office of Master of the Music to King Charles I, he was also a practising painter, a friend of Rubens, Van Dyck and many other artists of his time, and one of the very first great art collectors and connoisseurs. He is especially remembered for the part he played in acquiring, on behalf of Charles I, the famous collection of paintings belonging to the Gonzaga family of Mantua. Many of these paintings still form an important part of the Royal Collection today. In this book the different strands of Lanier's colourful life are for the first time drawn together and presented in a single compelling narrative.

Although liminality has been studied by scholars of medieval and seventeenth-century art, the role of the threshold motif in Netherlandish art of the late fourteenth, fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- this late medieval/early 'early modern' period -- has been much less fully investigated. Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385-1550) addresses this issue through a focus on key case studies (Sluter's portal of the Chartreuse de Champmol and the calendar pages of the Limbourg Brothers' Tres Riches Heures), and on important formats (altarpieces and illuminated manuscripts). Lynn F. Jacobs examines how the visual thresholds established within Netherlandish paintings, sculptures, and manuscript illuminations become sites where artists could address relations between life and death, aristocrat and peasant, holy and profane, and man and God-and where artists could exploit the "betwixt and between" nature of the threshold to communicate, paradoxically, both connections and divisions between these different states and different worlds. Building on literary and anthropological interpretations of liminality, this book demonstrates how the exploration of boundaries in Netherlandish art infused the works with greater meaning. The book's probing of the -- often ignored --meanings of the threshold motif casts new light on key works of Netherlandish art.

In his own day, Godefridus Schalcken (1643-1706) was an internationally renowned Dutch painter, but little is known about the four years that he spent in London. Using newly discovered documents, this book provides the first comprehensive examination of Schalcken's activities there. The author analyses Schalcken's strategic appropriations of English styles, his attempts to exploit gaps in the art market, and his impact on tastes in London's milieu. Five chapters survey his art during these years, concluding with a critical catalogue of all his London-period work.

In the fifteenth century, the Oblates of Santa Francesca Romana, a fledgling community of religious women in Rome, commissioned an impressive array of artwork for their newly acquired living quarters, the Tor de'Specchi. The imagery focused overwhelmingly on the sensual, corporeal nature of contemporary spirituality, populating the walls of the monastery with a highly naturalistic assortment of earthly, divine, and demonic figures. This book draws on art history, anthropology, and gender studies to explore the disciplinary and didactic role of the images, as well as their relationship to important papal projects at the Vatican.

Reviewers of a recent exhibition termed Federico Barocci (ca. 1533-1612), 'the greatest artist you've never heard of'. One of the first original iconographers of the Counter Reformation, Barocci was a remarkably inventive religious painter and draftsman, and the first Italian artist to incorporate extensive color into his drawings. The purpose of this volume is to offer new insights into Barocci's work and to accord this artist, the dates of whose career fall between the traditional Renaissance and Baroque periods, the critical attention he deserves. Employing a range of methodologies, the essays include new ideas on Barocci's masterpiece, the Entombment of Christ; fresh thinking about his use of color in his drawings and innovative design methods; insights into his approach to the nude; revelations on a key early patron; a consideration of the reasons behind some of his most original iconography; an analysis of his unusual approach to the marketing of his pictures; an exploration of some little-known aspects of his early production, such as his reliance on Italian majolica and contemporary sculpture in developing his compositions; and an examination of a key Barocci document, the post mortem inventory of his studio. A translated transcription of the inventory is included as an appendix.

This title was first published in 2001: Paolo Veronese: Piety and Display in an Age of Religious Reform examines the large body of religious paintings with which Veronese (1528 -1588) played a crucial role in shaping Venetian piety. With 117 illustrations (26 in colour) Richard Cocke sets Veronese's work into context, arguing his mastery of narrative has long been neglected, largely as a result of Sir Joshua Reynolds's criticism in his Discourses. The new expressiveness of Veronese's work in his final decade is linked with the decrees of the Council of Trent, which resulted in an enhanced display of paintings in Venetian palaces during the 1570s, matched by the renewed decorative schemes in the city's churches.

