Lomazzo's Aesthetic Principles Reflected in the Art of his Time explores the work of the Milanese artist-theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-92) and his influence on the circle of the Accademia della Val di Blenio and beyond. Following reflections on Lomazzo's fortuna critica, the accompanying essays examine his admiration of Gaudenzio Ferrari; Lomazzo's painted oeuvre; his influence on printmaking with Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla; on drawing and painting with Aurelio Luini; on the decorative arts and the embroideress Caterina Cantoni; his pupils Giovanni Ambrogio Figino and Girolamo Ciocca; grotesque sculpture outside Milan; and Lomazzo in England with Richard Haydocke's translation of the Trattato. In doing so, this book takes an innovative approach-one which aims to bridge the scholarship, hitherto disjoined, between Lomazzo the artist and Lomazzo the theorist-while expanding our knowledge of a protagonist of Renaissance and early modern art theory. Contributors: Alessia Alberti, Federico Cavalieri, Jean Julia Chai, Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Alexander Marr, Silvia Mausoli, Mauro Pavesi, Rossana Sacchi, Paolo Sanvito, and Lucia Tantardini.

What makes this book different from so many others about Leonardo da Vinci? In these 100 pages, Catherine has worked hard to make it interesting for those who may yet know nothing about him, but also for those who already know quite a bit It is written in a family-friendly way, with stories and details that appeal to a wide range of ages -- from kids through adults. Here Leonardo is placed in a framework of history and geography, so that his vast accomplishments can more easily be seen and understood. Catherine includes maps, pictures, charts, timelines, and more, to bring the ultimate Renaissance man to life You may also enjoy Catherine's historical fiction books about Leonardo da Vinci - The Life and Travels of Da Vinci. She has currently finished the first three novels in the series: Leonardo the Florentine, Leonardo: Masterpieces in Milan, and Leonardo: To Mantua and Beyond.

The Hieroglyphenkunde by Karl Giehlow published in 1915, described variously by critics as "a masterpiece", "magnificent", "monumental" and "incomparable", is here translated into English for the first time. Giehlow's work with an initial focus on the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, the manuscript of which was discovered by Giehlow, was a pioneering attempt to introduce the thesis that Egyptian hieroglyphics had a fundamental influence on the Italian literature of allegory and symbolism and beyond that on the evolution of all Renaissance art. The present edition includes the illustrations of Albrecht Durer from the Pirckheimer translation of the Horapollo from the early fifteenth century.

Leonardo Da Vinci is considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived, responsible for the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Madonna of the Carnation and Vitruvian Man. Leonardo was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer, and this captivating book provides the reader with a unique insight into the life and work of one of history's most intriguing figures. All of Leonardo Da Vinci's work is presented in this compact volume - from his paintings and frescos, to detailed reproductions of his remarkable encrypted notebooks. As well as featuring each individual artwork, sections of each are shown in isolation to reveal incredible details - for example, the different levels of perspective between the background sections of the Mona Lisa, and the disembodied hand in The Last Supper. 640 pages of colour artworks and photographs of Da Vinci's original notebooks, accompanied by fascinating biographical and historical details are here.

Michelangelo in the New Millennium presents six paired studies in dialogue with each other that offer new ways of looking at Michelangelo's art as a series of social, creative, and emotional exchanges where artistic intention remains flexible; probe deeper into the artist's formal borrowing and how it affects meaning regarding his early religious works; and consider the making and significance of his late papal painting projects commissioned by Paul III and Paul IV for chapels at the Vatican Palace. Contributors are: William E. Wallace, Joost Keizer, Eric R. Hupe, Emily Fenichel, Jonathan Kline, Erin Sutherland Minter, Margaret Kuntz, Tamara Smithers and Marcia B. Hall

The growth of princely states in early Renaissance Italy brought a thorough renewal to the old seats of power. One of the most conspicuous outcomes of this process was the building or rebuilding of new court palaces, erected as prestigious residences in accord with the new 'classical' principles of Renaissance architecture. The novelties, however, went far beyond architectural forms: they involved the reorganisation of courtly interiors and their functions, new uses for the buildings, and the relationship between the palaces and their surroundings. The whole urban setting was affected by these processes, and therefore the social, residential and political customs of its inhabitants. This is the focus of A Renaissance Architecture of Power, which aims to analyse from a comparative perspective the evolution of Italian court palaces in the Renaissance in their entirety. Contributors are Silvia Beltramo, Flavia Cantatore, Bianca de Divitiis, Emanuela Ferretti, Marco Folin, Giulio Girondi, Andrea Longhi, Marco Rosario Nobile, Aurora Scotti, Elena Svalduz, and Stefano Zaggia.

