Epic Arts in Renaissance France studies the relationship between epic literature and other art forms such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Why, the book asks, the epic heroes and themes so ubiquitous in French Renaissance art are widely celebrated whereas the same period's literary epics, frequently maligned, now go unread? To explore this paradox, the book investigates a number of epic building sites, i.e. specific situations in which literary epics either become the basis for realisations in other art forms or somehow contest or compete with them. Beginning with a detour about the appearance of epic heroes (Odysseus and Aeneas) on marriage chests in fifteenth-century Florence, the study traces how French communities of readers, writers, translators, and artists reinvent epic forms in their own-or their patron's-image. Following extended discussion of three galleries in different regions of France, which all depicted key scenes from the classical epics of Homer, Virgil, and Lucan, the book turns to epics written in the period. Chapters of Epic Arts focus on Etienne Dolet's Fata, which praise the victories (but also failures) of Francois Ier in ways that make it both a continuum of Fontainebleau and a response to the celebration of French defeat in foreign paintings; on Ronsard's Franciade, whose muse was depicted on the facade of the Louvre and whose story was eventually taken up in a long series of paintings by Toussaint Dubreuil; and on Agrippa d'Aubigne's Protestant Tragiques, which allude to, and frequently function as graffiti over, Catholic works of art in Paris and Rome. Situated at the frontier of literary criticism and art history, Epic Arts in Renaissance France is a compelling call for a revaluation of French epic literature and indeed of how we read.

Now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Raphael Cartoons are widely considered one of the glories of the Italian Renaissance. Made as full-scale design drawings for tapestries, their survival is remarkable given their original purpose and inherent fragility. This beautiful and compelling book presents a new consideration of Raphael's achievement, shedding fresh light on the Cartoons' history from their creation, their acquisition by the English Crown in 1623, to their loan to the South Kensington Museum by Queen Victoria in 1865 in memory of Prince Albert. Illustrated with entirely new digital photography, made to mark the 500th anniversary of the artist's death, the book focuses on Raphael's artistic practice and his legacy. The Cartoons were carefully designed to be reproduced, and they are shown here as never before.

This sweeping overview of Rembrandt's extraordinary achievement as a draughtsman fills a gap in the otherwise enormous literature on the artist. Beautifully illustrated, mostly in colour, the more than 150 drawings - culled from a corpus of some 800 - are discussed in detail. The drawings span Rembrandt's entire productive life as an artist, from early self-portraits in the 1620s to late drawings from the 1660s of the victim of an execution, a state coach, and historical and mythological images. The scope of the book allows readers to delve into the very broad range of Rembrandt's oeuvre of drawings.

A new series of blank sketch books, with luxurious bindings. Combining high-quality production with on the best and most popular art, the covers are printed on foil and embossed, foil stamped with gilded edges. Perfect for personal use, for anyone who sketches or makes notes, for students and artists, they also make a brilliant gift. This example is based on 'The Vitruvian Man', c. 1492 by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

The painter and printmaker Albrecht Durer is one of the most important figures of the German Renaissance. This book accompanies the first major exhibition of the Whitworth Art Gallery's outstanding Durer collection in over half a century. It offers a new perspective on Durer as an intense observer of the worlds of manufacture, design and trade that fill his graphic art. Artworks and artefacts examined here expose understudied aspects of Durer's art and practice, including his attentive examination of objects of daily domestic use, his involvement in economies of local manufacture and exchange, the microarchitectures of local craft and, finally, his attention to cultures of natural and philosophical inquiry and learning. -- .

Arguably the greatest sculptor of all time, Donatello (c.1386-1466) was at the vanguard of a revolution in sculptural practice in the early Renaissance. Combining ideas from classical and medieval sculpture to create innovative sculptural forms, Donatello had an unparalleled ability to portray emotions in works intended to inspire spiritual devotion. Pieces such as the penitent St Mary Magdalene and the bronze of David remain deeply affecting to audiences today. Working in marble, bronze, wood, terracotta and stucco, he contributed to major commissions of church and state; was an intimate of the Medici family and their circle in Florence, and highly sought after in other Italian cities. This book, specially commissioned to accompany the 2023 exhibition at the V&A, explores Donatello's extraordinary creativity within the vibrant artistic and cultural context of fifteenth-century Italy, surveying his early connection with goldsmiths' work and the collaborative nature of his workshop and processes. It also reflects on Donatello's legacy, reviewing how his sculpture inspired subsequent generations in the later Renaissance and beyond.

