In The Patron's Payoff, Jonathan Nelson and Richard Zeckhauser apply the innovative methods of information economics to the study of art. Their findings, written in highly accessible prose, are surprising and important. Building on three economic concepts--signaling, signposting, and stretching--the book develops the first systematic methodology for assessing the meaning of art patronage and provides a broad and useful framework for understanding how works of art functioned in Renaissance Italy. The authors discuss how patrons used conspicuous commissions to establish and signal their wealth and status, and the book explores the impact that individual works had on society. The ways in which artists met their patrons' needs for self-promotion dramatically affected the nature and appearance of paintings, sculptures, and buildings. The Patron's Payoff presents a new conceptual structure that allows readers to explore the relationships among the main players in the commissioning game--patrons, artists, and audiences--and to understand how commissioned art transmits information. This book facilitates comparisons of art from different periods and shows the interplay of artists and patrons working to produce mutual benefits subject to an array of limiting factors. The authors engage several art historians to look at what economic models reveal about the material culture of Italy, ca. 1300?1600, and beyond. Their case studies address such topics as private chapels and their decorations, donor portraits, and private palaces. In addition to the authors, the contributors are Molly Bourne, Kelley Helmstutler Di Dio, Thomas J. Loughman, and Larry Silver.

Knight, Death and Devil; Melencolia I, and more-all Dürer's known works in all three media, including 6 works formerly attributed to him. 120 plates.

Innovation, technology, and spectacle combine in wondrous works of decorative art and furniture that embody the splendor and luxury of the royal courts of Europe At once beautiful works of art and technological wonders, the objects featured in Making Marvels demonstrate how European royalty from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment signaled their status through their collections of ingeniously crafted inventions. Featuring 150 exemplary objects ranging from mechanical toys to scientific instruments, timepieces to automata, this groundbreaking study brings to life a glorious period when luxury, a quest for knowledge, scientific invention, and political power combined to produce remarkable works of art. More than frivolous playthings, these works inspired technical innovations that influenced a broad spectrum of activities, including astronomy, engineering, and artisanal craftsmanship. This remarkable volume explores works in a wide range of materials, including precious metals, gemstones, pietra dura, marble, ivory, wood, bone, shell, glass, and paper. The book's compelling essays address the layered historical context in which these objects were fashioned and gathered into cabinets of wonder at courts throughout Europe; elucidate their complex blending of art and science; and provide fascinating details about the patrons who commissioned them and the specialists who made them. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (November 25, 2019-March 1, 2020)

Artists like Botticelli, Holbein, Leonardo, Durer, and Michelangelo and works such as the Last Supper fresco and the monumental marble statue of David, are familiar symbols of the Renaissance. But who were these artists, why did they produce such memorable images, and how would their original beholders have viewed these objects? Was the Renaissance only about great masters and masterpieces, or were women artists and patrons also involved? And what about the "minor" pieces that Renaissance men and women would have encountered in homes, churches and civic spaces? This Very Short Introduction answers such questions by considering both famous and lesser-known artists, patrons, and works of art within the cultural and historical context of Renaissance Europe. The volume provides a broad cultural and historical context for some of the Renaissance's most famous artists and works of art. It also explores forgotten aspects of Renaissance art, such as objects made for the home and women as artists and patrons. Considering Renaissance art produced in both Northern and Southern Europe, rather than focusing on just one region, the book introduces readers to a variety of approaches to the study of Renaissance art, from social history to formal analysis.

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was the greatest artist of the Northern European Renaissance. Durer's virtuoso woodcuts and engravings ensured his fame throughout the Continent during his own lifetime. Yet he also produced an extraordinary output in other media - including painting, watercolour and drawing - which encompasses riveting portraits and self-portraits, grand altarpieces and meticulous studies of animals and nature. In this major new monograph, Jeffrey Chipps Smith examines the myths that have contributed to Durer's legend, considering his life and career within the framework of a tumultuous epoch in European history. Taking account of the extensive scholarship on the artist, Smith provides fresh insights into many of his most notable works, uncovering the creative process behind them and their wealth of meanings and ideas. Central to Smith's focus is the historical and cultural ferment of pre- and post-Reformation Europe, as he traces Durer's formative years in the Imperial free city of Nuremberg and his subsequent travels across Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The result is a vivid picture of the professional activity of a prolific and psychologically complex figure. With its detailed commentary and original research, this is both an authoritive and an approachable monograph - indispensable for the student or scholar, while certain to appeal to anyone interested in this brilliant artist.

