A chance discovery provided the author with the key to unlocking the centuries old enigma of Botticelli's Primavera, a masterpiece painted for the private viewing of a Medici. Its pagan figures in a paradisical spring meadow illuminated the cryptic world of the Renaissance pagan revival. Botticelli's allegory emerged to address its personal message to a young Medici. Botticelli's cleverly disguised message for Lorenzo Minore, is to be found on the right side of La Primavera, where Chloris draws Zephyr's attention to it. This book is extremely well researched and beautifully produced with eighty color plates. Lane-Spollen clearly explains the fusion of Christian and pagan imagery which is reflected in La Primavera, placing it in the wider context of Italy's religion and politics. The author employs a readable style which will make this book suitable for those familiar with this period looking for more detail about a beloved painting, and those who are new to the Renaissance and Art History. Lane-Spollen gives a clear overview of why and how Botticelli conveyed his message in disguise. An esteemed circle of scholars around the Medici, disillusioned with a worldly and corrupted medieval Church, searched for a purer, unadulterated Christianity in the pre-Christian foundations of their faith. This was a sensitive occupation in a society where the reach of the Church was present in all matters public and private. In 1460 a manuscript was brought to Cosimo de'Medici. Its author, Hermes, was revered by Augustine and the early Church Fathers. Its revelations on the true nature of Man held the evidence they were seeking and stood in stark contrast to the medieval Church view in which the lowly humble sinner must throw himself on the mercy of the Church for his redemption. The Hermetic corpus which so inspired the Medici circle, saw Man as unique among all species, of unlimited potential and possessing a 'spark of the Divine'. As Burckhardt noted, "it became the breath of life for all the most instructed minds of Europe". For medieval man, it heralded his rebirth, his Renaissance. Expressing this newly discovered 'God-like' being in art stimulated the creative imagination of Renaissance artists like Botticelli, Leonardo, and Raffaello. Lane-Spollen gives a clear overview of why and how Botticelli conveyed his message in code: An esteemed circle of scholars around the Medici, disillusioned with a worldly and corrupted medieval Church, searched for a purer, unadulterated Christianity in the pre-Christian foundations of their faith. This was a dangerous occupation in a society where the reach of the Church was present in all matters public and private. In 1460 a manuscript was brought to Cosimo de'Medici. Its author, Hermes, was revered by Augustine and the early Church Fathers. Its revelations on the true nature of Man held the evidence they were seeking and stood in stark contrast to the teachings of the medieval church and had no place for man as a lowly humble sinner who must throw himself on the mercy of the Church. Neoplatonism and the Hermetic corpus which so inspired the Medici circle, saw Man as unique among all species and possessing a 'spark of the divine'.Though heretical and blasphemous in the extreme, this philosophy had a profound effect and spread rapidly. As Burckhardt noted, 'it became the breath of life for all the most instructed minds of Europe'. Convinced by its impeccable provenance, the Medici circle of philosophers and poets strived to merge the three great but competing religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, into a single religion in harmony with their original pre-Christian foundations. Expressing this newly discovered 'God-like' being in art stimulated the creative imagination of the early Renaissance as artists like Botticelli, Leonardo, Michaelangelo and Raphaello strove to express 'divine' Man's dignity, his innate capability and the profound depths of his potential for greatness.

