In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical investigations, this book challenges basic assumptions about the way early modern artists and theorists represented their relationship to the visible world and how they understood these representations. By analyzing technical feats such as anamorphosis (the perspectival distortion of an object to make it viewable only from a certain angle), drawing machines, and printed diagrams, each chapter highlights the moments when perspective theorists failed to unite a singular, ideal viewpoint with the artist’s or viewer’s viewpoint or were unsuccessful at conjoining fictive and lived space. Showing how these “failures” were subsequently incorporated rather than rejected by perspective theorists, the book presents an important reassessment of the standard view of Renaissance perspective. While many scholars have maintained that perspective rationalized the relationships among optics, space, and painting, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies asserts instead that Renaissance and early modern theorists often revealed a disjunction between geometrical ideals and practical applications. In some cases, they not only identified but also exploited these discrepancies. This discussion of perspective shows that the painter’s geometry did not always conform to the explicitly rational, Cartesian formula that so many have assumed, nor did it historically unfold according to a standard account of scientific development.

A provocative account of the philosophical problem of 'difference' in art history, Tintoretto's Difference offers a new reading of this pioneering 16th century painter, drawing upon the work of the 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Bringing together philosophical, art historical, art theoretical and art historiographical analysis, it is the first book-length study in English of Tintoretto for nearly two decades and the first in-depth exploration of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy for the understanding of early modern art and for the discipline of art history. With a focus on Deleuze's important concept of the diagram, Tintoretto's Difference positions the artist's work within a critical study of both art history's methods, concepts and modes of thought, and some of the fundamental dimensions of its scholarly practice: context, tradition, influence, and fact. Indicating potentials of the diagrammatic for art historical thinking across the registers of semiotics, aesthetics, and time, Tintoretto's Difference offers at once an innovative study of this seminal artist, an elaboration of Deleuze's philosophy of the diagram, and a new avenue for a philosophical art history.

In From Giotto to Botticelli, Julia Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell explore the three-hundred-year rise and fall of the Humiliati (“Humbled Ones”), a religious order infamous for its attempt to assassinate Saint Carlo Borromeo and ultimately suppressed, by papal bull, in 1571. This book focuses on the order’s artistic patronage and considers the major works by artists such as Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio that the Humiliati commissioned for the Church of the Ognissanti in Florence. Miller and Taylor-Mitchell reveal how the Humiliati promoted their public image through the visual arts and examine the themes and ideas in these works. The Humiliati have received remarkably little scholarly attention to date, in part because of their suppression and eradication by the Church. This is one of the first comprehensive historical studies of this important religious order and the central role the Humiliati played in the history of Italian art. From Giotto to Botticelli will appeal not only to art historians but also to scholars of history, religion, and cultural studies, as well as to members of the general public.

Not unlike their European forebears, Americans have historically held Italian Renaissance paintings in the highest possible regard, never allowing works by or derived from Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian to fall from favor. The ten essays in A Market for Merchant Princes trace the progression of American collectors’ taste for Italian Renaissance masterpieces from the antebellum era, through the Gilded Age, to the later twentieth century. By focusing variously on issues of supply and demand, reliance on advisers, the role of travel, and the civic-mindedness of American collectors from the antebellum years through the post–World War II era, the authors bring alive the passions of individual collectors while chronicling the development of their increasingly sophisticated sensibilities. In almost every case, the collectors on whom these essays concentrate founded institutions that would make the art they had acquired accessible to the public, such as the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Walters Art Gallery, The Frick Collection, and the John and Mable Ringling Museum. The contributors to the volume are Jaynie Anderson, Andrea Bayer, Edgar Peters Bowron, Virginia Brilliant, David Alan Brown, Clay M. Dean, Frederick Ilchman, Tiffany Johnston, Stanley Mazaroff, and Jennifer Tonkovich.