This study is the first to examine the relationship between art and violence in 15th-century Florence, exposing the underbelly of a period more often celebrated for enlightened and progressive ideas. Renaissance Florentines were constantly subjected to the sight of violence, whether in carefully staged rituals of execution or images of the suffering inflicted on Christ. There was nothing new in this culture of pain, unlike the aesthetic of violence that developed towards the end of the 15th century. It emerged in the work of artists such as Piero di Cosimo, Bertoldo di Giovanni, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and the young Michelangelo. Inspired by the art of antiquity, they painted, engraved, and sculpted images of deadly battles, ultimately normalizing representations of brutal violence. Drawing on work in social and literary history, as well as art history, Scott Nethersole sheds light on the relationship between these Renaissance images, violence, and ideas of artistic invention and authorship.

This comprehensive, interdisciplinary collection illuminates many previously unexplored aspects of the Basilica of San Lorenzo's history, extending from its Early Christian foundation to the modern era. Brunelleschi's rebuilt Basilica, the center of liturgical patronage of the Medici and their grand-ducal successors until the nineteenth century, is today one of the most frequently studied churches in Florence. Modern research has tended, however, to focus on the remarkable art and architecture from ca. 1400-1600. In this wide-ranging collection, scholars investigate: the urban setting of the church and its parish; San Lorenzo's relations with other ecclesiastical institutions; the genesis of individual major buildings of the complex and their decorations; the clergy, chapels and altars; the chapter's administration and financial structure; lay and clerical patronage; devotional furnishings, music, illuminated liturgical manuscripts, and preaching; as well as the annual or ephemeral festal practices on the site. Each contribution offers a profound exploration of its topic, wide-ranging in its chronological scope. One encounters here fresh archival research, the publication of relevant documents, and critical assessments of the historiography. San Lorenzo is represented in this volume as a living Florentine institution, continually reshaped by complex historical forces.

The Italian sculptor known as Donatello helped to forge a new kind of art - one that defines the Renaissance. His work was progressive, innovative, challenging and even controversial. Using a variety of novel sculptural techniques and perspectives, Donatello depicted human sexuality, violence, spirituality and beauty. But to really understand Donatello one needs to understand a changing world, a transition from Medieval to Renaissance and to an art more personal and part of the modern self. Donatello was not just a man of his times, he helped create the spirit of the times he lived in, and those to come. In this beautifully illustrated book, the first monograph on Donatello for 25 years, A. Victor Coonin describes the full extent of Donatello's revolutionary contribution and shows how his work heralded the emergence of modern art.

How did maps of the distant reaches of the world communicate to the public in an era when exploration of those territories was still ongoing and knowledge about them remained incomplete? And why did Renaissance rulers frequently commission large-scale painted maps of those territories when they knew that they would soon be proven obsolete by newer, more accurate information? The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy addresses these questions by bridging the disciplines of art history and the histories of science, cartography, and geography to closely examine surviving Italian painted maps that were commissioned during a period better known for its printed maps and atlases. Challenging the belief that maps are strictly neutral or technical markers of geographic progress, this well-illustrated study investigates the symbolic and propagandistic dimensions of these painted maps as products of the competitive and ambitious European court culture that produced them.

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.

Giles Knox examines how El Greco, Velaizquez, and Rembrandt, though a disparate group of artists, were connected by a new self-consciousness with respect to artistic tradition. In particular, Knox considers the relationship of these artists to the art of Renaissance Italy, and sets aside nationalist art histories in order to see the period as one of fruitful exchange. Across Europe during the seventeenth century, artists read Italian-inspired writings on art and these texts informed how they contemplated their practice. Knox demonstrates how these three artists engaged dynamically with these writings, incorporating or rejecting the theoretical premises to which they were exposed. Additionally, this study significantly expands our understanding of how paintings can activate the sense of touch. Knox discusses how Velaizquez and Rembrandt, though in quite different ways, sought to conjure for viewers thoughts about touching that resonated directly with the subject matter they depicted.

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.

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 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.

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.

Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, European society confronted rapid monetization, a process that has been examined in depth by economic historians. Less well understood is the development of architecture to meet the needs of a burgeoning mercantile economy in the Late Middle Ages and early modern period. In this volume, Lauren Jacobi explores some of the repercussions of early capitalism through a study of the location and types of spaces that were used for banking and minting in Florence and other mercantile centers in Europe. Examining the historical relationships between banks and religious behavior, she also analyzes how urban geographies and architectural forms reveal moral attitudes toward money during the onset of capitalism. Jacobi's book offers new insights into the spaces and locations where pre-industrial European banking and minting transpired, as well as the impact of religious concerns and financial tools on those sites.

