A Companion to the Spanish Renaissance makes a renewed case for the inclusion of Spain within broader European Renaissance movements. Its introduction, "A Renaissance for the 'Spanish Renaissance'?" will be sure to incite polemic across a broad spectrum of academic fields. This interdisciplinary volume combines micro- with macro-history to offer a snapshot of the best new work being done in this area. With essays on politics and government, family and daily life, religion, nobles and court culture, birth and death, intellectual currents, ethnic groups, the plastic arts, literature, popular culture, law courts, women, literacy, libraries, civic ritual, illness, money, notions of community, philosophy and law, science, colonial empire, and historiography, it offers breath-taking scope without sacrificing attention to detail. Destined to become the standard go-to resource for non-specialists, this book also contains an extensive bibliography aimed at the serious researcher. Contributors are: Beatriz de Alba-Koch, Edward Behrend-Martinez, Cristian Berco, Harald E. Braun, Susan Byrne, Bernardo Cantens, Frederick A. de Armas, William Eamon, Stephanie Fink, Enrique Garcia Santo-Tomas, J.A. Garrido Ardila, Marya T. Green-Mercado, Elizabeth Teresa Howe, Hilaire Kallendorf, Henry Kamen, Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Michael J. Levin, Ruth MacKay, Fabien Montcher, Ignacio Navarrete, Jeffrey Schrader, Lia Schwartz, Elizabeth Ashcroft Terry, and Elvira Vilches.

In 1908, an idea arose during a conversation between Dr Felix Peipers and Rudolf Steiner. Steiner had been lecturing on the healing nature of the Egyptian Goddess Isis, and drew a parallel to the Christian Madonna, Mary. From that, Steiner and Peipers started to formulate a sequence of fifteen Madonna images, primarily by Raphael, which Dr Peipers used effectively in meditative therapy with his patients. All fifteen images are included in the book. This book explores the nature of the Madonna images, addressing topics ranging from the mystery of seeing, beauty, truth and goodness, and Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom, to Isis and Madonna, working with images and Rudolf Steiner's healing mission. There is a special section on Raphael's Sistine Madonna. This book is a perfect complement to Raphael's Madonnas (edited by Christopher Bamford), a beautiful collection of colour Madonna images.

The interplay between nature, science, and art in antiquity and the early modern period differs significantly from late modern expectations. In this book scholars from ancient studies as well as early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science, explore that interplay in several influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance. The Natural History of Pliny, De Architectura of Vitruvius, De Rerum Natura of Lucretius, Automata of Hero, and Timaios of Plato among other texts reveal how fields of inquiry now considered distinct were originally understood as closely interrelated. In our choice of texts, we focus on materialistic theories of nature, knowledge, and art that remain underappreciated in ancient and early modern studies even today.

Measured Words explores the rich commerce between computation and writing that proliferated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy. In this captivating and generously illustrated work, Arielle Saiber studies the relationship between number, shape, and the written word in the works of four exceptional thinkers of the time: Leon Battista Alberti, Luca Pacioli, Niccolo Tartaglia, and Giambattista Della Porta. Although these Renaissance humanists came from different social classes and practised the mathematical and literary arts at varying levels of sophistication, they were all guided by a sense that there exist deep ontological and epistemological bonds between computational and verbal thinking and production. Their shared view that a network or continuity exists between the literary arts and mathematics yielded extraordinary results, from Alberti's treatise on cryptography and Pacioli's design calculations for the Roman alphabet to Tartaglia's poetic solutions of cubic equations and Della Porta's dramatic applications of geometry. Through lively, cogent analysis of these and other related texts of the period, Measured Words presents, literally and figuratively, brilliant examples of what interdisciplinary work can offer us.

The essays in Visualizing the Past in Italian Renaissance Art address a foundational concept that was as central to early modern thinking as it is to our own: that the past is always an important part of the present. Written by the friends, students, and colleagues of Dr. Brian Curran, former professor of Art History at the Pennsylvania State University, these authors demonstrate how reverberations of the past within the present are intrinsic to the ways in which we think about the history of art. Examinations of sculpture, painting, and architecture reveal the myriad ways that history has been appropriated, reinvented, and rewritten as subsequent generations-including the authors collected here-have attained new insight into the past and present. Contributors: Denise Costanzo, William E. Wallace, Theresa A. Kutasz Christensen, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Cutler, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Louis Alexander Waldman, Elizabeth Petersen Cyron, Stuart Lingo, Jessica Boehman, Katherine M. Bentz, Robin L. Thomas, and John Pinto.

Palladio (1508-80) combined classical restraint with constant inventiveness to produce one of the most beautiful, and easily the most influential, series of buildings in the history of art.

In this brilliantly incisive study, Professor Ackerman sets Palladio in the context of his age - the great Humanist era of Michelangelo and Raphael, Titian and Veronese - examines each of the wonderful villas, churches and palaces in turn, and tries to penetrate to the heart of the Palladian miracle. Palladio's theoretical writings are important and illuminating, he suggests, yet they can never do justice to the intense intuitive skills of 'a magician of light and colour'. Indeed, as the fine photographs in this book reveal, Palladio was 'as sensual, as skilled in visual alchemy as any Venetian painter of his time', and his countless imitators have usually captured the details, but not the essence, of his supreme style. There are buildings all the way from Philadelphia to St. Petersburg which bear witness to Palladio's 'permanent place in the making of architecture', yet he richly deserves also to be seen on his own terms; this masterly introduction to a master architect does just that.