In Art as Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena, contributors explore the evolving relationship between image and politics in Siena from the time of the city-state's defeat of Florence at the Battle of Montaperti in 1260 to the end of the Sienese Republic in 1550. Engaging issues of the politicization of art in Sienese painting, sculpture, architecture, and urban design, the volume challenges the still-prevalent myth of Siena's cultural and artistic conservatism after the mid fourteenth century. Clearly establishing uniquely Sienese artistic agendas and vocabulary, these essays broaden our understanding of the intersection of art, politics, and religion in Siena by revisiting its medieval origins and exploring its continuing role in the Renaissance.

Dedicated to the topics of eroticism and sexuality in the visual production of the medieval and early modern Muslim world, this volume sheds light on the diverse socio-cultural milieus of erotic images, on the range of motivations that determined their production, and on the responses generated by their circulation. The articles revise what has been accepted as a truism in existing literature-that erotic motifs in the Islamic visual arts should be read metaphorically-offering, as an alternative, rigorous contextual and cultural analyses. Among the subjects discussed are male and female figures as sexualized objects; the spiritual dimensions of eroticism; licit versus illicit sexual practices; and the exotic and erotic 'others' as a source of sensual delight. As the first systematic study on these themes in the field of Islamic art history, this volume fills a considerable gap and contributes to the lively debates on the nature and function of erotic and sexual images that have featured prominently in broader art-historical discussions in recent decades.

As this collection of essays makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of Caravaggio's art are multiple and variable. Art historians from the UK and North America offer new or recently updated interpretations of the works of seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and of his many followers known as the Caravaggisti. The volume deals with all the major aspects of Caravaggio's paintings: technique, creative process, religious context, innovations in pictorial genre and narrative, market strategies, biography, patronage, reception, and new hermeneutical trends. The concluding section tackles the essential question of Caravaggio's legacy and the production of his followers-not only in terms of style but from some highly innovative strategies: concettismo; art marketing and the price of pictures; self-fashioning and biography; and the concept of emulation.

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters"Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem"this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands examines the later images by Bruegel in the context of two contemporary discourses - art theoretical and convivial. The first concerns the purely visual interactions between artists and artistic practices that unfold in pictures, which often transgress the categorical boundaries modern scholars place on their work, such as sacred and profane, antique and modern, and Italian and Northern. In this context, the images themselves - those of Bruegel, his contemporaries and predecessors - make up the primary source material from which the author argues. The second deals with the dialogue that occurred between viewers in front of pictures and the way in which pictorial strategies facilitated their visual experience and challenged their analytical capabilities. In this regard, the author expands his base of primary sources to include convivial texts, dialogues and correspondences, and texts by rhetoricians and Northern humanists addressing art theoretical issues. Challenging the conventional wisdom that the artist eschewed Italianate influences, this study demonstrates how Bruegel's later peasant paintings reveal a complicated artistic dialogue in which visual concepts and pictorial motifs from Italian and classical ideas are employed for a subject that was increasingly recognized in the sixteenth century as a specifically Northern phenomenon. Similar to the Dutch rhetorician societies and French Pleiade poets who cultivated the vernacular language using classical Latin, the function of this interpictorial discourse, the author argues, was not simply to imitate international trends, a common practice during the period, but to use it to cultivate his own visual vernacular language. Although the focus is primarily on Bruegel's later work, the author's conclusions are applied to sketch a broader understanding of both the artist himself and the vibrant artistic dialogue occurring in the Netherl

