This is a fascinating volume that uses illustrated manuscripts to gain a unique insight into the gardens of the Renaissance. Whether part of a grand villa or an extension of a common kitchen, gardens in the Renaissance were planted and treasured in all reaches of society. Illuminated manuscripts of the period offer a glimpse into how people at the time pictured, used, and enjoyed these idyllic green spaces. Drawn from a wide range of works in the Getty Museum's permanent collection, this gorgeously illustrated volume explores gardens on many levels, from the literary Garden of Love and the biblical Garden of Eden to courtly gardens of the nobility, and reports on the many activities - both reputable and scandalous - that took place there.

The recent rediscovery in Spain of Pieter Bruegel the ElderGCOs lost painting, "The Wine of Saint MartinGCOs Day," has created even more interest in this much-loved artist, who was one of the NetherlandsGCO two great masters of satire and fantasy, along with Hieronymus Bosch. Although these two artists never met each otherGCoBruegel was born around 1525, a decade after BoschGCOs deathGConumerous features link them; indeed, Bruegel painted several demon-infested hellscapes directly inspired by the older master, and he was known in Antwerp as a GCsecond Bosch.GC But Bruegel is most famous for his peasant scenes, often humorous and packed with anecdote, and for his landscapes, which poignantly evoke NatureGCOs changing seasons. His legacy to Netherlandish art was the enduring popularity of both these genres, as well as the artistic dynasty he founded, beginning with his painter sons Pieter the Younger and Jan Brueghel.Critics have often remarked how BruegelGCOs art, so keenly observed and richly detailed, seems to preserve a world in miniature. In this new monograph, Larry Silver, an eminent historian of Northern Renaissance art, serves as our guide to that world. He leads us expertly through BruegelGCOs complex and fascinating iconography, allowing us to see his paintings and drawings from the same perspective as his sixteenth-century countrymen. Silver situates Bruegel within the visual culture of his timeGCoexploring, for example, his relationship with the print publisher Hieronymus CockGCoand within the broader context of Netherlandish history. All of BruegelGCOs surviving paintings are reproduced here, with many full-page details, as well as all of his prints and representative works by his contemporaries and followers.This volume on Bruegel complements SilverGCOs widely praised monograph on Hieronymus Bosch, which was published by Abbeville Press in 2006. These two books are the most authoritative and best-illustrated studies of their respective subjects, and together they present us with a panorama of Netherlandish artGCOs emergence into the distinctive form of the Northern Renaissance.

Gender, Space, and Experience at the Renaissance Court investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. It examines the ceremonial use and artistic reception of the Palazzo Te from the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530 to the Sack of Mantua in 1630. This book further proposes that we conceptualise the built environment as a performative space, a space formed by the gendered relationships and actors of its time. The Palazzo Te was constituted by the gendered behaviors of sixteenth-century courtiers, but it was not simply a passive receptor of gender performance. Through its multivalent form and ceremonial function, Maria F. Maurer argues that the palace was an active participant in the construction and perception of femininity and masculinity in the early modern court.

This book presents a new approach to the relationship between traditional pictorial arts and the theatre in Renaissance England. Demonstrating the range of visual culture in evidence from the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century, from the grandeur of court murals to the cheap amusement of woodcut prints, John H. Astington shows how English drama drew heavily on this imagery to stimulate the imagination of the audience. He analyses the intersection of the theatrical and the visual through such topics as Shakespeare's Roman plays and the contemporary interest in Roman architecture and sculpture; the central myth of Troy and its widely recognised iconography; scriptural drama and biblical illustration; and the emblem of the theatre itself. The book demonstrates how the art that surrounded Shakespeare and his contemporaries had a profound influence on the ways in which theatre was produced and received.

Influenced by a revival of interest in Greco-Roman ideals and sponsored by a newly prosperous merchant class, fifteenth-century artists produced works of astonishingly innovative content and technique. The International Gothic style of painting, still popular at the beginning of the century, was giving way to the influence of Early Netherlandish Flemish masters such as Jan van Eyck, who emphasized narrative and the complex use of light for symbolic meaning. Patrons favored paintings in oil and on wooden panels for works ranging from large, hinged altarpieces to small, increasingly lifelike portraits.
In the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Mantua, artists and architects alike perfected existing techniques and developed new ones. The painter Masaccio mastered linear perspective; the sculptor Donatello produced anatomically correct but idealized figures such as his bronze nude of David; and the brilliant architect and engineer Brunelleschi integrated Gothic and Renaissance elements to build the self-supporting dome of the Florence Cathedral.
This beautifully illustrated guide analyzes the most important people, places, and concepts of this early Renaissance period, whose explosion of creativity was to spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century.

