A poetic new essay collection in which the symbols of the tarot brush up against life in a changing world. The Tarot de Marseille is a 15th-century set of playing cards, the deck on which the occult use of tarot was originally based. When Jessica Friedmann bought her first pack, the unfamiliar images sparked a deep immersion in the art, symbols, myths, and misrepresentations of Renaissance-era tarot. Over the years that followed, and as tarot became a part of her daily rhythm, Friedmann’s life was touched by floods and by drought, by devastating fires and a pandemic, creating an environment in which the only constant was change. Twenty-Two Impressions: notes from the Major Arcana uses the Tarot de Marseille as a touchstone, blending historical research, art history, and critical insights with personal reflections. In these essays, Friedmann demonstrates how the cards of the Major Arcana can be used as a lens through which to examine the unexpectedness — and subtle beauty — of 21st-century life.

In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes - her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.

Campbell and Cole, respected teachers and active researchers, draw on traditional and current scholarship to present complex interpretations in this new edition of their engaging account of Italian Renaissance art. The book's unique decade-by-decade structure is easy to follow, and permits the authors to tell the story of art not only in the great centres of Rome, Florence and Venice, but also in a range of other cities and sites throughout Italy, including more in this edition from Naples, Padua and Palermo. This approach allows the artworks to take centre-stage, in contrast to the book's competitors, which are organized by location or by artist. Other updates for this edition include an expanded first chapter on the Trecento, and a new `Techniques and Materials' appendix that explains and illustrates all of the major art-making processes of the period. Richly illustrated with high-quality reproductions and new photography of recent restorations, it presents the classic canon of Renaissance painting and sculpture in full, while expanding the scope of conventional surveys by offering a more thorough coverage of architecture, decorative and domestic arts, and print media.

Dress became a testing ground for masculine ideals in Renaissance Italy. With the establishment of the ducal regime in Florence in 1530, there was increasing debate about how to be a nobleman. Was fashionable clothing a sign of magnificence or a source of mockery? Was the graceful courtier virile or effeminate? How could a man dress for court without bankrupting himself? This book explores the whole story of clothing, from the tailor's workshop to spectacular court festivities, to show how the male nobility in one of Italy's main textile production centers used their appearances to project social, sexual, and professional identities. Sixteenth-century male fashion is often associated with swagger and ostentation but this book shows that Florentine clothing reflected manhood at a much deeper level, communicating a very Italian spectrum of male virtues and vices, from honor, courage, and restraint to luxury and excess. Situating dress at the heart of identity formation, Currie traces these codes through an array of sources, including unpublished archival records, surviving garments, portraiture, poetry, and personal correspondence between the Medici and their courtiers. Addressing important themes such as gender, politics, and consumption, Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence sheds fresh light on the sartorial culture of the Florentine court and Italy as a whole.

"Medieval renaissance Baroque" celebrates Marilyn Aronberg Lavin's breakthrough achievements in both the print and digital realms of art and cultural history. Fifteen friends and colleagues present tributes and essays that reflect every facet of this renowned scholar's brilliant career. Tribute presenters include Ellen Burstyn, Langdon Hammer, Phyllis Lambert, and James Marrow. Contributors include Kirk Alexander, Horst Bredekamp, Nicola Courtright, David Freedberg, Jack Freiberg, Marc Fumaroli, David A. Levine, Daniel T. Michaels, Elizabeth Pilliod, Debra Pincus, and Gary Schwartz. 79 illustrations, bibliography of Marilyn Lavin's works, index.

A fascinating collection of writings from the great polymath of the Italian Renaissaince, Leonardo da Vinci. There are sections covering the great man's thoughts on life, art and science. Maurice Baring trawled the available manuscripts to distil da Vinci's writings on these subjects into a single, accessible tome, which will be of interest to students of da Vinci, the Renaissance and the history of both art and science.

Humanism is usually thought to come to England in the early sixteenth century. In this book, however, Daniel Wakelin uncovers the almost unknown influences of humanism on English literature in the preceding hundred years. He considers the humanist influences on the reception of some of Chaucer's work and on the work of important authors such as Lydgate, Bokenham, Caxton, and Medwall, and in many anonymous or forgotten translations, political treatises, and documents from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. At the heart of his study is a consideration of William Worcester, the fifteenth-century scholar.
Wakelin can trace the influence of humanism much earlier than was thought, because he examines evidence in manuscripts and early printed books of the English study and imitation of antiquity, in polemical marginalia on classical works, and in the ways in which people copied and shared classical works and translations. He also examines how various English works were shaped by such reading habits and, in turn, how those English works reshaped the reading habits of the wider community. Humanism thus, contrary to recent strictures against it, appears not as 'top-down' dissemination, but as a practical process of give-and-take between writers and readers. Humanism thus also prompts writers to imagine their potential readerships in ways which challenge them to re-imagine the political community and the intellectual freedom of the reader. Our views both of the fifteenth century and of humanist literature in English are transformed.

For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge, and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo, is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.