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In the past half century scholars have downplayed the significance of Lorenzo de' Medici (1449--1492), called "the Magnificent," as a patron of the arts. Less wealthy than his grandfather Cosimo, the argument goes, Lorenzo was far more interested in collecting ancient objects of art than in commissioning contemporary art or architecture. His earlier reputation as a patron was said to be largely a construct of humanist exaggeration and partisan deference.

Although some recent studies have taken issue with this view, no synthesis of Lorenzo as art patron and art lover has yet emerged. In Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence historian F. W. Kent offers a new look at Lorenzo's relationship to the arts, aesthetics, collecting, and building -- especially in the context of his role as the political boss (maestro della bottega) of republican Florence and a leading player in Renaissance Italian diplomacy. As a result of this approach, which pays careful attention to the events of his short but dramatic life, a radically new chronology of Lorenzo's activities as an art patron emerges, revealing them to have been more extensive and creative than previously thought. Kent's Lorenzo was broadly interested in the arts and supported efforts to beautify Florence and the many Medici lands and palaces. His expertise was well regarded by guildsmen and artists, who often turned to him for advice as well as for patronage. Lorenzo himself was educated in the arts by such men, and Kent explores his aesthetic education and taste, taking into account what is known of Lorenzo's patronage of music and manuscripts, and of his own creative work as a major Quattrocento poet.

Richly illustrated withphotographs of Medici landmarks by Ralph Lieberman, Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence offers a masterful portrait of Lorenzo as a man whose achievements might have rivaled his grandfather's had he not died so young.

"Sixteenth-Century Italian Art" is a first-rate collection of the major classic and contemporary writings on the Italian Renaissance. Taking a thematic approach, the book exemplifies the traditional concerns of the field and presents arguments in a clear, accessible way.
A stellar collection of 23 classic and recent essays on the art and architecture of this fascinating period in art history
Brings together in a single volume, important literature on sixteenth-century Italian art from the last half century, highlighting major topics of recent art historical studies
Introduces major topics and debates in the field, including pagan mysteries, nature and artifice, the art of the body, and "reformations" of art, theory and practice
Includes new translations of texts never previously published in English
Organized thematically, and features substantial editorial introductions, making this anthology ideal for course use.

Giotto's Harmony explores the philosophical and cultural intersection of musicians, artists, and intellectuals in early Trecento Padua. Padua's unique intellectual fervor, with its prominent university and proximity to Venice, attracted such titan celebrities as Giotto, Dante, Marchetto da Padova, and Pietro d'Abano. The richness of their cross-disciplinary work places Padua at the forefront of pre-humanism. Both Giotto and Marchetto da Padova sought to reproduce natural phenomena as faithfully as possible in their respective metiers. Professor Beck argues that this return to nature is a reflection of the rebirth of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature found in the Physica and Metaphysica, taught at the University of Padua, and expounded in the theories of Pietro d'Abano. Paduan musical pre-humanist contributions are posited to be at the vanguard of musical development in Italy, rather than a footnote to the musical culture of Florence. Indeed, Giotto's Harmony makes the case that the musical Renaissance, which is often believed to have its origins in the much later work of Dunstable and Dufay, has its roots in Padua's pre-humanist tradition, as reflected in the work of Marchetto and contemporary theorists and composers.

For Italian city builders more than a thousand years ago, the urban realm was the great theater where their best aspirations were played out, the place where society said the most substantial things about who they were and what they longed for. In this masterful blend of art and cultural history, architect David Mayernik reveals how the very different cities of Venice, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Pienza were all literally designed to be both models of the mind and images of heaven. Mayernik takes the reader on a journey into the past in Timeless Cities, but he also explains why these city-building ideas remain relevant today. For those traveling on vacation or appreciating the art and architecture of Italy from home, Mayernik helps bring the wonder and beauty of the Renaissance mind a little closer.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Old St Peter's Basilica in Rome stood for over eleven centuries until it was demolished to make room for today's church on the same Vatican site. Its last eyewitness, Maffeo Vegio, explained to the Roman hierarchy how revival of the papacy, whose prestige after the exile to Avignon had been diminished, was inseparable from a renewed awareness of the primacy of Peter's Church. To make his case, Vegio wrote a history founded on credible written and visual evidence. The text guides us through the building's true story in its material reality, undistorted by medieval guides. This was its living memory and a visualization of the continuity of Roman history into modern times. This volume makes available the first complete English translation of Vegio's text. Accompanied by full-color digital reconstructions of the Basilica as it appeared in Vegio's day.

