This new edition of Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Leicester is the most comprehensive scholarly edition of any of Leonardo's manuscripts. It contains a high-quality facsimile reproduction of the Codex, a new transcription and translation, accompanied by a paraphrase in modern language and a page-by-page commentary, and a series of interpretative essays. This important endeavour introduces important new research into the interpretation of the texts and images, on the setting of Leonardo's ideas in the context of ancient and medieval theories, and above all into the notable fortunes of the Codex within the sciences of astronomy, water, and the history of the earth, opening a new field of research into the impact of Leonardo as a scientist after his death.

'The most important art historian of his generation' is how some scholars have described the late Michael Baxandall (1933-2007), Professor of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Baxandall's work had a transformative effect on the study of European Renaissance and eighteenth-century art, and contributed to a complex transition in the aims and methods of art history in general during the 1970s, '80s and '90s. While influential, he was also an especially subtle and independent thinker - occasionally a controversial one - and many of the implications of his work have yet to be fully understood and assimilated. This collection of 10 essays endeavors to assess the nature of Baxandall's achievement, and in particular to address the issue of the challenges it offers to the practice of art history today. This volume provides the most comprehensive assessment of Baxandall's work to date, while drawing upon the archive of Baxandall papers recently deposited at the Cambridge University Library and the Warburg Institute.

Michelangelo was, apart from being a sculptor, architect, and painter of genius, a poet and letter-writer of remarkable accomplishment. George Bull, a distinguished translator of many Italian classics, has brought his skill and experience to bear on translating this new selection of Michelangelo's letters and poetry, as well as the Life, the biography written by Michelangelo's pupil Ascanio Condivi.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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.

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.

It was one of the most concentrated surges of creativity in the history of civilization. Between 1390 and 1537, Florence poured forth an astonishing stream of magnificent artworks. But Florentines did more during this brief period than create masterpieces. As citizens of a fractious republic threatened from below, without, and within, they also were driven to reimagine the political and ethical basis of their world, exploring the meaning and possibilities of liberty, virtue, and beauty. This vibrant era is brought to life in rich detail by noted historian Lawrence Rothfield in The Measure of Man. His highly readable account introduces readers to a city teeming with memorable individuals and audacious risk-takers, capable of producing works of the most serene beauty and acts of the most shocking violence. Rothfield's cast of characters includes book hunters and book burners, devout Christians and assassins, humble pharmacists and arrogant oligarchs, all caught up in a dramatic struggle--a tragic arc running from the cultural heights of republican idealism in the early fifteenth century, through the aesthetic flowerings and civic vicissitudes of the age of the Medici and Savonarola, to the brooding meditations of Machiavelli and Michelangelo over the fate of the dying republic.

Winner of the 2022 Prose Award (Art History & Criticism) from the Association of American Publishers This groundbreaking book seeks to explain why women artists were far more numerous, diverse, and successful in early modern Bologna than elsewhere in Italy. They worked as painters, sculptors, printmakers, and embroiderers; many obtained public commissions and expanded beyond the portrait subjects to which women were traditionally confined. Babette Bohn asks why that was the case in this particular place and at this particular time. Drawing on extensive archival research, Bohn investigates an astonishing sixty-eight women artists, including Elisabetta Sirani and Lavinia Fontana. The book identifies and explores the factors that facilitated their success, including local biographers who celebrated women artists in new ways, an unusually diverse system of artistic patronage that included citizens from all classes, the impact of Bologna’s venerable university, an abundance of women writers, and the frequency of self-portraits and signed paintings by many women artists. In tracing the evolution of Bologna’s female artists from nun-painters to working professionals, Bohn proposes new attributions and interpretations of their works, some of which are reproduced here for the first time. Featuring original methodological models, innovative and historically grounded insights, and new documentation, this book will be a crucial resource for art historians, historians, and women’s studies scholars and students.

The Venetian painter known as Giorgione or "big George" died at a young age in the dreadful plague of 1510, possibly having painted fewer than twenty-five works. But many of these are among the most mysterious and alluring in the history of art. Paintings such as The Three Philosophers and The Tempest remain compellingly elusive, seeming to deny the viewer the possibility of interpreting their meaning. Tom Nichols argues that this visual elusiveness was essential to Giorgione's sensual approach and that ambiguity is the defining quality of his art. Through detailed discussions of all Giorgione's works, Nichols shows that by abandoning the more intellectual tendencies of much Renaissance art, Giorgione made the world and its meanings appear always more inscrutable.