In early modern times scholars and architects investigated age-old buildings in order to look for useful sources of inspiration. They too, occasionally misinterpreted younger buildings as proofs of majestic Roman or other ancient glory, such as the buildings of the Carolingian, Ottonian and Stauffer emperors. But even if the correct age of a certain building was known, buildings from c. 800-1200 were sometimes regarded as 'Antique' architecture, since the concept of 'Antiquity' was far more stretched than our modern periodisation allows. This was a Europe-wide phenomenon. The results are rather diverse in style, but they all share an intellectual and artistic strategy: a conscious revival of an 'ancient' architecture - whatever the date and origin of these models. Contributors: Barbara Arciszewska, Lex Bosman, Ian Campbell, Eliana Carrara, Bianca de Divitiis, Krista De Jonge, Emanuela Ferretti, Emanuela Garofalo, Stefaan Grieten, Hubertus Gunther, Stephan Hoppe, Sanne Maekelberg, Kristoffer Neville, Marco Rosario Nobile, Konrad Ottenheym, Stefano Piazza, and Richard Schofield.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700. The seventeen essays ask how landscape, construed as the description of place in image and/or text, more than merely inviting close viewing, was often seen to call for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Contributors: Boudewijn Bakker, William M. Barton, Stijn Bussels, Reindert Falkenburg, Margaret Goehring, Andrew Hui, Sarah McPhee, Luke Morgan, Shelley Perlove, Kathleen P. Long, Lukas Reddemann, Denis Ribouillault, Paul J. Smith, Troy Tower, and Michel Weemans.

An acclaimed historian of Europe explores one of the world’s most iconic buildings and the monarch who created it Few buildings have played so central a role in Spain’s history as the monastery-palace of San Lorenzo del Escorial. Colossal in size and imposing—even forbidding—in appearance, the Escorial has invited and defied description for four centuries. Part palace, part monastery, part mausoleum, it has also served as a shrine, a school, a repository for thousands of relics, and one of the greatest libraries of its time. Constructed over the course of more than twenty years, the Escorial challenged and provoked, becoming for some a symbol of superstition and oppression, for others a “wonder of the world.� Now a World Heritage Site, it is visited by thousands of travelers every year. In this intriguing study, Henry Kamen looks at the circumstances that brought the young Philip II to commission construction of the Escorial in 1563. He explores Philip’s motivation, the influence of his travels, the meaning of the design, and its place in Spanish culture. It represents a highly engaging narrative of the high point of Spanish imperial dominance, in which contemporary preoccupations with art, religion, and power are analyzed in the context of this remarkable building.

A significant new interpretation of the emergence of Western pictorial realism When Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) completed the revolutionary Ghent Altarpiece in 1432, it was unprecedented in European visual culture. His novel visual strategies, including lifelike detail, not only helped make painting the defining medium of Western art, they also ushered in new ways of seeing the world. This highly original book explores Van Eyck's pivotal work, as well as panels by Rogier van der Weyden and their followers, to understand how viewers came to appreciate a world depicted in two dimensions. Through careful examination of primary documents, Noa Turel reveals that paintings were consistently described as au vif: made not "from life" but "into life." Animation, not representation, drove Van Eyck and his contemporaries. Turel's interpretation reverses the commonly held belief that these artists were inspired by the era's burgeoning empiricism, proposing instead that their "living pictures" helped create the conditions for empiricism. Illustrated with exquisite fifteenth-century paintings, this volume asserts these works' key role in shaping, rather than simply mirroring, the early modern world.

Lomazzo's Aesthetic Principles Reflected in the Art of his Time explores the work of the Milanese artist-theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538-92) and his influence on the circle of the Accademia della Val di Blenio and beyond. Following reflections on Lomazzo's fortuna critica, the accompanying essays examine his admiration of Gaudenzio Ferrari; Lomazzo's painted oeuvre; his influence on printmaking with Giovanni Ambrogio Brambilla; on drawing and painting with Aurelio Luini; on the decorative arts and the embroideress Caterina Cantoni; his pupils Giovanni Ambrogio Figino and Girolamo Ciocca; grotesque sculpture outside Milan; and Lomazzo in England with Richard Haydocke's translation of the Trattato. In doing so, this book takes an innovative approach-one which aims to bridge the scholarship, hitherto disjoined, between Lomazzo the artist and Lomazzo the theorist-while expanding our knowledge of a protagonist of Renaissance and early modern art theory. Contributors: Alessia Alberti, Federico Cavalieri, Jean Julia Chai, Roberto Paolo Ciardi, Alexander Marr, Silvia Mausoli, Mauro Pavesi, Rossana Sacchi, Paolo Sanvito, and Lucia Tantardini.

Over the course of his career, Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) created altarpieces rich in theological complexity, elegant in formal execution, and dazzlingly brilliant in chromatic impact. This book investigates the spiritual dimensions of those works, focusing on six highly-significant panels. According to Steven J. Cody, the beauty and splendor of Andrea's paintings speak to a profound engagement with Christian theories of spiritual renewal-an engagement that only intensified as Andrea matured into one of the most admired artists of his time. From this perspective, Andrea del Sarto - Splendor and Renewal in the Renaissance Altarpiece not only shines new light on a painter who has long deserved more scholarly attention; it also offers up fresh insights regarding the Renaissance altarpiece itself.