This book explores the poetics of literary defences of women written by men in late-medieval and early-modern France. It fills an important lacuna in studies of this polemic in imaginative literature by bridging the gap between Christine de Pizan and a later generation of women writers and male, Neo-Platonist writers who have recently all received due critical attention. Whereas male-authored defences composed between 1440 and 1538 have previously been dismissed as "insincere" or "mere intellectual games," Swift formulates reading strategies to overcome such critical stumbling blocks and engage with the particular rhetorical and historical contexts of these works. Edited and as yet unedited texts by Martin Le Franc, Jacques Milet, Pierre Michault, and Jean Bouchet-catalogues of women, allegorical narratives, and debate poems-are brought together and analysed in detail for the first time in order to explore, for example, how such works address the misogynistic spectre of Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose.
The book seeks to understand the contemporary popularity of the case for women (la querelle des femmes) as literary subject matter. It investigates the publication history across this period, from manuscript to print, of Le Franc's Le Champion des dames. Swift further aims to show how these texts hold interest for modern audiences. A nexus of theoretical concerns centred on performance - Judith Butler's gender performativity, Derrida's re-working of Austin's linguistic performativity through spectrality, and dramatic performance - is enlisted to articulate the interpretative engagement expected by querelle writers of their audience. The reading strategies proposed foster a nuanced andenriched perspective on the question of a male author's "sincerity" when writing in defence of women.

England's Helicon is about one of the most important features of early modern gardens: the fountain. It is also a detailed study of works by Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and Ben Jonson, and of an influential Italian romance, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Fountains were "strong points" in the iconography and structure of gardens, symbolically loaded and interpretatively dense, soliciting the most active engagement possible from those who encountered them. These qualities are registered and explored in their literary counterparts.
England's Helicon is not a simple motif study of fountains in English Renaissance literature: it is, rather, an investigation of how each might work; of how literary fountains both inform and are informed by real fountains in early modern literature and culture. While its main focus remains the literature of the late sixteenth century, England's Helicon recognizes that intertextuality and influence can be material as well as literary. It demonstrates that the "missing piece" needed to make sense of a passage in a play, a poem, or a prose romance could be a fountain, a conduit, a well, or a reflecting pool, in general or even in a specific, known garden; it also considers portraits, textiles, jewelry, and other artifacts depicting fountains.
Early modern English gardens and fountains are almost all lost, but to approach them through literary texts and objects is often to recover them in new ways. This is the double project that England's Helicon undertakes; in so doing, it offers a new model for the exploration of the interconnectedness of texts, images, objects and landscapes in early modern literature and culture.

A groundbreaking approach to the problem of realism in Tudor art   In Tudor and Jacobean England, visual art was often termed “lively.� This word was used to describe the full range of visual and material culture—from portraits to funeral monuments, book illustrations to tapestry. To a modern viewer, this claim seems perplexing: what could “liveliness� have meant in a culture with seemingly little appreciation for illusionistic naturalism? And in a period supposedly characterised by fear of idolatry, how could “liveliness� have been a good thing?   In this wide-ranging and innovative book, Christina Faraday excavates a uniquely Tudor model of vividness: one grounded in rhetorical techniques for creating powerful mental images for audiences. By drawing parallels with the dominant communicative framework of the day, Tudor Liveliness sheds new light on a lost mode of Tudor art criticism and appreciation, revealing how objects across a vast range of genres and contexts were taking part in the same intellectual and aesthetic conversations. By resurrecting a lost model for art theory, Faraday re-enlivens the vivid visual and material culture of Tudor and Jacobean England, recovering its original power to move, impress and delight.   Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Leonardo da Vinci lived an itinerant life. Throughout his career - from its beginnings in the creative maelstrom of fifteenth-century Florence to his role as genius in residence at the court of the king of France - Leonardo created a kind of private universe for himself and his work. Leonardo also spent a great deal of time away from his easel, pursuing his interest in engineering, natural science, sculpture, poetry, fables, music and anatomy. In the time that another artist would finish a series of paintings, he would work on one. Sometimes a painting would take decades, accompanying him on his travels as he worked on other commissions. Leonardo's private world was both vibrant and active. It sometimes did and at other times did not interact with the wider world. But what emerged from it has established Leonardo as the definition of the Renaissance Man.

This richly illustrated books tells the story of the different ways in which women were represented in Italian Renaissance painting. It is clearly arranged into four distinct areas that relate to the function of the art work: marriage furniture, portraiture, the nude and depictions of female saints. Uncovering the many layers of meaning hidden in the iconography of these paintings, the book reintroduces us to the cultural context in which the artists operated, providing interesting new readings of well-known works by Raphael, Leonardo and Titian, among others. -- .

