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 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.

Raffaello Borghini's Il Riposo (1584) is the most widely known Florentine document on the subject of the Counter-Reformation content of religious paintings. Despite its reputation as an art-historical text, this is the first English-language translation of Il Riposo to be published. A distillation of the art gossip that was a feature of the Medici Grand Ducal court, Borghini's treatise puts forth simple criteria for judging the quality of a work of art. Published sixteen years after the second edition of Giorgio Vasari's Vite, the text that set the standard for art-historical writing during the period, Il Riposo focuses on important issues that Vasari avoided, ignored, or was oblivious to. Picking up where Vasari left off, Borghini deals with artists who came after Michaelangelo and provides more comprehensive descriptions of artists who Vasari only touched upon such as Tintoretto, Veronese, Barocci, and the artists of Francesco I's Studiolo. This text is also invaluable as a description of the mid-sixteenth century reaction against the style of the 'maniera,' which stressed the representation of self-consciously convoluted figures in complicated works of art.The first art treatise specifically directed toward non-practitioners, Il Riposo gives unique insight into the early stages of art history as a discipline, late Renaissance art and theory, and the Counter-Reformation in Italy.

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.