At the turn of the 16th century, Italy was a turbulent territory made up of independent states, each at war with or intriguing against its neighbor. There were the proud, cultivated, and degenerate Sforzas in Milan, and in Rome, the corrupt Spanish family of the Borgia whose head, Rodrigo, ascended to St Peter's throne as Pope Alexander VI. In Florence, a golden age of culture and sophistication ended with the death of the greatest of the Medici family, Lorenzo the Magnificent, giving way to an era of uncertainty, cruelty, and religious fundamentalism.
In the midst of this turmoil, there existed the greatest concentration of artists that Europe has ever known. Influenced by the rediscovery of the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, artists and thinkers such as Botticelli and da Vinci threw off the shackles of the Middle Ages to produce one of the most creative periods in history - the Renaissance.
This is the story of twelve years when war, plague, famine, and chaos made their mark on a volatile Italy, and when a young, erratic genius, Michelangelo Buonarroti, made his first great statue - the David. It was to become a symbol not only of the independence and defiance of the city of Florence but also of the tortured soul who created it. This is a wonderful history of the artist, his times, and one of his most magnificent works.

Ferdinand Columbus, son of Christopher Columbus and author of the first published account of a voyage to the New World, was also the owner of one of the largest private libraries assembled during the Renaissance and the most important early collection of prints. Although the collection has vanished, about half of it has been reconstructed by Mark McDonald from information found in a detailed inventory that survives in Seville. This beautifully produced book catalogues 110 of the most significant prints in Columbus's collection. The introductory chapters discuss Columbus's life and work and show how the reconstruction of his collection has radically transformed our understanding of the print industry in Renaissance Europe.

A pioneer of Italian Renaissance architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi is most famous for his daring and original ideas, among them the magnificent dome of Florence's famed Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. This comprehensive book describes how he created the structure, construction concepts, and other inventions. 28 halftones, 18 line illustrations.

Read this book and the world's most famous image will never look the same again. For the world's greatest cultural icon still has secrets to reveal - not the silly secrets that the 'Leonardo loonies' continue to advance, but previously unknown facts about the lives of Leonardo, his father, Lisa Gherardini, the subject of the portrait, and her husband Francesco del Giocondo. From this factual beginning we see how the painting metamorphosed into a 'universal picture' that became the prime vehicle for Leonardo's prodigious knowledge of the human and natural worlds. We learn about the new money of the ambitious merchant who married into the old gentry of Lisa's family. We discover Lisa's life as a wife and mother, her association with sexual scandals, and her later life in a convent. We meet, for the first time, previously undiscovered members of Leonardo's immediate family and discover new information about his early life. The tiny hill town of Vinci is placed before us, with its widespread poverty. We find out about the career and possessions of his father, a notable lawyer in Florence. The meaning of the portrait that resulted from these human circumstances is vividly illuminated though Renaissance love poetry and verses specifically dedicated to Leonardo. We come to understand how Leonardo's sciences of optics, psychology, anatomy and geology are embraced in his poetic science of art. Recent scientific examinations of the painting disclose how it evolved to assume its present appearance in Leonardo's experimental hands. Above all, we cut through the suppositions and the myths to show that the portrait is a product of real people in a real place at a real time. This is the book that brings back a sense of reality into the creation of the portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. And the actual Mona Lisa, it turns out, is even more astonishing and transcendent than the Mona Lisa of legend.

This book is a collection of specially-commissioned art-historical essays on the theme of manuscript studies by some of the world's leading art historians and curators of manuscripts. It is expected to be even more successful and well-received than the comparable volume from University of Exeter Press, The Art of the Book: Its Place in Medieval Worship, edited by Margaret M. Manion and Bernard J. Muir. The contributors are writing on their particular area of manuscript study, with the Wharncliffe Hours and the Book of Kells among the important manuscripts discussed. Their essays are written in honor of Margaret M. Manion, Professor Emeritus, Department of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne. Margaret Manion has an international reputation for her work in the field of art history. Her many publications include a facsimile edition of The Wharncliffe Hours (Thames & Hudson) and Medieval and Renaissance Illuminated Manuscripts in Australian Collections (with Vera F. Vines, Thames & Hudson).

Sifting the available evidence, Carlo Ginzburg builds up a vivid portrait of Piero della Francesca's patrons and convincingly explains the contemporary intrigues resonant in his painting. This new edition, extensively illustrated, includes additional material by Ginzburg dealing with the work of Roberto Longhi, the dating of the Arezzo Cycle, and the rediscovery of della Francesca in the twentieth century.

