346 in all: Old Testament, St. Jerome, Passion, Life of Virgin, Apocalypse, many others. Introduction by Campbell Dodgson. "...it was in woodcut design that the creative genius of Dürer reached its highest expression...The only available source for many of these works."-Antique Monthly.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.

After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.

Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us.

Italian-born Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (1475-1564) was a tormented, prodigiously talented, and God-fearing Renaissance man. His manifold achievements in painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and engineering combined body, spirit, and God into visionary masterpieces that changed art history forever. Famed biographer Giorgio Vasari considered him the pinnacle of Renaissance achievement. His peers called him simply "Il Divino" ("the divine one"). This book provides the essential introduction to Michelangelo with all the awe-inspiring masterpieces and none of the queues and crowds. With vivid illustration and accessible texts, we explore the artist's extraordinary figuration and celebrated style of terribilita (momentous grandeur), which allowed human and biblical drama to exist in compelling scale and fervor. Through the power hubs of Renaissance Italy, we take in his major commissions and phenomenal capacity for compositional schemes, whether the famous Medici library in Florence, or the extraordinary 500-square-meter ceiling (1508-1512) in the Vatican's Sistine Chapel. From the towering David to the aching grief and faith of The Pieta and the vivid drama of the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment, this is a succinct, dependable reference to a true giant of art history and to some of the most famous artworks in the world. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the "new poetry" of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, urns, mirrors, and relics participate in lyric acts of discovery and self-revelation, reveal memory as contingent and unstable, expose knowledge of the self as deceptive, and show how history intersects with the ideology of empire.

Mary E. Barnard's study argues persuasively that the material culture of early sixteenth-century Europe embedded within Garcilaso's poems offers a key to understanding the interplay between objects and texts that make those works such vibrant inventions.

Taking as axiomatic the concept that artistic output does not simply reflect culture but also shapes it, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection take a holistic approach to the cultural fashioning of sexualities, drawing on visual art, theatre, music, and literature, in sacred and secular contexts. Although there is diversity in disciplinary approach, the interpretations and readings offered in each essay have a historical basis. Approaching the topic from the point of view of both visual and auditory media, this volume paints a comprehensive picture of artists' challenges to erotic boundaries, and contributes to new historicizing thinking on sexualities. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the role played by artistic production-visual arts, literature, theatre and music-in fashioning, policing, and challenging early modern sexual boundaries, and thus help to identify the ways in which the arts contributed to both the disciplining and the exploration of a range of sexualities.

Beginning with a dissertation on Raphael's drawings, Oskar Fischel made it his endeavor, with an ever growing knowledge of Raphael, to arrive at a comprehensive representation, and this he has left behind this book. The illustrations gathered together by him over a period of many years are intended, in the selection here provided, to induce the reader to seek out the works of the artist. The book speaks of Raphael's influential manner on society.

According to Nico Muhly, the Coronation of the Virgin is "a panel of pure theatre and music". Painted in 1358 by the Venetian artist Paolo Veneziano (ca. 1295-1362), the apocryphal story of the Virgin's death is depicted in one of the artist's most thrilling and important works. Paolo Veneziano presents the Virgin and Christ in sumptuous garments and surrounded by a choir of angels playing portable organs, lutes, trumpets, tambourines, and other instruments. The angels symbolize the harmony of the universe; their instruments are the authentic components of a medieval orchestra, accurately depicted and correctly held and played. The decorative sparkle of the surface - with its brilliant, expensive colours, patterned textiles, and lavish gold leaf - reflects the Venetians' love of luxury, a taste that enriches much of 14th- and 15th-century architecture in Venice.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ's post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

Perhaps the most imaginative writer on art in the sixteenth century, Giovan Paolo Lomazzo was also an ambitious painter, well-informed critic, and sarcastic wit: he proved a lively adversary for Vasari, Dolce, and even Aretino. His greatest contribution to the history of art is his special treatment of expression and, in its more mature form, self-expression. The image of the Temple of Painting embodies all his essential thoughts about art. Housing statues of Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Leonardo, Raphael, Mantegna, and Titian--paradigms of style and, for Lomazzo, the seven greatest painters in the world--it guides the novice in the discovery of a unique style that matches his own temperament. Idea of the Temple of Painting (1590), written as a pithy introduction to the encyclopedic Trattato dell'arte della pittura, demonstrates why art is all about expressing an individual style, or maniera. Neither spontaneous nor unconscious, style reflects the rational process of adapting all the elements of painting into a harmonious whole. This treatise also represents a rare historical document. Presiding over an original confraternity of artists and humanists, Lomazzo actively participated in the Milan art scene, which is vividly brought to life by his personal commentaries. This is the first translation of any of his treatises into English.