The self-portrait of Baccio Bandinelli in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, shows the scupltor pointing not to a work of marble or bronze, but to a drawing. Bandinelli was particularly proud of his skills as a draughtsman, and he was prolific in his production of works on paper. This set him apart from contemporaries in his profession; many Renaissance sculptors left us no drawings at all. Accompanying an exhibition at the Gardner Museum, this publication will put Bandinelli's portrait in context by looking at the practice of drawing by scupltors from the Renaissance to the Baroque in Central Italy. A focus of the book will be Bandinelli's own drawings and the development of his practice across his career and his experimentation with different media. Bandinelli's drawings will be compared with those of Michelangelo and Cellini. The broader question considered, however, is when, how, and why scupltors drew. EVery Renaissance sculptor who set out to make a work in metal or stone would first have made a series of preparatory models in wax, clay, and/or stucco. Drawing was not an essential practice for sculptors in teh way it was for painters, and indeed, most surviving sculptors' drawings are not preparatory studies for works they subsequently executed in three dimensions. By comparing bot rough sketches and more finished drawings with related three-dimensional works by the same artists, the importance of drawing for various individual sculptors will be examined. When sculptors did draw, it often indicated something about the artist's training or about his ambitions. Among the most accomplished draftsmen were artists like Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and Cellini, who had come to sculpture by way of goldsmithery, a profession that required profieciency in ornamental design. Artists who soought to become architects, meanwhile - the likes of Michelangelo, Giambologna, and Ammanati - similarly needed to learn to draw, since architects had to provide plans, elevations, and other drawings to assistants and clients and had to imagine the place of individual figures within a larger multi-media ensemble. Certain kinds of projects, moreover - fountains and tombs, for example - required drawings to a degree that others did not. Sections on the Renaissance goldsmith-sculptor and sculptor-architect will allow comparison of the place drawing had in various artists' careers. Beginning with a chapter dedicated to the importance of draftsmanship in the education of sculptors, showing works by Finiguerra, Cellini Bandinelli, and Giambologna, the book will be split up into chapters dealing with the various challenges scupltors faced while drawing objects in the round, reliefs, and architectural structures. A central section will focus on Bandinelli, demonstrating the importance drawing held for him while he was preparing sculptures and as an independent token of his artistry.

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent age This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region's creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel's encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens. Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel's writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.

This volume provides an account of the art and architecture of Venice and the principal cities of the Venetian mainland empire in the Renaissance, from 1450 to1600. Thematically organized, it puts special emphasis on the relationship between art and the political, social, and religious institutions of the Venetian Republic. Major painters such as Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese and of major architects such as Sansovino and Palladio are viewed in the context of the particular needs and ideologies of individual and institutional patrons. Moreover, the distinctive character of Venice as an artistic center is complemented by the discussion of the art produced in the mainland cities of Padua, Treviso, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, and Bergamo, all of which similarly used visual means to assert their own separate identities. An up-to-date account of the art of early modern Venice, with specially commissioned essays by a team of internationally-known scholars is also included.

"Quite simply the most fascinating record of a '[fashion] victim' one could hope for." The Spectator This captivating study reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, it chronicles how style-conscious accountant Matthaus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the 16th century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress - seemingly both ephemeral and trivial - is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and everyday culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of 16th-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.

This book explores the poetics of literary defences of women written by men in late-medieval and early-modern France. It fills an important lacuna in studies of this polemic in imaginative literature by bridging the gap between Christine de Pizan and a later generation of women writers and male, Neo-Platonist writers who have recently all received due critical attention. Whereas male-authored defences composed between 1440 and 1538 have previously been dismissed as "insincere" or "mere intellectual games," Swift formulates reading strategies to overcome such critical stumbling blocks and engage with the particular rhetorical and historical contexts of these works. Edited and as yet unedited texts by Martin Le Franc, Jacques Milet, Pierre Michault, and Jean Bouchet-catalogues of women, allegorical narratives, and debate poems-are brought together and analysed in detail for the first time in order to explore, for example, how such works address the misogynistic spectre of Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose.
The book seeks to understand the contemporary popularity of the case for women (la querelle des femmes) as literary subject matter. It investigates the publication history across this period, from manuscript to print, of Le Franc's Le Champion des dames. Swift further aims to show how these texts hold interest for modern audiences. A nexus of theoretical concerns centred on performance - Judith Butler's gender performativity, Derrida's re-working of Austin's linguistic performativity through spectrality, and dramatic performance - is enlisted to articulate the interpretative engagement expected by querelle writers of their audience. The reading strategies proposed foster a nuanced andenriched perspective on the question of a male author's "sincerity" when writing in defence of women.