A social history of reception, this study focuses on sacred art and Catholicism in Rome during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The five altarpieces examined here were painted by artists who are admired today - Caravaggio, Guercino, and Guido Reni - and by the less renowned but once influential Tommaso Laureti and Andrea Commodi. By shifting attention from artistic intentionality to reception, Pamela Jones reintegrates these altarpieces into the urban fabric of early modern Rome, allowing us to see the five paintings anew through the eyes of their original audiences, both women and men, rich and poor, pious and impious. Because Italian churchmen relied, after the Council of Trent, on public altarpieces more than any other type of contemporary painting in their attempts to reform and inspire Catholic society, it is on altarpieces that Pamela Jones centers her inquiry. Through detailed study of evidence in many genres - including not only painting, prints, and art criticism, but also cheap pamphlets, drama, sermons, devotional tracts, rules of religious orders, pilgrimages, rituals, diaries, and letters - Jones shows how various beholders made meaning of the altarpieces in their aesthetic, devotional, social, and charitable dimensions. This study presents early modern Catholicism and its art in an entirely new light by addressing the responses of members of all social classes - not just elites - to art created for the public. It also provides a more accurate view of the range of religious ideas that circulated in early modern Rome by bringing to bear both officially sanctioned religious art and literature and unauthorized but widely disseminated cheap pamphlets and prints that were published without the mandatory religious permission. On this basis, Jones helps to illuminate further the insurmountable problems churchmen faced when attempting to channel the power of sacred art to elicit orthodox responses.

A significant contribution to the understanding of sixteenth-century English art in an historical context, this study by Susan James represents an intensive rethinking and restructuring of the Tudor art world based on a broad, detailed survey of women's diverse creative roles within that world. Through an extensive analysis of original documents, James examines and clarifies many of the misperceptions upon which modern discussions of Tudor art are based. The new evidence she lays out allows for a fresh investigation of the economics of art production, particularly in the images of Elizabeth I; of strategies for influencing political situations by carefully planned programs of portraiture; of the seminal importance of extended clans of immigrant Flemish artists and of careers of artists Susanna Horenboult and Lievine Teerlinc and their impact on the development of the portrait miniature. Drawn principally from primary sources, this book presents important new research which examines the contributions of Tudor women in the formation, distribution and popularization of the visual arts, particularly portraiture and the portrait miniature. James highlights the involvement of women as patrons, consumers and creators of art in sixteenth-century England and their use of the painted image as a statement of cultural worth. She explores and analyzes the amount of time, money, effort and ingenuity which women across all social classes invested in the development of art, in the uses they found for it, and the surprising and unexpected ways in which they exploited it.

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.

Exploring the rich variety of pictorial rhetoric in early modern northern European genre images, this volume deepens our understanding of genre's place in early modern visual culture. From 1500 to 1700, artists in northern Europe pioneered the category of pictures now known as genre, portrayals of people in ostensibly quotidian situations. Critical approaches to genre images have moved past the antiquated notion that they portray uncomplicated 'slices of life,' describing them instead as heavily encoded pictorial essays, laden with symbols that only the most erudite contemporary viewers and modern iconographers could fully comprehend. These essays challenge that limiting binary, revealing a more expansive array of accessible meanings in genre's deft grafting of everyday scenarios with a rich complex of experiential, cultural, political, and religious references. Authors deploy a variety of approaches to detail genre's multivalent relations to older, more established pictorial and literary categories, the interplay between the meaning of the everyday and its translation into images, and the multifaceted concerns genre addressed for its rapidly expanding, unprecedentedly diverse audience.

Focusing on the ways his art and persona were valued and criticized by writers, collectors, and artists subsequent to his death, this book examines the reception of the works of Albrecht Durer. Andrea Bubenik's analysis highlights the intensive and international interest in Durer's art and personality, and his developing role as a paragon in art historiography, in conjunction with the proliferation of portraits after his likeness. The author traces carefully how Durer's paintings, prints, drawings and theoretical writings traveled widely, and were appropriated into new contexts and charged with different meanings. Drawing on inventories and correspondences and taking collecting practices into account, Bubenik establishes who owned what by Durer in the 16th and 17th centuries, and characterizes the key locations where interest in Durer peaked (especially the courts of Maximilian I in Munich, and Rudolf II in Prague). Bubenik treats the emergent artistic appropriations of Durer-borrowings from or transformations of his originals-in conjunction with contemporary sources on art theory. The volume includes illustrations of numerous imitative works after Durer. As well as being the first book to fully address the early reception of the most important of German Renaissance artists, Reframing Albrecht Durer shows how appropriation is a crucial concept for understanding artistic practice during the early modern period.

Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways"both positive and negative"was quickly realized.