This absorbing book explores the crown jewel of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's collection of rare books and manuscripts: Jean Bourdichon's Boston Hours. As court artist to King Francois I of France, Bourdichon produced paintings, books and even parade floats for the sovereign and his entourage. This publication accompanies the museum's first ever exhibition dedicated to this spectacular illuminated manuscript. Painter to two kings, Jean Bourdichon remains today one of the most celebrated artists of the French Renaissance. By age twenty-four, he was already serving as "peintre du roy," a title which Bourdichon held for the rest of his life. His illustrious career at the French royal court led to a wide range of commissions - from portraits to wall maps to stained glass - but he is remembered principally for astonishing illuminated manuscripts. The peerless Grandes Heures for Queen Anne of Brittany remains the touchstone of this group which includes some of the most lavishly painted books of hours ever produced. One of these masterpieces - Bourdichon's Boston Hours - in the collection of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is the subject of this book. Bourdichon's only intact book of hours in the United States was acquired by Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1890 and became the crown jewel of her collection of rare books and manuscripts. Leading scholars Nicholas Herman and Anne-Marie Eze explore its history in depth, shedding new light on the book's patronage and provenance - from the shelves of a wealthy Catholic landowner in Lincolnshire to the shop of a Venetian art and antiques dealer. This book is the latest in the Gardner's Close Up series, each installment focusing on an individual, outstanding work of art in the collection. This publication is the first dedicated to this rare treasure, and precedes an exhibition opening in summer 2022.

This book examines the multi-media art patronage of three generations of the Tornabuoni family, who commissioned works from innovative artists, such as Sandro Botticelli and Rosso Fiorentino. Best known for commissioning the fresco cycle in Santa Maria Novella by Domenico Ghirlandaio, a key monument of the Florentine Renaissance, the Tornabuoni ordered a number of still-surviving art works, inspired by their commitment to family, knowledge of ancient literature, music, love, loss, and religious devotion. This extensive body of work makes the Tornabuoni a critically important family of early modern art patrons. However, they are further distinguished by the numerous objects they commissioned to honor female relations who served in different family roles, thus deepening understanding of Florentine Renaissance gender relations. Maria DePrano presents a comprehensive picture of how one Florentine family commissioned art to gain recognition in their society, revere God, honor family members, especially women, and memorialize deceased loved ones.

Chronicling the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and journeying from the Piazza San Marco to the villas of the Veneto, this vivid and authoritative survey of architecture, sculpture, and painting offers a rich perspective on the history and artistic achievements of Renaissance Venice. Distinguished scholar Loren Partridge examines the masterpieces of Venice's urban design, civic buildings, churches, and palaces within their distinctive cultural and geographic milieus, exploring issues of function, style, iconography, patronage, and gender. Readers will also discover fascinating in-depth analyses of major works of such artists as Giovanni Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Palladio, Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese. Designed to appeal to students and travelers alike, this essential guide to the art and architecture of Renaissance Venice brings La Serenissima to life as never before.

The National Gallery, London possesses an important collection of paintings by 16th-century Netherlandish artists, including Joachim Beuckelaer, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Jean Gossart, and Quinten Massys. They are grouped here with a small number of French paintings, some by artists who came from the Low Countries (Corneille de Lyon, probably Jean Hey, and perhaps the Master of Saint Giles). Lorne Campbell's catalogue is a model of scholarship; he examined all the pictures with conservators and rigorously researched their histories, subjects, and styles. New discoveries about artists' techniques and practices have led to many reattributions, and the rescue from anonymity of over twenty paintings. The identities of several patrons are established or suggested, while an introductory essay explains how contemporaries regarded these paintings. Generously illustrated, with many details and technical photographs, and beautifully produced, this comprehensive catalogue is essential reading for scholars, while also introducing general readers to a vital part of the Gallery's collection. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