England's Helicon is about one of the most important features of early modern gardens: the fountain. It is also a detailed study of works by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson, and of an influential Italian romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Fountains were "strong points" in the iconography and structure of gardens, symbolically loaded and interpretatively dense, soliciting the most active engagement possible from those who encountered them. These qualities are registered and explored in their literary counterparts.
England's Helicon is not a simple motif study of fountains in English Renaissance literature: it is, rather, an investigation of how each might work; of how literary fountains both inform and are informed by real fountains in early modern literature and culture. While its main focus remains the literature of the late sixteenth century, England's Helicon recognizes that intertextuality and influence can be material as well as literary. It demonstrates that the "missing piece" needed to make sense of a passage in a play, a poem, or a prose romance could be a fountain, a conduit, a well, or a reflecting pool, in general or even in a specific, known garden; it also considers portraits, textiles, jewelry, and other artifacts depicting fountains.
Early modern English gardens and fountains are almost all lost, but to approach them through literary texts and objects is often to recover them in new ways. This is the double project that England's Helicon undertakes; in so doing, it offers a new model for the exploration of the interconnectedness of texts, images, objects and landscapes in early modern literature and culture.

This edition prints all three parts of Dante's great poem about the journey of the soul - INFERNO, PURGATORIO and PARADISO - in the recent English translation by Allen Mandelbaum, with an introduction and explanatory notes on each canto by the noted Dante scholar, Peter Armour. This is the only reasonably priced hardback edition of one of the world's greatest masterworks and should prove to be the most accessible for students and general readers alike. It includes Botticelli's glorious and relatively unknown illustrations of THE DIVINE COMEDY, drawn in the 1480s.

An accomplished painter, architect and diplomat, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) is best known for Lives of the Artists, his classic account of the great masters-an extraordinary book that invented the genre of artistic biography, single-handedly established the canon of Italian Renaissance art and founded the cults of Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo that persist to this day. Vasari positioned art as an intellectual pursuit instead of just a technical skill, teaching us to view artists as geniuses and visionaries rather than as simple craftsmen. Immersing readers in the world of the Medici and the popes, Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney show the great works of Western culture taking shape amid the thrilling culture of Renaissance Italy.

Using scientific methods in his investigations of the human body -- the first ever by an artist -- da Vinci was able to produce remarkably accurate depictions of the "ideal" human figure. This exceptional collection reprints 59 of his sketches of the skeleton, skull, upper and lower extremities, human embryos, and other subjects.

Superb reproductions of 44 of Holbein's finest portrait drawings: Sir Thomas Moore, Jane Seymour, the Prince of Wales, Anne Boleyn, dozens more personalities from the court of Henry VIII. 44 black-and-white illustrations. Publisher's Note. Captions.

Early narratives have tended to be critiqued as novels, an approach which misses their distinctive Renaissance realism. Alastair Fowler surveys picturing and perspective from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, drawing analogies between literature and visual art. The book is based on the history of the narrative imagination after single-point perspective. The habit of an older, multipoint perspective long continued, accounting for 'anachronism', discontinuous realism, 'double time-schemes', and depiction of different moments as simultaneous.

The concept of a Northern European 'Renaissance' in the arts, in thought, and in more general culture north of the Alps often evokes the idea of a cultural transplant which was not indigenous to, or rooted in, the society from which it emerged. Classic definitions of the European 'Renaissance' during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries have often seen it as an Italian import of, for example, humanism and classical learning into the Gothic North. There were certainly differences between North and South which have to be addressed, not least in the development of the visual arts. In this book, Malcolm Vale argues for a Northern Renaissance which, while cognisant of Italian developments, had a life of its own, expressed through such innovations as a rediscovery of pictorial space and representational realism, and which displayed strong continuities with the indigenous cultures of northern Europe. But it also contributed new movements and tendencies in thought, the visual arts, literature, religious beliefs and the dissemination of knowledge which often stemmed from, and built upon, those continuities. A Short History of the Renaissance in Northern Europe - while in no way ignoring or diminishing the importance of the Greek and Roman legacy - seeks other sources, and different uses of classical antiquity, for a rather different kind of 'Renaissance' in the North.