Early narratives have tended to be critiqued as novels, an approach which misses their distinctive Renaissance realism. Alastair Fowler surveys picturing and perspective from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, drawing analogies between literature and visual art. The book is based on the history of the narrative imagination after single-point perspective. The habit of an older, multipoint perspective long continued, accounting for 'anachronism', discontinuous realism, 'double time-schemes', and depiction of different moments as simultaneous.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' by Vermeer. The grand master of portraiture, Johannes Vermeer, was a pivotal figure of the Dutch Golden Age. Girl with a Pearl Earring depicts the fresh-faced beauty of a young woman, simply but strikingly adorned in a turban and luminous pearl. Her intimate and direct gaze enhances the energy of the portrait and offsets the dark, understated colour scheme. An enigmatic and seductive atmosphere swirls around her, while the subject remains forever still for the viewer to admire.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. National Gallery: Bosschaert the Elder - Still life of Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase. Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder was a Dutch Golden Age painter. The flowers in this arrangement, which include lilies, tulips, roses, and carnations, are painted with almost scientific precision. Bosschaert's choice of a smooth copper support enhances the extraordinary detail of his brushwork. The bouquet itself, however, is a fiction: these flowers do not bloom at the same time, and would have been far too precious to cut for temporary display.

The first major history of the bravura movement in European painting The painterly style known as bravura emerged in sixteenth-century Venice and spread throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. While earlier artistic movements presented a polished image of the artist by downplaying the creative process, bravura celebrated a painter's distinct materials, virtuosic execution, and theatrical showmanship. This resulted in the further development of innovative techniques and a popular understanding of the artist as a weapon-wielding acrobat, impetuous wunderkind, and daring rebel. In Bravura, Nicola Suthor offers the first in-depth consideration of bravura as an artistic and cultural phenomenon. Through history, etymology, and in-depth analysis of works by such important painters as Fran ois Boucher, Caravaggio, Francisco Goya, Frans Hals, Peter Paul Rubens, Tintoretto, and Diego Velazquez, Suthor explores the key elements defining bravura's richness and power. Suthor delves into how bravura's unique and groundbreaking methods-visible brushstrokes, sharp chiaroscuro, severe foreshortening of the body, and other forms of visual emphasis-cause viewers to feel intensely the artist's touch. Examining bravura's etymological history, she traces the term's associations with courage, boldness, spontaneity, imperiousness, and arrogance, as well as its links to fencing, swordsmanship, henchmen, mercenaries, and street thugs. Suthor discusses the personality cult of the transgressive, self-taught, antisocial genius, and the ways in which bravura artists, through their stunning displays of skill, sought applause and admiration. Filled with captivating images by painters testing the traditional boundaries of aesthetic excellence, Bravura raises important questions about artistic performance and what it means to create art.

A fascinating new look at the artistic legacy of the Tudors, revealing the dynasty's influence on the arts in Renaissance England and beyond Ruling successively from 1485 through 1603, the five Tudor monarchs changed England indelibly, using the visual arts to both legitimize and glorify their tumultuous rule-from Henry VII's bloody rise to power, through Henry VIII's breach with the Roman Catholic Church, to the reign of the "virgin queen" Elizabeth I. With incisive scholarship and sumptuous new photography, the book explores the politics and personalities of the Tudors, and how they used art in their diplomacy at home and abroad. Tudor courts were truly cosmopolitan, attracting artists and artisans from across Europe, including Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8-1543), Jean Clouet (ca. 1485-1540), and Benedetto da Rovezzano (1474-1552). At the same time, the Tudors nurtured local talent such as Isaac Oliver (ca. 1565-1617) and Nicholas Hilliard (ca. 1547-1619) and gave rise to a distinctly English aesthetic that now defines the visual legacy of the dynasty. This book reveals the true history behind a family that has long captured the public imagination, bringing to life the extravagant and politically precarious world of the Tudors through the exquisite paintings, lush textiles, gleaming metalwork, and countless luxury objects that adorned their spectacular courts. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (October 10, 2022-January 8, 2023) The Cleveland Museum of Art (February 26-May 14, 2023) Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (June 24-September 24, 2023)

The concept of a 'Renaissance' in the arts, in thought, and in more general culture North of the Alps often evokes the idea of a cultural transplant which was not indigenous to, or rooted in, the society from which it emerged. Classic definitions of the European 'Renaissance' during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries have seen it as what was in effect an Italian import into the Gothic North. Yet there were certainly differences, divergences and dichotomies between North and South which have to be addressed. Here, Malcolm Vale argues for a Northern Renaissance which, while cognisant of Italian developments, displayed strong continuities with the indigenous cultures of northern Europe. But it also contributed novelties and innovations which often tended to stem from, and build upon, those continuities. A Short History of the Renaissance in Northern Europe - while in no way ignoring or diminishing the importance of the Hellenic and Roman legacy - seeks other sources, and different uses of classical antiquity, for a rather different kind of 'Renaissance', if such it was, in the North.

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.

The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered 'decent' and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. Simultaneously, artists and the public became increasingly interested in the depiction of specific body parts or excretions. This book explores the concept of indecency and its relation to the human body across drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and texts. The ten essays investigate questions raised by such objects about practices and social norms regarding the body, and they look at the particular function of those artworks within this discourse. The heterogeneous media, genres, and historical contexts north and south of the Alps studied by the authors demonstrate how the alleged indecency clashed with artistic intentions and challenges traditional paradigms of the historiography of Early Modern visual culture.