Between 1480 and 1520, a concentration of talented artists, including Bramante, Raphael and Michelangelo, arrived in Rome and produced some of the most enduring works of art ever created. In this study, Ingrid Rowland examines the culture, society, and intellectual norms that generated the High Renaissance. Fueled by a volatile mix of economic development, longing for ancient civilization, and religious ferment, the High Renaissance, Rowland posits, was also a period in which artists sought "new methods for doing new things."

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.

This book breaks new ground by illuminating the key role of verse-writing as a cultural strategy on the part of Italian Renaissance artists. It does so by undertaking a wide-ranging study of poems by painters, sculptors, architects, and goldsmiths who were active in Florence under Cosimo I and Francesco I de' Medici - a milieu in which many practitioners of the visual arts appropriated the literary medium to address issues related to their primary professions. New Apelleses, and New Apollos intervenes in the burgeoning scholarly discourse on the intellectual life of artists in early modern Italy, revealing how poetry often provides fresh insights into art-theoretical debates, patronage questions, workshop cultures, issues of professional identity, and networks of personal relations.

In recent years, art historians have begun to delve into the patronage, production and reception of sculptures-sculptors' workshop practices; practical, aesthetic, and esoteric considerations of material and materiality; and the meanings associated with materials and the makers of sculptures. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors in early modern Italy confronted such challenges as procurement of materials, their costs, shipping and transportation issues, and technical problems of materials, along with the meanings of the usage, hierarchies of materials, and processes of material acquisition and production. Contributors also explore the implications of these facets in terms of the intended and perceived meaning(s) for the viewer, patron, and/or artist. A highlight of the collection is the epilogue, an interview with a contemporary artist of large-scale stone sculpture, which reveals the similar challenges sculptors still encounter today as they procure, manufacture and transport their works.

'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.

Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) put the connoisseurship of Renaissance art on a firm footing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His monument is the library and collection of Italian painting, Islamic miniatures, and Asian art at Villa I Tatti in Florence. The authors in this collection of essays explore the intellectual world in which Berenson was formed and to which he contributed. Some essays consider his friendship with William James and the background of perceptual psychology that underlay his concept of "tactile values." Others examine Berenson's relationships with a variety of cultural figures, ranging from the German-born connoisseur Jean Paul Richter, the German art historian Aby Warburg, the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and the American medievalist Arthur Kingsley Porter to the African-American dance icon Katherine Dunham, as well as with Kenneth Clark, Otto Gutekunst, Archer Huntington, Paul Sachs, and Umberto Morra. Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage makes an important contribution to the rising interest in the historiography of the discipline of art history in the United States and Europe during its formative years.

The Renaissance artist Raphael is known for his extraordinary frescoes, his sublime Madonnas, devotional altarpieces, architectural designs, and his inventive prints and tapestries. It was his use of ancient Roman models - classical sculptures, reliefs and paintings - that formed his much admired classical style, and influenced the styles of many later artists. In Raphael and the Antique Claudia La Malfa gives a full account of Raphael's prodigious career, from central Italy when he was 17 years old, to Perugia, Siena and Florence, where he first met with Leonardo and Michelangelo, to Rome where he became one of the most feted artists of the Renaissance. This book focuses and highlights Raphael's re-invention of classical models, his draughtsmanship and his concept of art, which he pursued and was still striving to perfect at the time of his death aged only 37, in 1520.

Both lauded and criticized for his pictorial eclecticism, the Florentine artist Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo, created some of the most visually striking religious images of the Renaissance. These paintings, which challenged prevailing illusionistic conventions, mark a unique contribution into the complex relationship between artistic innovation and Christian traditions in the first half of the sixteenth century. Pontormo's sacred works are generally interpreted as objects that reflect either pure aesthetic experimentation, or personal and cultural anxiety. Jessica Maratsos, however, argues that Pontormo employed stylistic change deliberately for novel devotional purposes. As a painter, he was interested in the various modes of expression and communication - direct address, tactile evocation, affective incitement - as deployed in a wide spectrum of devotional culture, from sacri monti, to Michelangelo's marble sculptures, to evangelical lectures delivered at the Accademia Fiorentina. Maratsos shows how Pontormo translated these modes in ways that prompt a critical rethinking of Renaissance devotional art.

