In this book, Douglas Biow analyzes Vasari's Lives of the Artists - often considered the first great work of art history in the modern era - from a new perspective. He focuses on key words and shows how they address a variety of compelling, culturally determined ideas circulating in late Renaissance Italy. The keywords chosen for this study investigate five seemingly divergent, yet still interconnected, ideas. What does it mean to have a 'profession', professione, and possess 'genius', ingegno, in the visual arts? How is 'speed', prestezza, valued among visual artists of the period and how is 'time', tempo, conceptualized in Vasari's narrative and descriptions of visual art? Finally, how is the 'night', notte, conceived and visually represented as a distinct span of time in The Lives? Written in an engaging manner for specialists and non-specialists alike, Vasari's Words places the Lives - a truly foundational and innovative book of Western culture - within the context of the modern discipline of intellectual history.

Explores the deployment of racial thinking and racial formations in the visual culture of the pre-modern world.   The capacious visual archive studied in this volume includes a trove of materials such as annotated or illuminated manuscripts, Renaissance costume books and travel books, maps and cartographic volumes produced by Europeans as well as Indigenous peoples, mass-printed pamphlets, jewelry, decorative arts, religious iconography, paintings from around the world, ceremonial objects, festival books, and play texts intended for live performance. Contributors explore the deployment of what coeditor Noémie Ndiaye calls “the racial matrix� and its interconnected paradigms across the medieval and early modern chronological divide and across vast transnational and multilingual geographies. This volume uses items from the Fall 2023 exhibition “Seeing Race Before Race�—a collaboration between RaceB4Race and the Newberry Library—as a starting point for an ambitious theoretical conversation between premodern race studies, art history, performance studies, book history, and critical race theory.

The Italian Renaissance is a pivotal episode in the history of Western culture. Artists such as Masaccio, Donatello, and Fra Angelico created some of the most influential and exciting works in a variety of artistic fields at this time. Evelyn Welch presents a fresh picture of this period in the light of new scholarship and by recreating the experience of contemporary Italians - the patrons, the viewing public and the artists. The book discusses a wide range of works from across Italy, examines the issues of materials, workshop practices and artist-patron relationships, and explores the ways in which visual imagery related to contemporary sexual, social and political behaviour.

This book breaks new ground by illuminating the key role of verse-writing as a cultural strategy on the part of Italian Renaissance artists. It does so by undertaking a wide-ranging study of poems by painters, sculptors, architects, and goldsmiths who were active in Florence under Cosimo I and Francesco I de' Medici - a milieu in which many practitioners of the visual arts appropriated the literary medium to address issues related to their primary professions. New Apelleses, and New Apollos intervenes in the burgeoning scholarly discourse on the intellectual life of artists in early modern Italy, revealing how poetry often provides fresh insights into art-theoretical debates, patronage questions, workshop cultures, issues of professional identity, and networks of personal relations.

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.

Lorenzo de' Medici: The embodiment of Florence's most powerful family, a brutal man who ruled the city with an iron fist, whilst protecting it from the shifting mire of Italian politics. Fra Girolamo Savonarola: An unprepossessing provincial monk whose sermons, filled with Old Testament fury, resonated with the disenfranchised population of the city. The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events - including a mighty foreign invasion, trial by fire, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', terrible executions and mysterious deaths - featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.

In this influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance, Burckhardt explores the political and psychological forces that marked the beginning of the modern world.

In 1508, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The thirty-three-year-old Michelangelo had very little experience of the physically and technically taxing art of fresco; and, at twelve thousand square feet, the ceiling represented one of the largest such projects ever attempted. Nevertheless, for the next four years he and a hand-picked team of assistants laboured over the vast ceiling, making thousands of drawings and spending back-breaking hours on a scaffold fifty feet above the floor. The result was one of the greatest masterpieces of all time. This fascinating book tells the story of those four extraordinary years and paints a magnificent picture of day-to-day life on the Sistine scaffolding - and outside, in the upheaval of early sixteenth-century Rome.