Inigo Jones, the first English classical architect, was famous in his own time and was the posthumous sponsor of the Palladian movement of the eighteenth century. This authoritative and elegantly written book, first published in 1966, reassessed Jones's life and career, cleared away the myths of attribution that surround his work, and reassigned to him projects that had disappeared from his oeuvre. Summerson's classic text is enhanced by a new foreword and notes by Howard Colvin, updated bibliography, and improved illustrations.

Rubens' interest in history, particularly ancient history, was intense, as is evident in the paintings and drawings grouped together in this volume, part 13(1) in the series "Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard".;In Rubens' day, history was principally valued for the lessons it taught, and the historical scenes most commonly depicted in Renaissance art are exemplary themes, above all illustrations of the virtuous deeds of the heroes and heroines of classical antiquity. Rubens painted a number of these - "The Continence of Scipio", for example, "The Justice of Cambyses", "The Devotion of Ertemisia" and "The Courage of Cloelia" - bringing to them his characteristic wit, originality and artistic force.;He also illustrated quite novel subjects, some of them rarely discussed by modern scholars and often even misidentified, from "Pythagoras advocating Vegetarianism" and "Alcibiades interrupting the Symposium" to the famous "Death of Seneca", the medieval story of "The Piety of Rudolf of Habsburg" and the vividly evocative "Battle of Tunis".;The present volume focuses particularly on Rubens' ingenuity in the invention of subjects for a variety of contexts - occasionally simply for his own pleasure. An introduction considers the artist's relationship to the tradition of depicting history, the books read and the easy familiarity with ancient literature which is reflected in his paintings, where striking images from Ovid and other classical poets often helped to inspire his most remarkable creations.;This is followed by the Catalogue Raisonne, which deals with 60 different compositions. Included is a discussion of a projected tapestry series on the life of Romulus. Rubens' other designs for tapestry cycles on themes from ancient history are treated in a separate volume, but some consideration is given to them here, in the introduction. As with other volumes of the Corpus, all relevant paintings, including sketches and drawings, or copies of lost works, are illustrated and discussed.

Compared to the Middle Ages, the Renaissance is brief--little more than two centuries, extending roughly from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the sixteenth century--and largely confined to a few Italian city states. Nevertheless, the epoch marked a great cultural shift in sensibilities, the dawn of a new age in which classical Greek and Roman values were "reborn" and human values in all fields, from the arts to civic life, were reaffirmed.
With this volume, Eugenio Garin, a leading Renaissance scholar, has gathered the work of an international team of scholars into an accessible account of the people who animated this decisive moment in the genesis of the modern mind. We are offered a broad spectrum of figures, major and minor, as they lived their lives: the prince and the military commander, the cardinal and the courtier, the artist and the philosopher, the merchant and the banker, the voyager, and women of all classes. With its concentration on the concrete, the specific, even the anecdotal, the volume offers a wealth of new perspectives and ideas for study.

Although Saint Cecilia is venerated throughout the Western world as the patron saint of music and Raphael's famous painting The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia is filled with musical iconography, the ancient origins of Cecilia's association with music have long been shrouded in mystery. This book, a masterful investigation of the Cecilian cult from its beginnings in Christian antiquity down to the Renaissance, explains how Cecilia came to be linked with music and offers a new interpretation of Raphael's painting. Thomas Connolly finds the key to the mystery in a theme he identifies as "mourning-into-joy." This theme, rooted in the Bible and in Aristotle's doctrine of the passions of the soul, became prominent in the visual and literary arts as well as in theology and spirituality and expressed the soul's passages between vice and virtue as a conversion of sadness into joy. According to Connolly, this idea strongly influenced the legend and worship of Saint Cecilia, a model for all who sought spiritual transformation. Connolly argues that the medieval mystical mind saw music as an intimate expression of the experiences of conversion and spiritual growth and that the conjunction of spirit and music became crystallized in the figure of the saint. His explanation not only provides a better understanding of Raphael's work and other Renaissance and Baroque art but also clarifies puzzling literary questions concerning Saint Cecilia, such as Chaucer's treatment of her in "The Second Nun's Tale."

Part of the Norton Critical Studies in Art History, this text examines Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The book includes: an illustration section depicting the entire work as well as in detail; documents and literary sources; and critical essays from history of art literature.

Jacob Burckhardt was a scholar who had the gift of being able to combine vast knowledge with a vivid imagination and lively creativity. This book, his contribution to cultural history, was first published in 1860, and has long been recognized as a great work of literature as well as history; its range, powerful style, and breadth of vision make it a classic introduction to the study of the Renaissance, and one that is still a source of inspiration. My starting point has to be a vision, ' Burckhardt wrote to a friend, otherwise I cannot do anything. Vision I call not only optical, but also spiritual realization; for instance, historical vision issuing from the old sources.