Over three decades, the painting of Anton Henning (*1964) has been both a challenge and an inspiration. For him, “even more modern” means showing the lasting significance of modernism for the present. The first volume of his large-scale catalogue of works of 2018 was a basic introduction to his work as a painter. “Vol. 2” now offers an unexpected shift of perspective to his in-depth examination of art history from the Renaissance to Romanticism. A rare interview with Anton Henning about his practice and his artistic self-image supplements the extensive picture section. Text in English, German, French, and Japanese.

Few Renaissance Venetians saw the New World with their own eyes. As the print capital of early modern Europe, however, Venice developed a unique relationship to the Americas. Venetian editors, mapmakers, translators, writers, and cosmographers represented the New World at times as a place that the city's mariners had discovered before the Spanish, a world linked to Marco Polo's China, or another version of Venice, especially in the case of Tenochtitlan. Elizabeth Horodowich explores these various and distinctive modes of imagining the New World, including Venetian rhetorics of 'firstness', similitude, othering, comparison, and simultaneity generated through forms of textual and visual pastiche that linked the wider world to the Venetian lagoon. These wide-ranging stances allowed Venetians to argue for their different but equivalent participation in the Age of Encounters. Whereas historians have traditionally focused on the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World, and the Dutch and English mapping of it, they have ignored the wide circulation of Venetian Americana. Horodowich demonstrates how with their printed texts and maps, Venetian newsmongers embraced a fertile tension between the distant and the close. In doing so, they played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America.

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.

The RF 1475-1556 Louvre Album is universally regarded as a corpus of drawings that was executed by the Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini. The album's trajectory prior to coming into the possession of the Bellini family is elucidated in the present book. Based on Norberto Gramaccini's interpretation, it was the Paduan painter Francesco Squarcione who was the mastermind and financier behind the drawings. The preparatory work had actually been delegated to his most gifted pupils, among them Andrea Mantegna, Jacopo Bellinis future son-in-law. The drawing's topics -anatomy, perspective, archeology, mythology, contemporary chronicles, and zoology -were part of the teaching program of an art academy established by Squarcione in the 1440s, famous in its day, which provided crucial impulses for the training of artists in the modern era.

Taking into account the destructive powers of globalization, Making Worlds considers the interconnectedness of the world in the early modern period. This collection examines the interdisciplinary phenomenon of making worlds, with essays from scholars of history, literary studies, theatre and performance, art history, and anthropology. The volume advances questions about the history of globalization by focusing on how the expansion of global transit offered possibilities for interactions that included the testing of local identities through inventive experimentation with new and various forms of culture. Case studies show how the imposition of European economic, religious, political, and military models on other parts of the world unleashed unprecedented forces of invention as institutionalized powers came up against the creativity of peoples, cultural practices, materials, and techniques of making. In doing so, Making Worlds offers an important rethinking of how early globalization inconsistently generated ongoing dynamics of making, unmaking, and remaking worlds.

A beautifully illustrated volume which explores one of the central themes of Christian Art: Christ as the Man of Sorrows, "Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese" draws on works by some of the of the greatest names in Venetian painting including Veronese, Tintoretto, Crivelli, Giambono and the Bassano family. It creates a new and illuminating context for these great masters by considering their work alongside contemporary works in other media, and from other parts of Western Europe, including Tuscany, France, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands.
An essay by Catherine Puglisi and William Barcham explores the origins of the image of Christ as Man of Sorrows and its emergence as a distinct and central devotional image in the religious life of Venice from about 1300. The authors address the questions of who was the Man of Sorrows and why the figure grew significantly in Venice during the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance. Xavier Seubert's essay focuses on the appeal of the Man of Sorrows as an image expressing anguish, which encourages the viewer to identify with suffering, and offers hope for deliverance and redemption.
The main catalogue section presents illuminated manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings and liturgical objects from major American and European collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, the J Paul Getty Center and the National Gallery, London, almost none of which have been linked before through the study of a common artistic theme.

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.