In this book, Irina Chernetsky examines how humanists, patrons, and artists promoted Florence as the reincarnation of the great cities of pagan and Christian antiquity - Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The architectural image of an ideal Florence was discussed in chronicles and histories, poetry and prose, and treatises on art and religious sermons. It was also portrayed in paintings, sculpture, and sketches, as well as encoded in buildings erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over time, the concept of an ideal Florence became inseparable from the real city, in both its social and architectural structures. Chernetsky demonstrates how the Renaissance notion of genealogy was applied to Florence, which was considered to be part of a family of illustrious cities of both the past and present. She also explores the concept of the ideal city in its intellectual, political, and aesthetic contexts, while offering new insights into the experience of urban space.

Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed sweeping innovations in the art of sculpture. Sculptors rediscovered new types of images from classical antiquity and invented new ones, devised novel ways to finish surfaces, and pushed the limits of their materials to new expressive extremes. The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy surveys the sculptural production created by a range of artists throughout the peninsula. It offers a comprehensive overview of Italian sculpture during a century of intense creativity and development. Here, nineteen historians of Quattrocento Italian sculpture chart the many competing forces that led makers, patrons, and viewers to invest sculpture with such heightened importance in this time and place. Methodologically wide-ranging, the essays, specially commissioned for this volume, explore the vast range of techniques and media (stone, metal, wood, terracotta, and stucco) used to fashion works of sculpture. They also examine how viewers encountered those objects, discuss varying approaches to narrative, and ponder the increasing contemporary interest in the relationship between sculpture and history.

This monograph is the first title in a new series titled Opera Maestra, specifically focused on the work and itinerary of the artists who made history, from an unprecedented perspective. The series begins with Leonardo da Vinci, captured by the expert Marco Versiero. At the core the analysis is the specific soul, among the thousands of Leonardo's, that Marco Versiero wants to underline: his mirror-soul; namely, Leonardo's eye between Human and Nature. In other words, the eye that allowed the artist to mediate between his favourite dimensions (the human and the natural one), and allowed them to communicate with each other without cancelling themselves, but rather managing to reflect one in the other's light, like in front of a mirror. An essential biographical note introduces the reader to Marco Versiero's pages, enriched with 61 detailed pictures. The pictures, proposing not only a selection of Leonardo's paintings but also of his drawings, enhanced with comprehensive captions, tell the itinerary of the genius from the years of his apprenticeship in Verrocchio's workshop till the days of his maturity.

Raphael's Poetics applies strategies of interpretation implicit in antique poetry to the visual art of the Renaissance, concentrating on Raphael's Roman works and their cultural context. Until recently, scholarly discussion was dominated by the application of Renaissance literary theory to visual arts, obscuring the fact that Renaissance humanists who contributed to literary theory were, in the first instance and almost without exception, poets rather than theorists. To counter the tendency towards theory, the hermeneutic rules implicit in their poetry and thus the poetry itself is brought to the fore by this study as a hermeneutical tool. By focusing on the interaction between the work of art and its public, Rijser offers innovative interpretations of canonical works and important insights into the cultural history of the early modern period. Reconstructing a visual grammar and defining the context in which Raphael's art functioned, this study illuminates contemporary significances that have since been lost.