Humanism is usually thought to come to England in the early sixteenth century. In this book, however, Daniel Wakelin uncovers the almost unknown influences of humanism on English literature in the preceding hundred years. He considers the humanist influences on the reception of some of Chaucer's work and on the work of important authors such as Lydgate, Bokenham, Caxton, and Medwall, and in many anonymous or forgotten translations, political treatises, and documents from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. At the heart of his study is a consideration of William Worcester, the fifteenth-century scholar.
Wakelin can trace the influence of humanism much earlier than was thought, because he examines evidence in manuscripts and early printed books of the English study and imitation of antiquity, in polemical marginalia on classical works, and in the ways in which people copied and shared classical works and translations. He also examines how various English works were shaped by such reading habits and, in turn, how those English works reshaped the reading habits of the wider community. Humanism thus, contrary to recent strictures against it, appears not as 'top-down' dissemination, but as a practical process of give-and-take between writers and readers. Humanism thus also prompts writers to imagine their potential readerships in ways which challenge them to re-imagine the political community and the intellectual freedom of the reader. Our views both of the fifteenth century and of humanist literature in English are transformed.

A fascinating collection of writings from the great polymath of the Italian Renaissaince, Leonardo da Vinci. There are sections covering the great man's thoughts on life, art and science. Maurice Baring trawled the available manuscripts to distil da Vinci's writings on these subjects into a single, accessible tome, which will be of interest to students of da Vinci, the Renaissance and the history of both art and science.

In Florentine Patricians and Their Networks, Elisa Goudriaan presents the first comprehensive overview of the cultural world and diplomatic strategies of Florentine patricians in the seventeenth century and the ways in which they contributed as a group to the court culture of the Medici. The author focuses on the patricians' musical, theatrical, literary, and artistic pursuits, and uses these to show how politics, social life, and cultural activities tended to merge in early modern society. Quotations from many archival sources, mainly correspondence, make this book a lively reading experience and offer a new perspective on seventeenth-century Florentine society by revealing the mechanisms behind elite patronage networks, cultural input, recruiting processes, and brokerage activities.

Illuminating Leonardo opens the new series Leonardo Studies with a tribute to Professor Carlo Pedretti, the most important Leonardo scholar of our time, with a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship from the most renowned Leonardo scholars and young researchers. Though no single book could provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of Leonardo studies, after reading this collection of short essays cover-to-cover, the reader will come away knowing a great deal about the current state of the field in many areas of research. To begin the series, editors Constance Moffatt and Sara Taglialagamba present an impressive group of essays that offer fresh ideas as a departure point for future studies. Contributors include Andrea Bernardoni, Pascal Broist, Alfredo Buccaro, Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Claire Farago, Francesca Fiorani, Fabio Frosini, Sabine Frommel, Leslie Geddes, Damiano Iacobone, Martin Kemp, Matthew Landrus, Domenico Laurenza, Pietro C. Marani, Max Marmor, Constance Moffatt, Romano Nanni, Annalisa Perissa-Torrini, Paola Salvi, Richard Schofield, Sara Taglialagamba, Carlo Vecce, Alessandro Vezzosi, Marino Vigano, and Joanna Woods-Marsden.

Raphael's "St. George and the Dragon" is the work of a genius -- an exquisitely rendered vision of heroism and innocence by one of the greatest painters of all time. Yet the painting's creation is only the beginning of its fascinating story, which spans centuries of power play and intrigue, and has made it a witness to the rise and fall of the great powers of the Western world as it seduced its owners to ever greater heights of corruption and greed.

Raphael's masterpiece was commissioned by Duke Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, the ruler of Urbino, in 1506. Raphael was only twenty-three years old, but he had already begun to acquire a reputation as a painter who was as ruthless in his pursuit of money as he was talented. The duke sent the painting to England's King Henry VII as a thank-you for naming him a knight in the Order of the Garter.