In this second volume of his classic essays on the Renaissance, E H Gombrich focuses on a theme of central importance: visual symbolism. He opens with a searching introduction ('The Aims and Limits of Iconology'), and follows with detailed studies of Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Poussin and others. The volume concludes with an extended study of the philosophies of symbolism, demonstrating that the ideas which preoccupied the philosophers of the Renaissance are still very much alive today. Like its predecessor, Norm and Form, this volume is indispensable for all students of Renaissance art and thought as a work that has itself helped to shape the evolving discipline of art history. Reflecting the author's abiding concern with standards, values and problems of method, it also has a wider interest as an introduction to the fundamental questions involved in the interpretation of images.

The third volume of E H Gombrich's seminal essays on the Renaissance has the classical tradition as its central theme. Apelles, the most famous painter of ancient Greece, was said to have combined perfect beauty with supreme skill in imitating the appearances of nature. These twin ideals of perfect beauty and perfect imitation of nature, which were inherited from classical antiquity and remained unchallenged as the cornerstone of art until the twentieth century, form the starting-point for these learned and always stimulating essays. Whether discussing the rendering of light and lustre, the working methods of Leonardo da Vinci or the principles of criticism, the author's analyses and interpretations are underpinned by a deep conviction that, despite the apparent abandonment of the Renaissance ideals in the twentieth century, questions about traditions, values and standards are still of fundamental importance. This wider concern gives these essays a continuing vitality, not only for students but also for anyone interested in art and culture.

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19-1594) was among the most distinctive artists of the Italian Renaissance. Yet, although his bold paintings are immediately recognizable, his drawings remain unfamiliar even to many scholars. Drawing in Tintoretto's Venice offers a complete overview of Tintoretto as a draftsman. It begins with a look at drawings by Tintoretto's precedents and contemporaries, a discussion intended to illuminate Tintoretto's sources as well as his originality, and also to explore the historiographical and critical questions that have framed all previous discussion of Tintoretto's graphic work. Subsequent chapters explore Tintoretto's evolution as a draftsman and the role that drawings played in his artistic practice-both preparatory drawings for his paintings and the many studies after sculptures by Michelangelo and others-thus examining the use of drawings within the studio as well as teaching practices in the workshop. Later chapters focus on the changes to Tintoretto's style as he undertook ever larger commissions and accordingly began to manage a growing number of assistants, with special attention paid to Domenico Tintoretto, Palma Giovane, and other artists whose drawing style was infl uenced by their time working with the master. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Drawing in Tintoretto's Venice, opening at the Morgan Library& Museum, New York, in 2018 and travelling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in early 2019. All of the drawings in the exhibition are discussed and illustrated, and a checklist of the exhibition is also included in the volume, but the book is a far more widely ranging account of Tintoretto's drawings and a comprehensive account of his work as a draftsman.

Following the arc of Bellini's career, from his early devotional paintings to his later, occasionally secular works, this book offers an in-depth appreciation of the Venetian master who dominated the Early Renaissance. Featuring nearly every extant Bellini work, as well as those of his contemporaries, this book brims with gorgeous Renaissance art. Author Johannes Grave focuses on some of the artist's greatest works including Allegoria Sacra, the Brera Pieta, and the altarpiece of San Giobbe-to explore how Bellini excelled in tempera before mastering oil painting. Grave discusses how Bellini's precise lines, his delicate facial expressions, and the subtle effects of light and shadow were used in his religious paintings as well as his portraiture and late mythological depictions. This book examines Bellini's life, including his complex relationships with his father Jacopo, his brother Gentile, and his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna. It considers the original contexts of Bellini's works, and elucidates the ways in which these paintings were meant to be perceived. The book also links Bellini's devotional paintings with the poetic creations of his pupil Giorgione. An important contribution to the scholarship of Renaissance art, this masterful book reaffirms Bellini's status as one of Venice's greatest painters.

In this widely acclaimed work, James Ackerman considers in detail the buildings designed by Michelangelo in Florence and Rome--including the Medici Chapel, the Farnese Palace, the Basilica of St. Peter, and the Capitoline Hill. He then turns to an examination of the artist's architectural drawings, theory, and practice. As Ackerman points out, Michelangelo worked on many projects started or completed by other architects. Consequently this study provides insights into the achievements of the whole profession during the sixteenth century. The text is supplemented with 140 black-and-white illustrations and is followed by a scholarly catalog of Michelangelo's buildings that discusses chronology, authorship, and condition. For this second edition, Ackerman has made extensive revisions in the catalog to encompass new material that has been published on the subject since 1970.