Edited by art historian Noelia Garcia Perez, this first-ever collection of essays on Juana of Austria, the younger daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and sister to Philip II of Spain, offers an interdisciplinary study of the Habsburg princess that addresses her political, religious, and artistic dimensions. The volume's contextual framework shows her sharing agency with other women of her dynastic family who governed in the sixteenth century and developed an outstanding reputation for promoting artists and works of art. The Making of Juana of Austria demonstrates how Juana's role as a leading patron of the arts offered her a means of creating her own image, which she then promulgated through the objects she collected and her crowning architectural endeavor, the Monastery-Palace of the Descalzas Reales. Drawing on early modern literature, archival documents, and artworks, the essays in this volume delineate a new portrait of Juana of Austria. Contributors not only highlight her multiple facets-princess of Portugal, regent of Castile, and the only female Jesuit in history-but also show her as a discerning art patron and collector who pursued an active role of patronage, through which she constructed her own art collection and used it to articulate a visual statement of her lineage, power, and religious convictions. Her role as an art promoter culminated with the foundation of the Descalzas Reales and the works of art she collected and displayed within its walls. The Making of Juana of Austria offers a new perspective on female rule and patronage, exploring the achievements of a crucial figure in the history of art, court, and gender in early modern Europe.

The untold story of how paper revolutionized art making during the Renaissance, exploring how it shaped broader concepts of authorship, memory, and the transmission of ideas over the course of three centuries In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society-not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist's workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became "Europeanized" through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper-as refuse and rags transformed into white surface-informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists' thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.

For four hundred years Caravaggio's (1571-1610) staggering artistic achievements have thrilled viewers, yet his volatile personal trajectory-the murder of Ranuccio Tomasini, the doubt surrounding Caravaggio's sexuality, the chain of events that began with his imprisonment on Malta and ended with his premature death-has long confounded historians. In a bravura performance, Andrew Graham-Dixon delves into the original Italian sources, presenting fresh details about Caravaggio's sex life, his many crimes and public brawls, and the most convincing account yet published of the painter's tragic death at the age of thirty-eight. With illuminating readings of Caravaggio's infamous religious paintings, which often depict prostitutes and poor people, Graham-Dixon immerses readers in the world of Italy at the height of the Counter-Reformation and creates a masterful profile of the mercurial painter's life and work.

This sumptuous catalogue provides an overview of French art circa 1500, a dynamic, transitional period when the country, resurgent after the dislocations of the Hundred Years' War, invaded Italy and all media flourished. What followed was the emergence of a unique art: the fusion of the Italian Renaissance with northern European Gothic styles. Outstanding examples of exquisite and revolutionary works are featured, including paintings, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, tapestries, and metalwork. Exciting new research brings to life court artists Jean Fouquet, Jean Bourdichon, Michel Colombe, Jean Poyer, and Jean Hey (The Master of Moulins), all of whose creations were used by kings and queens to assert power and prestige. Also detailed are the organization of workshops and the development of the influential art market in Paris and patronage in the Loire Valley. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: Grand Palais, Paris (10/06/10-01/10/11) The Art Institute of Chicago (02/27/11-05/30/11)

One of the most influential scholars of the Renaissance, Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) gained fame not only for his literary theory and poetry, but for his incredible collection of art and antiquities. Drawing on anecdotes from Bembo's letters and unpublished archival material, Susan Nalezyty analyzes how Bembo's collection functioned as a source of inspiration for artists like Titian and writers like Giovanni della Casa. As visitors to the collection marveled at the quality and variety of the displayed objects, Bembo encouraged investigations into the ways in which contemporary art compared with ancient objects. Often straddling the line between the visual and literary worlds, these critical discussions catalyzed artistic experiments that led to new modes of creative expression. This generously illustrated volume brings Bembo's collection to life and reveals its key role in the development of Renaissance artistic philosophy and historical study of the classical past.

"Ambitious Form" describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors--Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti--as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked.

Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.

A fifteenth-century Flemish painter who spent most of his life in Bruges, van Eyck was revered for his innovative manipulation of oil paint. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details - allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre.