The relationship between medieval animal symbolism and the iconography of animals in the Renaissance has scarcely been studied. Filling a gap in this significant field of Renaissance culture, in general, and its art, in particular, this book demonstrates the continuity and tenacity of medieval animal interpretations and symbolism, disguised under the veil of genre, religious or mythological narrative and scientific naturalism. An extensive introduction, dealing with relevant medieval and early Renaissance sources, is followed by a series of case studies that illustrate ways in which Renaissance artists revived conventional animal imagery in unprecedented contexts, investing them with new meanings, on a social, political, ethical, religious or psychological level, often by applying exegetical methodology in creating multiple semantic and iconographic levels. Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 2

During the early modern period there was a natural correspondence between how artists might benefit from the knowledge of mathematics and how mathematicians might explore, through advances in the study of visual culture, new areas of enquiry that would uncover the mysteries of the visible world. This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind. The contributors explore the portrayal of mathematical activity and mathematicians as well as their ideas and instruments, how artists displayed their mathematical skills and the choices visual artists made between geometry and arithmetic, as well as Euclid's impact on drawing, artistic practice and theory. These chapters cover a broad geographical area that includes Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. The artists, philosophers and mathematicians whose work is discussed include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, as well as Michelangelo, Galileo, Piero della Francesca, Girard Desargues, William Hogarth, Albrecht Durer, Luca Pacioli and Raphael.

Dwelling on the rich interconnections between parody and festivity in humanist thought and popular culture alike, the essays in this volume delve into the nature and the meanings of festive laughter as it was conceived of in early modern art. The concept of 'carnival' supplies the main thread connecting these essays. Bound as festivity often is to popular culture, not all the topics fit the canons of high art, and some of the art is distinctly low-brow and occasionally ephemeral; themes include grobianism and the grotesque, scatology, popular proverbs with ironic twists, and a wide range of comic reversals, some quite profound. Many hinge on ideas of the world upside down. Though the chapters most often deal with Northern Renaissance and Baroque art, they spill over into other countries, times, and cultures, while maintaining the carnivalesque air suggested by the book's title.

When did drawing become an integral part of architecture? Among several architects and artists who brought about this change during the Renaissance, Francesco di Giorgio Martini's ideas on drawing recorded in his Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (1475-1490) are significant. Francesco suggests that drawing is linked to the architect's imagination and central in conveying images and ideas to others. Starting with the broader edges of Francesco's written work and steadily penetrating into the fantastic world of his drawings, the book examines his singular formulation of the act of drawing and its significance in the context of the Renaissance. The book concludes with speculations on how Francesco's work is relevant to us at the onset of another major shift in architecture caused by the proliferation of digital media.

Using Pieter de Marees' Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602) as her main source material, author Elizabeth Sutton brings to bear approaches from the disciplines of art history and book history to explore the context in which De Marees' account was created. Since variations of the images and text were repeated in other European travel collections and decorated maps, Sutton is able to trace how the framing of text and image shaped the formation of knowledge that continued to be repeated and distilled in later European depictions of Africans. She reads the engravings in De Marees' account as a demonstration of the intertwining domains of the Dutch pictorial tradition, intellectual inquiry, and Dutch mercantilism. At the same time, by analyzing the marketing tactics of the publisher, Cornelis Claesz, this study illuminates how early modern epistemological processes were influenced by the commodification of knowledge. Sutton examines the book's construction and marketing to shed new light on the social milieus that shared interests in ethnography, trade, and travel. Exploring how the images and text function together, Sutton suggests that Dutch visual and intellectual traditions informed readers' choices for translating De Marees' text visually. Through the examination of early modern Dutch print culture, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa expands the boundaries of our understanding of the European imperial enterprise.