In 1428, a devastating fire destroyed a schoolhouse in the northern Italian city of Forli, leaving only a woodcut of the Madonna and Child that had been tacked to the classroom wall. The people of Forli carried that print - now known as the Madonna of the Fire - into their cathedral, where two centuries later a new chapel was built to enshrine it. In this book, Lisa Pon considers a cascade of moments in the Madonna of the Fire's cultural biography: when ink was impressed onto paper at a now-unknown date; when that sheet was recognized by Forli's people as miraculous; when it was enshrined in various tabernacles and chapels in the cathedral; when it or one of its copies was - and still is - carried in procession. In doing so, Pon offers an experiment in art historical inquiry that spans more than three centuries of making, remaking, and renewal.

In the early sixteenth century, Albrecht Altdorfer promoted landscape from its traditional role as background to its new place as the focal point of a picture. His paintings, drawings, and etchings appeared almost without warning and mysteriously disappeared from view just as suddenly. In "Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape," Christopher S. Wood shows how Altdorfer transformed what had been the mere setting for sacred and historical figures into a principal venue for stylish draftsmanship and idiosyncratic painterly effects. At the same time, his landscapes offered a densely textured interpretation of that quintessentially German locus--the forest interior. This revised and expanded second edition contains a new introduction, revised bibliography, and fifteen additional illustrations.

The aesthetics of everyday life, as reflected in art museums and galleries throughout the western world, is the result of a profound shift in aesthetic perception that occurred during the Renaissance and Reformation. In this book, William A. Dyrness examines intellectual developments in late Medieval Europe, which turned attention away from a narrow range liturgical art and practices and towards a celebration of God's presence in creation and in history. Though threatened by the human tendency to self-assertion, he shows how a new focus on God's creative and recreative action in the world gave time and history a new seriousness, and engendered a broad spectrum of aesthetic potential. Focusing in particular on the writings of Luther and Calvin, Dyrness demonstrates how the reformers' conceptual and theological frameworks pertaining to the role of the arts influenced the rise of realistic theater, lyric poetry, landscape painting, and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Since 1900, the connections between art and technology with nature have become increasingly inextricable. Through a selection of innovative readings by international scholars, this book presents the first investigation of the intersections between art, technology and nature in post-medieval times. Transdisciplinary in approach, this volume's 14 essays explore art, technology and nature's shifting constellations that are discernible at the micro level and as part of a larger chronological pattern. Included are subjects ranging from Renaissance wooden dolls, science in the Italian art academies, and artisanal epistemologies in the followers of Leonardo, to Surrealism and its precursors in Mannerist grotesques and the Wunderkammer, eighteenth-century plant printing, the climate and its artistic presentations from Constable to Olafur Eliasson, and the hermeneutics of bioart. In their comprehensive introduction, editors Camilla Skovbjerg Paldam and Jacob Wamberg trace the Kantian heritage of radically separating art and technology, and inserting both at a distance to nature, suggesting this was a transient chapter in history. Thus, they argue, the present renegotiation between art, technology and nature is reminiscent of the ancient and medieval periods, in which art and technology were categorized as aspects of a common area of cultivated products and their methods (the Latin ars, the Greek techne), an area moreover supposed to imitate the creative forces of nature.

Luxurious, beautiful, and portable, tapestry was the pre-eminent art form of the Tudor court. Henry VIII amassed an unrivaled collection over the course of his reign, and the author weaves the history of this magnificent collection into the life of its owner with an engaging narrative style. Now largely dispersed or destroyed, Henry's extensive inventory is here reassembled and reveals how, through tapestry, Henry identified himself with historic, religious, and mythological figures, putting England in dialogue-and competition-with the leading courts of Early Modern Europe while promoting his own religious and political agendas at home. Campbell's original account sheds new light on Tudor political and artistic culture and the court's response to Renaissance aesthetic ideals. Sumptuously illustrated with newly commissioned photographs, this stunning re-creation of Europe's greatest tapestry collection challenges the predominantly text-driven histories of the period and offers a fascinating new perspective on the life of Henry VIII. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art