For women at the early modern courts, clothing and jewellery were essential elements in their political arsenal, enabling them to signal their dynastic value, to promote loyalty to their marital court and to advance political agendas. This is the first collection of essays to examine how elite women in early modern Europe marshalled clothing and jewellery for political ends. With essays encompassing women who traversed courts in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Habsburg Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, the contributions cover a broad range of elite women from different courts and religious backgrounds as well as varying noble ranks.

During the later 15th and in the 16th centuries pictures began to be made without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory. In part, Renaissance art adjusted to the social and economic pressures with an art we may be hard pressed to recognize under that same rubric-an art not so much of perfected nature as simply artless. Granted, the heroic and epic mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and proudly. Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from the Vitruvian ideal. The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice, of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of the present, of attitudes toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of sight
Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as signs of quite personal emotions rather than as subscriptions to publicly vaunted ideologies. Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of them-not even Giorgione's "La tempesta"-is a classic pastoral idyll. The"rosso stile" is to be understood as more comprehensive than that. The issue is not only who is represented, but whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically affirmative art.

The famous Italian artist Raphael's illustrations, drawings and portraits, shown in this book of plates by Oskar Fichnel.

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.

The famous Italian artist Raphael's illustrations, drawings and portraits, shown in this book of plates by Oskar Fichnel.

In this quincentennial year of Holbein's birth, this is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of texts relating to this important Northern European Renaissance artist, with an accompanying historiographic essay on various aspects of Holbein's reception.
The first part of the book, "Some Notes on Reception," contains overviews of texts about specific works such as "The Dead Christ, The Solothurn Madonna, " and "The Meyer Madonna." Other themes addressed include the perception of Holbein's character and his place among other Renaissance masters, his work as a portraitist, his use of illusion, authenticity controversies, and a brief chronicle of Holbein collectors. Previously unaddressed topics include Holbein's influence on later artists, and his impact on fiction, including his influence seen in the works of writers such as Dostoevsky, Henry James and Edith Wharton. This part of the book also contains synopses of the most significant and recent Holbein scholarship. These vignettes constitute a multi-dimensional approach to Holbein reception, sharpened by selected quotations from his critics.
The second part of the book is a comprehensive listing of over 2,500 bibliographic citations for works dealing with Holbein and his oeuvre, each accompanied by an annotation outlining the authors' principal contributions. The range of material covered includes not only books and scholarly journals but also newspapers and other popular publications. Individual sections include texts dealing with primary sources, monographs, compendia, and exhibition catalogues. Others are devoted to texts about Holbein's paintings, drawings and prints, as well as to iconography, technical studies, patronage, collections, influences on Holbein, and Holbein reception. General Index. Author Index.

An outstanding piece of interdisciplinary scholarship, "The Body Emblazoned" is a study of the Renaissance culture of dissection which informed intellectual inquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. Though the dazzling displays in Renaissance art and literature of the "exterior" of the body have long been a subject of enquiry, Jonathan Sawday considers in detail the "interior" of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture.
Sawday links the frequently illicit activities of the great anatomists of the period, to whose labors we are indebted for so much of our understanding of the structure and operation of the human body, to a wider cultural discourse which embraces not only the great moments of Renaissance art, but the very foundation of a modern idea of knowledge. Illustrated with thirty-two black and white prints, "The Body Emblazoned" re-assesses modern understanding not only of the literature and culture of the Renaissance, but of the modern organization of knowledge which is now so familiar that it is only rarely questioned.

For too long, the 'centre' of the Renaissance has been considered to be Rome and the art produced in, or inspired by it. This collection of essays dedicated to Deborah Howard brings together an impressive group of internationally recognised scholars of art and architecture to showcase both the diversity within and the porosity between the 'centre' and 'periphery' in Renaissance art. Without abandoning Rome, but together with other centres of art production, the essays both shift their focus away from conventional categories and bring together recent trends in Renaissance studies, notably a focus on cultural contact, material culture and historiography. They explore the material mechanisms for the transmission and evolution of ideas, artistic training and networks, as well as the dynamics of collaboration and exchange between artists, theorists and patrons. The chapters, each with a wealth of groundbreaking research and previously unpublished documentary evidence, as well as innovative methodologies, reinterpret Italian art relating to canonical sites and artists such as Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Sebastiano del Piombo, in addition to showcasing the work of several hitherto neglected architects, painters, and an inimitable engineer-inventor.

The studies in which history of art and theatre are considered together are few, and none to date investigate the evolution of the representation of clouds from the early Renaissance to the Baroque period. This book reconsiders the origin of Italian Renaissance and Baroque cloud compositions while including the theatrical tradition as one of their most important sources. By examining visual sources such as paintings, frescos and stage designs, together with letters, guild-ledgers, descriptions of performances and relevant treatises, a new methodology to approach the development of this early modern visuality is offered. The result is an historical reconstruction where multiple factors are seen as facets of a single process which led to the development of Italy's visual culture. The book also offers new insights into Leonardo da Vinci's theatrical works, Raphael's Disputa, Vasari's Lives, and Pietro da Cortona's fresco paintings. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650 examines the different ways Heaven has been conceived, imagined and represented from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, crossing over into the fields of history, religion and philosophy.