In seeing printed reproductions as a form of response to Michelangelo's work, Bernadine Barnes focuses on the choices that printmakers and publishers made as they selected which works would be reproduced and how they would be presented to various audiences. Six essays set the reproductions in historical context, and consider the challenges presented by works in various media and with varying degrees of accessibility, while a seventh considers how published verbal descriptions competed with visual reproductions. Rather than concentrating on the intentions of the artist, Barnes treats the prints as important indicators of the use of, and public reaction to, Michelangelo's works. Emphasizing reception and the construction of history, her approach adds to the growing body of scholarship on print culture in the Renaissance. The volume includes a comprehensive checklist organized by the work reproduced.

Presenting an inventive body of research that explores the connections between urban movements, space, and visual representation, this study offers the first sustained analysis of the vital interrelationship between printed images and urban life in early modern London. The study differs from all other books on early modern British print culture in that it seeks out printed forms that were active in shaping and negotiating the urban milieu-prints that troubled categories of high and low culture, images that emerged when the political became infused with the creative, as well as prints that bear traces of the roles they performed and the ways they were used in the city. It is distinguished by its close and sustained readings of individual prints, from the likes of such artists as Wenceslaus Hollar, Francis Barlow, and William Faithorne; and this visual analysis is complemented with a thorough examination of the dynamics of print production as a commercial exchange that takes place within a wider set of exchanges (of goods, people, ideas and money) across the city and the nation. This study challenges scholars to re-imagine the function of popular prints as a highly responsive form of cultural production, capable not only of 'recording' events, spaces and social actions, but profoundly shaping the way these entities are conceived in the moment and also recast within cultural memory. It offers historians of print culture and British art a sophisticated and innovative model of how to mobilize rigorous archival research in the service of a thoroughly historicized and theorized analysis of visual representation and its relationship to space and social identity.

Representing Renaissance art, c.1500-c.1600 is a study of change and continuity in the iconographies of art and the visual representation of artists during the sixteenth century, especially in Italy and the Netherlands. The issue of how, and how far, artists obtained higher status for their profession during the Renaissance is a key question for the study of the early modern period. This book considers the maintenance of well-established traditions for the visual representation of artists, and also examines the new iconographies that emerged in the sixteenth century. By highlighting art and architecture that artists designed for their personal use, including the decoration of their houses, this study provides insight into the tastes and 'ways of looking' specific to artists. By examining the visual evidence we see the opinions both of artists who expressed their views in literary texts, and additionally those of artists who did not publish their ideas in written form. -- .

Sebastiano del Piombo (c.1485-1547) was a close associate and rival of the central artistic figures of the High Renaissance, notably Michelangelo and Raphael. After the death of Raphael and the departure of Michelangelo from Rome, Sebastiano became the dominant artistic personality in the city. Despite being one of most significant artistic figures of the period, he remains the last artist of major importance in the western canon about whom no recent work has been published in English. In this study, Piers Baker-Bates approaches Sebastiano's career through analysis of the patrons he attracted following his arrival at Rome. The first half of the book concentrates on Sebastiano's network of patrons, predominantly Italian, who had strong factional ties to the Imperial camp; the second half discusses Sebastiano's relationship with his principal Spanish patrons. Sebastiano is a leading example of a transcultural artist in the sixteenth century and his relationship with Spain was fundamental to the development of his career The author investigates the domination of Sebastiano's career by patrons who had geographically different origins, but who were all were members of a wider network of Imperial loyalties. Thus Baker-Bates removes Sebastiano from the shadow of his contemporaries, bringing him to life for the reader as an artistic personality in his own right. Baker-Bates' characterization of the Rome in which Sebastiano made his career differs from previous scholarly accounts, and he describes how Sebastiano was ideally suited to flourish in the environment he depicts. Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome thus re-appraises not only Sebastiano's place in the canon of Renaissance art but, using him as a lens, also the cultural worlds of Early Modern Italy and Spain in which he operated.