This volume narrates the life of Raphael, 500 years after his death, and presents the various aspects of the unique artistic experience of the genius. Particular significance is given to Raphael's management of his studio: more than any other artist, in fact, he was able to act as an entrepreneur, organizing and directing an excellent group of collaborators, which could be expanded or contracted in response to requirements. It was a modern organization which was ahead of its time in that it included a kind of marketing. His inventions and ideas were spread thanks to engravings and woodcuts. The life and the main masterpieces of one of the finest artist of the whole history of art. For the first time in a title about Raffaello the reader will find a final chapter dedicated to his carvings, which made him the first artist entrepreneur of history.

How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination. European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet, as Christopher Heuer explains, between 1500 and 1700, one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally "abstract," the far North-a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination-offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a "non-site," spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts-and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art's very legitimacy. In Into the White, Heuer uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates over perception and matter, representation, discovery, and the time of the earth-long before the nineteenth century Romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, he argues, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and impossible to be mastered, something beyond the idea of image itself.

When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions-expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images-and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.

The architecture of the Italian Renaissance, theorized by artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti, influenced styles and trends of the following centuries throughout Europe and beyond. This volume offers a comprehensive compilation of Italian Renaissnace architecture--richly documented, illustrated, arranged by region, and including a glossary.

During the nineteenth century, Albrecht Durer's art, piety, and personal character were held up as models to inspire contemporary artists and-it was hoped-to return Germany to international artistic eminence. In this book, Jeffrey Chipps Smith explores Durer's complex posthumous reception during the great century of museum building in Europe, with a particular focus on the artist's role as a creative and moral exemplar for German artists and museum visitors. In an era when museums were emerging as symbols of civic, regional, and national identity, dozens of new national, princely, and civic museums began to feature portraits of Durer in their elaborate decorative programs embellishing the facades, grand staircases, galleries, and ceremonial spaces. Most of these arose in Germany and Austria, though examples can be seen as far away as St. Petersburg, Stockholm, London, and New York City. Probing the cultural, political, and educational aspirations and rivalries of these museums and their patrons, Smith traces how Durer was painted, sculpted, and prominently placed to accommodate the era's diverse needs and aspirations. He investigates what these portraits can tell us about the rise of a distinct canon of famous Renaissance and Baroque artists-addressing the question of why Durer was so often paired with Raphael, who was considered to embody the greatness of Italian art-and why, with the rise of German nationalism, Hans Holbein the Younger often replaced Raphael as Durer's partner. Accessibly written and comprehensive in scope, this book sheds new light on museum building in the nineteenth century and the rise of art history as a discipline. It will appeal to specialists in nineteenth-century and early modern art, the history of museums and collecting, and art historiography.

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account traces Rosa's strategies of self-promotion, and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject matter - witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic and dark violence - and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime. Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.

The art of the Sistine Chapel, decorated by artists who competed with one another and commissioned by popes who were equally competitive, is a complex fabric of thematic, chronological, and artistic references. Four main campaigns were undertaken to decorate the chapel between 1481 and 1541, and with each new addition, fundamental themes found increasingly concrete expression. One theme in particular plays a central role in the chapel: the legitimization of papal authority, as symbolized by two keys-one silver, one gold-to the kingdom of heaven. "The Sistine Chapel: Paradise in Rome" provides a concise, informative account of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. In unpacking this complex history, Ulrich Pfisterer reveals the remarkable unity of the images in relation to theology, politics, and the intentions of the artists themselves, who included such household names as Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Through a study of the main campaigns to adorn the Sistine Chapel, Pfisterer argues that the art transformed the chapel into a pathway to the kingdom of God, legitimising the absolute authority of the popes. First published in German, the prose comes to life in English in the deft hands of translator David Dollenmayer.

Depicting the Creation of Woman presented a special problem for Renaissance artists. The medieval iconography of Eve rising half-formed from Adam's side was hardly compatible with their commitment to the naturalistic representation of the human figure. At the same time, the story of God constructing the first woman from a rib did not offer the kind of dignified, affective pictorial narrative that artists, patrons, and the public prized. Jack M. Greenstein takes this artistic problem as the point of departure for an iconographic study of this central theme of Christian culture. His book shows how the meaning changed along with the form when Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano, and other Italian sculptors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries revised the traditional composition to accommodate a naturalistically depicted Eve. At stake, Greenstein argues, is the role of the artist and the power of image-making in reshaping Renaissance culture and religious thought.