The first book in over twenty-five years devoted solely to allegory and personification in art history, this anthology complements current literary and cultural studies of allegory. The volume re-examines early modern allegorical imagery in light of crucial material, contextual and methodological questions: how are allegories conceived; for whom; and for what purposes? Contributors consider a wide range of allegorical representations in the visual arts and material culture, of both early modern Europe and the colonial "New World" 1400-1800. Essays included here examine paintings, sculpture, prints, architecture and the spaces of public ritual while discussing the process and theory of interpretation, formation of audiences, reception history, appropriation and censorship. A special focus on the medium of the body in visual allegory unites the volume's diverse materials and methods.

The goal of the twelve essays in this volume, contributed by scholars in the fields of history, literature, art history, and medicine, is to enrich our understanding of cultural discourses on ageing in early modern Europe. While a number of books examine old age in other eras, and a few touch on the early modern period, this is the first to focus explicitly on representations of ageing in Europe from 1350-1700. These studies invite the reader to take a closer look at images of ageing; they show that representations are embedded in specific communities, life situations, and structures of power. As well, the book explores how representations of old age function in various and often surprising ways: as repositories of socio-cultural anxieties, as strategies of self-fashioning, and as instruments of ideology capable of disciplining the body and the body politic. Since this book is about how old age as a cultural category was produced and maintained through representation, the essays in this volume are organised thematically across geographic, disciplinary, and media boundaries to foreground the politics and poetics of representational strategies. The contributors to this collection show that our understanding not only of ageing, but also of power, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and the body is enriched by the study of cultural representations of old age. Through sensitive and sophisticated readings of a wide range of sources, these papers collectively demonstrate the formative influence and generative force of images of old age within early modern European culture.

This title was first published in 2002: JArg Breu belonged to the generation of German Renaissance artists that included DA1/4rer, Cranach, GrA1/4newald, Altdorfer, and, in his own city of Augsburg, Hans Burgkmair the Elder. His art registered the early reception of Italian art in Germany and spanned the dramatic years of the Reformation in Augsburg, when the city was riven with social and religious tensions. Uniquely, for a German artist, Breu left a diary chronicling his reaction to the massive social and cultural forces that engulfed him, including his own conversion to the Protestant cause. His story is representative of the condition of many artists during the Reformation years living through this watershed between two cultural eras, which witnessed the transfer of creative energies from religious painting to secular and applied forms of art. In this wide ranging and original study, Andrew Morrall examines the effect of these events on the nature and practice of JArg Breu's art and its reception, not just in his own period, but right up to the present day.

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550 and 1568) is a classic of cultural history. A monumental assembly of artists' lives from Giotto to Michelangelo, it paints a vivid picture of the progress of art in the hands of individual masters. This illustrated standalone edition of Vasari's Life of Raphael offers a new translation of this rich and remarkable 'Life', elegantly rendering Vasari's literary text in modern terms. A work of authoritative skill and precision, the translation preserves Vasari's compelling narrative, while beautifully reproduced illustrations bring it newly to life. Editors Paul Joannides and Rick Scorza bring together the original and expanded Italian editions of 1550 and 1568, with succinct commentary drawing upon their expert knowledge of Raphael's career.

With Italy at its centre, but encompassing the whole of Renaissance Europe, this evocative history challenges some of the popularly-held views on the Renaissance period. In particular, whilst always acknowledging the brilliance and exhuberance of Renaissance culture, Robin Kirkpatrick draws equal attention to the strangeness and often unresolved tensions that lay beneath the surface of that culture.Insisting on a European rather than purely Italian viewpoint, he embraces Renaissance thinking and culture in all its diversity: from Northern thinkers such as Cusanus, Luther and Calvin, to the painting of Van der Weyden and El Greco, and the music of the Flemish musicians, Josquin des Prez and Orlando Lassus. Special attention is also paid to the unique contribution made by Margueritte of Navarre to the development of humanist culture. The book concludes with a study of Shakespeare in which his plays are viewed as a searching critique of some of the main principles of Renaissance culture.

Sigmund Freud was already internationally acclaimed as the principal founder of psychoanalysis when he turned his attention to the life of Leonardo da Vinci. It remained Freud's favourite composition. Compressing many of his insights into a few pages, the result is a fascinating picture of some of Freud's fundamental ideas, including human sexuality, dreams, and repression. It is an equally compelling - and controversial - portrait of Leonardo and the creative forces that according to Freud lie behind some of his great works, including the Mona Lisa. With a new foreword by Maria Walsh.

The studies in which history of art and theatre are considered together are few, and none to date investigate the evolution of the representation of clouds from the early Renaissance to the Baroque period. This book reconsiders the origin of Italian Renaissance and Baroque cloud compositions while including the theatrical tradition as one of their most important sources. By examining visual sources such as paintings, frescos and stage designs, together with letters, guild-ledgers, descriptions of performances and relevant treatises, a new methodology to approach the development of this early modern visuality is offered. The result is an historical reconstruction where multiple factors are seen as facets of a single process which led to the development of Italy's visual culture. The book also offers new insights into Leonardo da Vinci's theatrical works, Raphael's Disputa, Vasari's Lives, and Pietro da Cortona's fresco paintings. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650 examines the different ways Heaven has been conceived, imagined and represented from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, crossing over into the fields of history, religion and philosophy.

