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.

The fourteen essays in this collection explore the dominance of patronage in Renaissance politics, religion, theatre, and artistic life. Originally published in 1982. 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.

This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to lore from the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.

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.

Sublime Beauty: Raphael's Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn focuses on one of the artist's most beguiling and enigmatic paintings and the idendity of the mysterious blonde sitter who epitomized his female portraiture during his Florentine period. Two essays by leading specialists in Renaissance art, Linda Wolk-Simon and Mary Shay-Millea, explore the stylistic relationship between this masterpiece and Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, and the link to Petrarch's poetry and popular notions of beauty in Renaissance art. They examine attributions and the painting's distinct iconography, and why, in place of the usual lapdog, the woman holds a unicorn.

Volume 2 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.

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)

Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and reimagining landscape as a mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, the internal and the external. The lens of the "unruly" reveals the latent landscapes that undergirded their conception, the elemental resources that resurfaced from the bowels of the earth, the staged topographies that unsettled the boundaries between nature and technology, and the fragile ecologies that undermined the status quo of human environs. Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature argues for an art history attentive to the vicissitudes of circumstance and attributes the regrounding of representation during a transitional age to the unquiet landscape.

A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy will provide readers unfamiliar with Southern Italy with an introduction to different aspects of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history and culture of this vast and significant area of Europe, situated at the centre of the Mediterranean. Commonly regarded as a backward, rural region untouched by the Italian Renaissance, a team of specialists presents a general survey of the most recent research on the centers of southern Italy, as well as insights into the ground-breaking debates on wider themes, such as the definition of the city and continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the effects of dynastic changes from the Angevin and Aragonese Kingdom to the Spanish Viceroyalty. Contributors: Giancarlo Abbamonte, David Abulafia, Guido Cappelli, Chiara De Caprio, Bianca de Divitiis, Fulvio Delle Donne, Teresa D'Urso, Dinko Fabris, Guido Giglioni, Antonietta Iacono, Fulvio Lenzo, Lorenzo Miletti, Francesco Montuori, Pasquale Palmieri, Eleni Sakellariou, Francesco Senatore, Francesco Storti, Pierluigi Terenzi, Carlo Vecce, Giuliana Vitale, and Andrea Zezza.

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."

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.

Incomparable Realms offers a vision of Spanish culture and society during the Golden Age, the period from 1500 to 1700 when Spain unexpectedly rose to become the dominant European power. But in what ways was this a 'Golden Age', and for whom? The relationship between the Habsburg monarchy and the Church shaped the period, with both constructing narratives to bind Spanish society together. Incomparable Realms unpicks the impact of these on thought and culture, and examines the people and perspectives such powerful projections sought to eradicate. The book shows that the tension between the heavenly and earthly realms, and in particular the struggle between the spiritual and the corporeal, defines Golden Age culture. In art and literature, mystical theology and moral polemic, ideology, doctrine and everyday life, the problematic pull of the body and of the material world is the unacknowledged force behind early modern Spain. Life is a dream, as the title of Calderon's famous play of the period proclaimed, but there is always a body dreaming it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.