This lavishly illustrated book records the high profile restoration of Rembrandt van Rijn's 17th century masterpiece, The Night Watch, one of the world's most famous paintings. Many questions about the creation of this work have been answered by extensive technical studies done in conjunction with the restoration. The popular Dutch TV program The Secret of the Master has documented the restoration of The Night Watch in four episodes, assisted in this by various external specialists. This book, by the producer of that series, reveals the many secrets of this fascinating and important work.

Raphael (1483-1520) was for centuries considered the greatest artist who ever lived. Much of what we know about him comes from this biography, written by the Florentine painter Giorgio Vasari and first published in 1550. Vasari's Lives of the Painters was the first attempt to write a systematic history of Italian art. The Life of Raphael is a key text not only for the appreciation of Raphael's own art - whose development and chronology Vasari describes in detail, together with the spectacular social career of the first painter to be mooted, it was claimed, as a Cardinal - but also for its unprecedented attention to theoretical issues.

First published in 1951 Arnold Hauser's commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced. This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hauser's narrative and serves as a critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.

The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo establishes a fundamental relationship between the Franciscan humility of Archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo and the Roman sacred works of Caravaggio. This is the first book to consider and focus entirely upon these two seemingly anomalous personalities of the Counter-Reformation. The import of Caravaggio's Lombard artistic heritage has long been seen as pivotal to the development of his sacred style, but it was not his only source of inspiration. This book seeks to enlarge the discourse surrounding Caravaggio's style by placing him firmly in the environment of Borromean Milan, a city whose urban fabric was transformed into a metaphorical Via Crucis. This book departs from the prevailing preoccupation - the artist's experience in Rome as fundamental to his formulation of sacred style - and toward his formative years in Borromeo's Milan, where humility reigned supreme. This book is intended for a broad, yet specialized readership interested in Counter-Reformation art and devotion. It serves as a critical text for undergraduate and graduate art history courses on Baroque art, Caravaggio, and Counter-Reformation art.

In 1992, the Comite International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA) held its 28th Congress in re-unified Berlin under the theme Kunstlerischer Austausch - Artistic Exchange. The subject fed a strain of idealism and optimism relating the history of art to the life of our times. Change was palpable to all the participants. A wall that had seemed everlasting had fallen, a cold war that had lasted a lifetime was now history. The shifting borders and a revised sense of periodization inspired new views of the past as well as the present, of art as well as nationhood and society. One generation later, the contributions to Artistic Innovations and Cultural Zones show how art history has responded to our newly broadened vision of the artistic heritage of Europe. In this volume, the previously unquestioned practice of labelling artists with a period and a place is challenged at an empirical as well as a fundamental level. Artistic Innovations and Cultural Zones revisits the constellation of questions posed at CIHA 1992 at a moment when European history is again being rewritten. It offers new art-historical insights for our time on what it means to be a European.

The mid-twentieth century saw a change in paradigms of art history: iconology. The main claim of this novel trend in art history was that renowned Renaissance artists (such as Botticelli, Leonardo, or Michelangelo) created imaginative syntheses between their art and contemporary cosmology, philosophy, theology, and magic. The Neoplatonism in the books by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola became widely acknowledged for its lasting influence on art. It thus became common knowledge that Renaissance artists were not exclusively concerned with problems intrinsic to their work but that their artifacts encompassed a much larger intellectual and cultural horizon. This volume brings together historians concerned with the history of their own discipline - and also those whose research is on the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance itself - with historians from a wide variety of specialist fields, in order to engage with the contested field of iconology. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, Renaissance studies, historiography, philosophy, theology, gender studies, and literature.

When did drawing become an integral part of architecture? Among several architects and artists who brought about this change during the Renaissance, Francesco di Giorgio Martini's ideas on drawing recorded in his Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (1475-1490) are significant. Francesco suggests that drawing is linked to the architect's imagination and central in conveying images and ideas to others. Starting with the broader edges of Francesco's written work and steadily penetrating into the fantastic world of his drawings, the book examines his singular formulation of the act of drawing and its significance in the context of the Renaissance. The book concludes with speculations on how Francesco's work is relevant to us at the onset of another major shift in architecture caused by the proliferation of digital media.