Animals were everywhere in the early modern period and they impacted, at least in some way, the lives of every kind of early modern person, from the humblest peasant to the greatest prince. Artists made careers based on depicting them. English gentry impoverished themselves spending money on them. Humanists exercised their scholarship writing about them. Pastors saved souls delivering sermons on them. Nobles forged alliances competing with them. Foreigners and indigenes negotiated with one another through trading them. The nexus between animal-human relationships and early modern identity is illuminated in this volume by the latest research of international scholars working on the history of art, literature, and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, France, England, Spain, and South Africa. Collectively, these essays investigate how animals - horses, dogs, pigs, hogs, fish, cattle, sheep, birds, rhinoceroses, even sea-monsters and other creatures - served people in Europe, England, the Americas, and Africa to defend, contest or transcend the boundaries of early modern identities. Developments in the methodologies employed by scholars to interrogate the past have opened up an intellectual and discursive space for - and a concomitant recognition of - the study of animals as a topic that significantly elucidates past and present histories. Relevant to a considerable array of disciplines, the study of animals also provides a means to surmount traditional disciplinary boundaries through processes of dynamic interchange and cross-fertilization.

Spanning from the inauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.

Emphasizing on the one hand the reconstruction of the material culture of specific residences, and on the other, the way in which particular domestic objects reflect, shape, and mediate family values and relationships within the home, this volume offers a distinct contribution to research on the early modern Italian domestic interior. Though the essays mainly take an art historical approach, the book is interdisciplinary in that it considers the social implications of domestic objects for family members of different genders, age, and rank, as well as for visitors to the home. By adopting a broad chronological framework that encompasses both Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and by expanding the regional scope beyond Florence and Venice to include domestic interiors from less studied centers such as Urbino, Ferrara, and Bologna, this collection offers genuinely new perspectives on the home in early modern Italy.

The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/31-1569) was an astoundingly inventive painter and draftsman, who made his art historical mark with beautiful, evocative landscapes as well as religious subjects, both notable for their vernacular language and attention to everyday, contemporary life. Immersing himself in rural or small-town communities, Bruegel is particularly notable for his depiction of peasant experience and folk culture, earning the artist nickname "Peasant Bruegel." Whether hunters shivering in the snow or a boisterous country fair, Bruegel raised the farming, festivals, gatherings, and games of peasant culture to the status of high art. Bruegel's imposing religious and moral subjects, meanwhile, such as The Triumph of Death and The Tower of Babel are as awestriking and influential today as they were in the 16th century, inspiring contemporary culture from The Lord of the Rings cinematic battle scenes to Don DeLillo's novel Underworld. From the corn harvest to the conversion of Saul, from quaint wedding processions to Christ's road to Calvary, this book brings together the rich range of Bruegel's subjects to introduce his powerful compositions of both biblical and earthly tableaux. 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

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.

Art and science – they may seem like opposites, but throughout history there have been visionaries who have brought together these contrasting subjects. The Art of Science explores the work of 40 such artists and artist-scientists, uncovering how these innovators have designed futuristic technology centuries ahead of its time, investigated time and space through abstract art, and created sculpture informed by NASA technology. An expertly curated selection of artists from many different cultures and eras – including Huang Quan, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer, Anna Atkins, Olafur Eliasson and Anicka Yi – this book tells the story of the vital partnership between art and science, with over 200 lavish illustrations.

Tracing the history of St. Antoninus' cult and burial from the time of his death in 1459 until his remains were moved to their final resting place in 1589, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that the saint's relic cult was a key element of Florence's sacred cityscape. The works of art created in his honor, as well as the rituals practiced at his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century places of burial, advertised Antoninus' saintly power and persona to the people who depended upon his intercessory abilities to negotiate life's challenges. Drawing on a rich variety of contemporary visual, literary, and archival sources, this volume explores the ways in which shifting political, familial, and ecclesiastical aims and agendas shaped the ways in which St. Antoninus' holiness was broadcast to those who visited his burial church. Author Sally Cornelison foregrounds the visual splendor of the St. Antoninus Chapel, which was designed, built, and decorated by Medici court artist Giambologna and his collaborators between 1579 and 1591. Her research sheds new light on the artist, whose secular and mythological sculptures have received far more scholarly attention than his religious works. Cornelison draws on social and religious history, patronage and gender studies, and art historical and anthropological inquiries into the functions and meanings of images, relics, and ritual performance, to interpret how they activated St. Antoninus' burial sites and defined them in ways that held multivalent meanings for a broad audience of viewers and devotees. Among the objects for which she provides visual and contextual analyses are a banner from the saint's first tomb, early printed and painted images, and the sculptures, frescoes, panel paintings, and embroidered textiles made for the present St. Antoninus Chapel.

Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure, as bearers of information on material reality, as mediators between the mind and the outer world, and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy, music and poetry, gardens, food, relics and rituals. Collectively, the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.