The painting then mysteriously disappeared for one hundred years until King Charles I saw it hanging in the collection of the Earl of Pembroke and acquired it for a book of Holbein drawings. After Charles was beheaded in 1649, his collection was broken up and the painting made its way to the private gallery of the third-richest man in France, where it was ensconced in its own special room. Thirty years later, the philosopher Diderot was instructed by Catherine the Great of Russia to buy it for her vast collection at the Hermitage.

The heroic curators of the Hermitage protected "St. George and the Dragon" from fire, water, and the anarchists of the Russian Revolution, until Joseph Stalin sold it in 1930 to raise cash. The secret buyer was Andrew Mellon, Treasury Secretary of the United States, who in doing so blatantly violated a U.S. sanction against doing any business with Soviet Russia. Mellon eventually founded The National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where "St. George and the Dragon" rests to this day.

Exceptionally written and breathlessly paced, "The Dragon's Trail" is a microhistory that touches on the rise of the Tudors, the downfall of a Stuart, the twilight of the French aristocracy, the terrors of the Bolshevik revolution, and the depths of the Cold War -- all witnessed by one painting that inspired the best and the worst instincts in its owners.

A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy will provide readers unfamiliar with Southern Italy with an introduction to different aspects of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history and culture of this vast and significant area of Europe, situated at the centre of the Mediterranean. Commonly regarded as a backward, rural region untouched by the Italian Renaissance, a team of specialists presents a general survey of the most recent research on the centers of southern Italy, as well as insights into the ground-breaking debates on wider themes, such as the definition of the city and continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the effects of dynastic changes from the Angevin and Aragonese Kingdom to the Spanish Viceroyalty. Contributors: Giancarlo Abbamonte, David Abulafia, Guido Cappelli, Chiara De Caprio, Bianca de Divitiis, Fulvio Delle Donne, Teresa D'Urso, Dinko Fabris, Guido Giglioni, Antonietta Iacono, Fulvio Lenzo, Lorenzo Miletti, Francesco Montuori, Pasquale Palmieri, Eleni Sakellariou, Francesco Senatore, Francesco Storti, Pierluigi Terenzi, Carlo Vecce, Giuliana Vitale, and Andrea Zezza.

Seventeenth-century authors so thoroughly imbued the language and imagery of the Bible in vernacular translation that their texts are to be read as attempts to inscribe themselves within the realm of the sacred. This book analyzes how three seventeenth-century English authors fashion themselves as a specific biblical figure, and how they fashion themselves in their works in order to bring their spiritual lives in line with the narrative arch of a biblical type.

Patronage, in its broadest sense, has been established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. This collection examines the role it played in the Italian Renaissance, focusing particularly upon Florence. Traditionally viewed simply as the context for the extraordinary artistic creativity of the Renaissance, patronage has more recently been examined by historians as a comprehensive system of patron-client structures which permeated society and social relations. The scattered research so far done on this broader concept of patronage is drawn together and extended in this new volume, derived from a conference held in Melbourne as part of 'Renaissance Year' in 1983. The essays, by art historians as well as historians, explore our new understanding of Renaissance Italy as a 'patronage society', and consider its implications for the study of art patronage and patron-client structures wherever they occur.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a remarkable knowledge of the science of his era. His poems also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's characterisation of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante's ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which it took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante's acts of seeing. On earth his visual perceptions are conducted according to optical rules, while in heaven the poet's human senses are overwhelmed by light of divine origin, which does not obey his rules of mathematical optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists' striving to portray unseeable brightness. Raphael shows himself to be the greatest master of spiritual radiance, while Correggio works his radiant magic in his dome illusions in Parma Cathedral. When Gaulli evokes the glories of the name of Jesus in the huge vault of the Jesuit Church in Rome he does so with an ineffable light that explodes though encircling clusters of glowing angels, whose pink bodies are bleached by the extreme luminosity of the light source. Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, this hugely original book combines a close reading of Dante's poetry with analysis of early optics and the art of the Renaissance and Baroque to create a fascinating, wide-ranging and visually exciting study.