Distant blue hills, soaring trees, vast cloudless skies-the majesty of nature has always had the power to lift the human spirit. For some it evokes a sense of timelessness and wonder. For others it reinforces religious convictions. And for many people today, it raises concerns for the welfare of the planet.During the Renaissance, artists from Italy to Flanders andEngland to Germany depicted nature in their religious art tointensify the spiritual experience of the viewer. Devotionalmanuscripts for personal or communal use-from small-scale prayer books to massive choir books-were filled withsome of the most illusionistic nature studies of this period.Sacred Landscapes, which accompanies an exhibition at theJ. Paul Getty Museum, presents some of the mostimpressive examples of this art, gathering a wide range ofilluminated manuscripts made between 1400 and 1600, aswell as panel paintings, drawings, and decorative arts.Readers will see the influ-ence of such masters as AlbrechtDu rer, Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, and Piero dellaFrancesca and will gain new appreciation for manuscriptilluminators like Simon Bening, Joris Hoefnagel, Vincent Raymond, and the Spitz Master. These artists were innovative in the early development of landscape painting and were revered through-out the early modern period. The authors provide thoughtful examination of works from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

'In this painting of Leonardo's there was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human.' Often called "the first art historian", Vasari writes with delight on the lives of Leonardo and other celebrated Renaissance artists . Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). Vasari's works available in Penguin Classics are Lives of the Artists Volume I and Volume II.

Volume 1 of 2. Lorenzo Ghiberti, sculptor and towering figure of the Renaissance, was the creator of the celebrated Bronze Doors of the Baptistery at Florence, a work that occupied him for twenty years and became known (at Michelangelo's suggestion, according to tradition) as the Doors of Paradise. Here Richard Krautheimer takes what Charles S. Seymour, Jr., describes as "a fascinating journey into the mind, career, and inventiveness of one of the indisputably outstanding sculptors of all the Western tradition." This one-volume edition includes an extensive new preface and bibliography by the author. Richard Krautheimer, Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, currently lives in Rome. He is the author of numerous works, including the Pelican Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture and Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton). Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, 31. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A nucleus of sculptures cast by Andrea di Alessandri, commonly called from his native city, 'Il Bresciano', or from his products, 'Andrea dai bronzi', has been identified over the centuries. His style has been described as having similarities both with the High Renaissance of Sansovino and the Mannerism of Vittoria, the two successive master sculptors of sixteenth-century Venice, though he cast major bronzes for both. Andrea's signed masterpiece is a Paschal Candlestick in bronze, over two metres high and with sixty or more fascinating figures, made for Sansovino's magnificent lost church of Santo Spirito in 1568 and now in Santa Maria della Salute. The author's identification in 1996 of a pair of magnificent Firedogs with sphinx feet (which in 1568 had been recommended to Prince Francesco de'Medici in Florence), and in 2015 of an elaborate figurative bronze Ewer in Verona, have been the culmination of the process of recognition. Archival research has at last revealed the span of Andrea's life as 1524/25-1573, as well as many significant facts about his family and patronage. So the time is ripe for a comprehensive, well-illustrated, book on Il Bresciano, a 'new' and major bronzista in the great tradition of north Italy.

For almost twenty years, new historicism has been a highly controversial and influential force in literary and cultural studies. In "Practicing the New Historicism, " two of its most distinguished practitioners reflect on its surprisingly disparate sources and far-reaching effects.
In lucid and jargon-free prose, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt focus on five central aspects of new historicism: recurrent use of anecdotes, preoccupation with the nature of representations, fascination with the history of the body, sharp focus on neglected details, and skeptical analysis of ideology. Arguing that new historicism has always been more a passionately engaged practice of questioning and analysis than an abstract theory, Gallagher and Greenblatt demonstrate this practice in a series of characteristically dazzling readings of works ranging from paintings by Joos van Gent and Paolo Uccello to "Hamlet" and "Great Expectations."
By juxtaposing analyses of Renaissance and nineteenth-century topics, the authors uncover a number of unexpected contrasts and connections between the two periods. Are aspects of the dispute over the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist detectable in British political economists' hostility to the potato? How does Pip's isolation in "Great Expectations" shed light on Hamlet's doubt?
Offering not only an insider's view of new historicism, but also a lively dialogue between a Renaissance scholar and a Victorianist, "Practicing the New Historicism" is an illuminating and unpredictable performance by two of America's most respected literary scholars.