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) is arguably the first truly international artist, a celebrity both during his own lifetime and since. A major artist of the northern Renaissance, he was praised by his contemporaries and described shortly after his death as 'the prince among German painters'. Durer's achievements as a painter were matched by his remarkable manipulation of the traditional techniques of woodcut and engraving, which altered the history of printmaking and ensured that his works were admired and collected throughout Europe. The British Museum holds one of the finest collections of Durer's graphic art in the world, with superlative prints and drawings from all phases of his career. Beginning with an introduction to the life of the artist, the book presents a selection of Durer's best-known works including early figure studies, landscape watercolours, animal studies drawn from nature and his imaginative famous prints such as Adam and Eve, Rhinoceros and Melancholia. As well as demonstrating Durer's astonishing range of subject matter, the book explores his working method and the versatile, spontaneous nature of his draughtsmanship. The development of Durer's ideas from drawings to related woodcuts and engravings is also investigated, making the book a perfect concise introduction to this fascinating and much-admired artist.

Architect and engraver Paul Letarouilly dedicated more than 30 years of his life to creating the most complete collection of plans, elevations, and details of the buildings and monuments of Renaissance Rome. This student's edition of his achievement features highlights from five massive volumes, originally published between 1825 and 1882. Its systematic overview illustrates the principles of design behind the works of Michelangelo, Sangallo, Peruzzi, Vignola, Bramante, Bernini, Fontana, dalla Porta, Maderno, Borromini, and other great builders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Letarouilly's engravings, which illustrate the translation of the principles behind classical architecture into the new age of the Renaissance, served as a major source of inspiration from the moment of their publication, and they remain standard references to this day. This edition includes informative text by classical architect and scholar John Barrington Bayley that offers insights into the architecture of Rome's palaces, villas, and squares as well as St. Peter's and the Vatican. Ideal for students of classical, Renaissance, and Roman architecture, this affordable volume also constitutes a useful guide for visitors to Rome.

Although his popularity is eclipsed by Rembrandt today, Peter Paul Rubens was revered by his contemporaries as the greatest painter of his era, if not of all history. His undeniable artistic genius, bolstered by a modest disposition and a reputation as a man of tact and discretion, made him a favorite among monarchs and political leaders across Europe--and gave him the perfect cover for the clandestine activities that shaped the landscape of seventeenth-century politics.
In "Master of Shadows," Mark Lamster brilliantly recreates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of Rubens's time, following the painter from Antwerp to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome and providing an insightful exploration of Rubens's art as well as the private passions that influenced it.

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.

After classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance raised the portrait, whether literary or pictorial, to the status of an important art form. Among sixteenth-century Renaissance painters, Titian made his reputation, and much of his living, by portraiture. Titian's portraits were promoted by his friend, Pietro Aretino, an eminent poet and critic, who addressed his letters and sonnets to the same personages whom Titian portrayed. In many of these letters (which often included sonnets), Aretino described both an individual patron and Titian's portrait of that patron, thus stimulating the reciprocal relation between a verbal and pictorial portrait. By investigating this unprecedented historical phenomenon, Luba Freedman elucidates the meaning conveyed by the portrait as an artistic form in Renaissance Italy.

Fusing iconographical analysis of the most famous Titian portraits with rhetorical analysis of Aretino's literary legacy as compared to contemporary reactions, Freedman demonstrates that it is due to Titian's many portraits and to Aretino's repeated simultaneous writings about them that the portrait ceased being primarily a social-historical document, preserving the sitter's likeness for posterity. It gradually became, as it is today, a work of art, the artist's invention, which gives its viewer an aesthetic pleasure.

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.

Quinten Massys’ An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’) is one of the Renaissance’s most famous faces. In a fresh review of the iconic image, this book unveils the painting’s original context: its status as a pioneering work of satirical art, its debt to Leonardo da Vinci’s grotesque drawings, and what it tells us about the period’s complex attitudes towards women, age and normative beauty.  The painting and its partner, An Old Man, are parodic portraits that mock the supposed lust and vanity of older women. Yet a closer look also reveals a figure defiantly flouting conventions and a painter subverting artistic expectations.  The publication traces the eventful afterlife and enduring power of this seminal image: how she gained her nickname ‘The Ugly Duchess’ and inspired John Tenniel’s much-loved illustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), capturing the imagination of generations of readers.  Published by National Gallery Global/Distributed by Yale University Press  Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery, London, 16 March–11 June 2023