This book recounts the exciting rediscovery of Giorgio Vasari's painting Allegory of Patience, painted in 1551-52 for the Bishop of Arezzo, Vasari's hometown. The painting was conceived in Rome with the aid of Michelangelo, as many surviving letters reveal. The work will be on view to the public at the National Gallery, London, through 2023. The monumental figure of a woman, life-sized, with arms crossed, watches time run down. The passing of time is symbolized in the drops that fall from an antique water clock beside her, gradually wearing away the stone on which she rests her foot. The Bishop of Arezzo regarded patience as the key to his career and achievements, and wished it to be represented in a picture. Vasari consulted his contemporaries and fellow humanists as well as the great sculptor Michelangelo when deciding what form it should take. The image represents more exactly the Latin tag 'diuturna tolerantia' (daily tolerance). The painting quickly became famous in its time and numerous copies were made of it - but not until now has the original emerged. Thanks to letters between those involved, the painting and the process of its creation are richly documented, and in particular provide insights and quotations about picture-making from Michelangelo. The book carries full documentation of the work and its known copies, some of which can be traced to leading patrons in Renaissance Italy. It also examines Vasari's own autograph technique and artistic aims.

This book presents and explores the Waddesdon Bequest, the name given to the Kunstkammer or cabinet collection of Renaissance treasures which was bequeathed to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, MP in 1898. The Bequest is named after Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, a fairy tale French chateau built by Baron Ferdinand from 1874 - 83, where the collection was housed during his lifetime. As a major Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds were the greatest collectors of the nineteenth century, seeking not only the finest craftsmanship in their treasures, but also demonstrating great discernment and a keen sense of historical importance in selecting them. Baron Ferdinand's aim, often working in rivalry with his cousins, was to possess a special room filled with splendid, precious and intricate objects in the tradition of European courts of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. It was understood at the time that a collection of this quality could never be formed again, given the rarity and expense of the pieces, and the problems of faking and forgery of just this kind of material. The book will unlock the history and romance of this glorious collection through its exploration of some of its greatest treasures and the stories they tell. It will introduce makers and patrons, virtuoso craftsmanship, faking and the history of collecting from the late medieval to modern periods, as told through the objects. Treasures discussed will include masterpieces of goldsmiths' work in silver; jewellery; hardstones and engraved rock crystal; astonishing microcarvings in boxwood, painted enamel, ceramic and glass; arms and armour and 'curosities': exotic treasures incorporating ostrich eggs, Seychelles nut, amber or nautilus shell. Scholarly catalogues have appeared for parts of this splendid collection but this book will open up the Bequest for the general reader. By looking at individual objects in detail, and drawing on new photography and research, the book will enable readers to see and understand the objects in a completely different light.

The life and times of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/30-1569) were marked by stark cultural conflict. He witnessed religious wars, the Duke of Alba's brutal rule as governor of the Netherlands, and the palpable effects of the Inquisition. To this day, the Flemish artist remains shrouded in mystery. We know neither where nor exactly when he was born. But while early scholarship emphasized the vernacular character of his painting and graphic work, modern research has attached greater importance to its humanistic content. Starting out as a print designer for publisher Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel produced numerous print series that were distributed throughout Europe. These depicted vices and virtues alongside jolly peasant festivals and sweeping landscape panoramas. He would eventually increasingly turn to painting, working for the cultural elite of Antwerp and Brussels. This monograph is a testament to Bruegel's evolution as an artist, one who bravely confronted the issues of his day all the while proposing new inventions and solutions. Rather than idealizing reality, he addressed the horrors of religious warfare and took a critical stand against the institution of the Church. To this end, he developed his own pictorial language of dissidence, lacing innocuous everyday scenes with subliminal statements in order to escape repercussions. To produce this XXL-sized collection, TASCHEN undertook a comprehensive photographic campaign, capturing all the breadth and splendid detail of Bruegel's oeuvre like never before. The result gathers all 40 paintings, 65 drawings, and 89 engravings in pristine reproductions-each piece a unique witness to both the religious mores and the close-knit folk culture of Bruegel's time. Marking the 450th anniversary of his death and his first ever monographic exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, this volume is the most immersive journey into Bruegel's unique visual universe.

This collection of essays by 26 Renaissance scholars from Europe and the United States represents the outcome of an international conference which took place at The National Museum of Denmark and the castles of Kronborg and Frederiksborg on 28 September 1 October 2006 as part of the Danish Renaissance Festival 2006 ("Renossance 2006"). The agenda of the conference was to reevaluate and re-present art and architecture in the Danish realms during the 16th and early 17th century for an international audience, given the fact that this material has often been left in the blind spot of interest in general surveys of the Renaissance. Moreover, it was essential to integrate the cases presented into recent discourses, aiming at resetting the theoretical or methodological frameworks of the field. Accordingly, the contributions represent different approaches, ranging from more universal issues to close readings of individual problems or monuments with emphasis on examples produced for circles, preferentially the elites, in the former monarchy of Denmark-Norway, yet including to no less extent works of art, agencies and activities related to areas, individuals or parallel initiatives beyond the narrow national frames. From an overall perspective several of the articles thus seek to open for a more European or even Global vision of the periods artistic physiognomy, basically questioning as well the notion of a specific 'Danish Renaissance', anchored in the art historical tradition of the 19th century. The general introduction is followed by 25 essays, arranged in four sections: "Reframing the Frames", "Lutheran Rhetorics", "Catalysts to Change" and "Rex Triumphans: The Unsurpassed