Francesco di Giorgio Martini is one of the few fifteenth century Sienese artists who became known outside his native city. Working at the courts of Urbino, Naples and Milan, he was a typical Renaissance uomo universale but his major achievements were in military and civil architecture, complemented by the composition of a theoretical treatise. The collection of essays does not offer a comprehensive study of the artist's architectural oeuvre, but rather emphasizes the partial nature of the scholarly endeavor so far undertaken. The essays discuss Francesco's theory, his drawings from the antique, the individual characteristics of his practice, and the reception of his work. They share a common idea: invention, which emerges as a valid theoretical framework, possibly the only one capable of encompassing Francesco di Giorgio's versatile accomplishments.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700. The seventeen essays ask how landscape, construed as the description of place in image and/or text, more than merely inviting close viewing, was often seen to call for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Contributors: Boudewijn Bakker, William M. Barton, Stijn Bussels, Reindert Falkenburg, Margaret Goehring, Andrew Hui, Sarah McPhee, Luke Morgan, Shelley Perlove, Kathleen P. Long, Lukas Reddemann, Denis Ribouillault, Paul J. Smith, Troy Tower, and Michel Weemans.

The contributions include Arnold Victor Coonin, Preface and Acknowledgments; Debra Pincus, "Like a Good Shepherd" A Tribute to Sarah Blake McHam; Amy R. Bloch, Perspective and Narrative in the Jacob and Esau Panel of Lorenzo Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise"; David Boffa, Sculptors' Signatures and the Construction of Identity in the Italian Renaissance; Meghan Callahan, Bronzino, Giambologna & Adriaen de Vries: Influence, Innovation and the "Paragone"; Arnold Victor Coonin, "The Spirit of Water" Reconsidering the "Putto Mictans" Sculpture in Renaissance Florence; Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, From Medalist to Sculptor: Leone Leoni's Bronze Bust of Charles V; Phillip Earenfight, "Civitas Florenti a]e" The New Jerusalem and the "Allegory of Divine Misericordia"; Gabriela Jasin, God's Oddities and Man's Marvels: Two Sculptures of Medici Dwarfs; Linda A. Koch, Medici Continuity, Imperial Tradition and Florentine History: Piero de' Medici's "Tabernacle of the Crucifix" at S. Miniato al Monte; Heather R. Nolin, A New Interpretation of Paolo Veronese's "Saint Barnabas Healing the Sick"; Katherine Poole, Medici Power and Tuscan Unity: The Cavalieri di Santo Stefano and Public Sculpture in Pisa and Livorno under Ferdinando I; Lilian H. Zirpolo, Embellishing the Queen's Residence: Queen Christina of Sweden's Patronage of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Members of His Circle of Sculptors; Sarah Blake McHam's List of Publications. 1st printing. 338 pages. 117 illustrations. Preface, bibliography, index.

This book is centered on the Venetian humanist Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), on his two-year stay in Sicily in 1492-4 to study the ancient Greek language under one of its most distinguished contemporary teachers, the Byzantine emigre Constantine Lascaris, and above all on his ascent of Mount Etna in 1493. The more particular focus of this study is on the imaginative capacities that crucially shape Bembo's elegantly crafted account, in Latin, of his Etna adventure in his so-called De Aetna, published at the Aldine press in Venice in 1496. This work is cast in the form of a dialogue that takes place between the young Bembo and his father Bernardo (himself a prominent Venetian statesman with strong humanist involvements) after Pietro's return to Venice from Sicily in 1494. But De Aetna offers much more than a one-dimensional account of the facts, sights and findings of Pietro's climb. Far more important in the present study is his eye for creative elaboration, or for transforming his literal experience on the mountain into a meditation on his coming-of-age at a remove from the conventional career-path expected of one of his station within the Venetian patriciate. Three mutually informing features that are critical to the artistic originality of De Aetna receive detailed treatment in this study: (i) the stimulus that Pietro drew from the complex history of Mount Etna as treated in the Greco-Roman literary tradition from Pindar onwards; (ii) the striking novelty of De Aetna's status as the first Latin text produced at the nascent Aldine press in the prototype of what modern typography knows as Bembo typeface; and (iii) Pietro's ingenious deployment of Etna as a powerful, multivalent symbol that simultaneously reflects the diverse characterizations of, and the generational differences between, father and son in the course of their dialogical exchanges within De Aetna.