Tracing the history of St. Antoninus' cult and burial from the time of his death in 1459 until his remains were moved to their final resting place in 1589, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that the saint's relic cult was a key element of Florence's sacred cityscape. The works of art created in his honor, as well as the rituals practiced at his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century places of burial, advertised Antoninus' saintly power and persona to the people who depended upon his intercessory abilities to negotiate life's challenges. Drawing on a rich variety of contemporary visual, literary, and archival sources, this volume explores the ways in which shifting political, familial, and ecclesiastical aims and agendas shaped the ways in which St. Antoninus' holiness was broadcast to those who visited his burial church. Author Sally Cornelison foregrounds the visual splendor of the St. Antoninus Chapel, which was designed, built, and decorated by Medici court artist Giambologna and his collaborators between 1579 and 1591. Her research sheds new light on the artist, whose secular and mythological sculptures have received far more scholarly attention than his religious works. Cornelison draws on social and religious history, patronage and gender studies, and art historical and anthropological inquiries into the functions and meanings of images, relics, and ritual performance, to interpret how they activated St. Antoninus' burial sites and defined them in ways that held multivalent meanings for a broad audience of viewers and devotees. Among the objects for which she provides visual and contextual analyses are a banner from the saint's first tomb, early printed and painted images, and the sculptures, frescoes, panel paintings, and embroidered textiles made for the present St. Antoninus Chapel.

Prints changed the history of art, even as that history was first being written. In this study, Sharon Gregory argues that this reality was not lost on Vasari; she shows that, contrary to common opinion, prints thoroughly pervade Vasari's history of art, just as they pervade his own career as an artist. This volume examines Giorgio Vasari's interest, as an art historian and as an artist, in engravings and woodblock prints, shedding new light not only on aspects of Vasari's career, but also on aspects of sixteenth-century artistic culture and artistic practice. It is the first book to study his interest in prints from this dual perspective. Investigating how prints were themselves more often interpretive than strictly reproductive, Gregory challenges the long-held view that Vasari's reliance on prints led to errors in his interpretation of major monuments. She demonstrates how, like Raphael and later artists, Vasari used engravings after his designs as a form of advertisement through which he hoped to increase his fame and attract influential patrons. She also explores how contributing illustrations for books by his scholarly friends, Vasari participated in the contemporary exchange of intellectual ideas and concerns shared by Renaissance humanists and artists.

Isabella d'Este, the marchioness of Mantua, was a collector of antiquities, a patron of art, and one of the most vivid personalities of the Italian Renaissance. Her artistic relationship with Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) is charted through the letters that they exchanged over the course of about six years. Beginning in late 1499, Leonardo spent several months in Mantua, where he met Isabella and produced a finished portrait drawing of her. In the years that followed, the marchioness wrote to the artist to ask him to undertake other paintings and projects. Though little came of these requests, da Vinci did produce a drawing of some classical hard-stone vases to assist her search for collectible antiques and also started work on a painting of Christ as a twelve-year-old boy at her request. The story of their relationship is explored in depth for the first time in Isabella and Leonardo. This illuminating story raises interesting and important questions about relationships between artists and patrons, and about women as art patrons at the beginning of the 16th century.

Decorated by Giovanni Buonconsiglio, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo, the church of the former Benedictine female monastery Santi Cosma e Damiano occupies an outstanding position in Venice. The author of this study argues that from its foundation in 1481 to its dissolution in 1805, Santi Cosma e Damiano was a reform convent, and that its nuns employed art and architecture as a means to actively express their specific religious concerns. While on the one hand focusing, on the basis of extensive archival research, on the reconstruction of the history and construction of the convent, this study's larger concern is with the religious reform movement, its ideas concerning art and architecture, and with the convent as a space for female self-realization in early modern Venice.

Titian, Colonna and the Renaissance Science of Procreation demonstrates that two major monuments of Italian Renaissance culture - Bellini's and Titian's famous series of mytho-poetical paintings for the camerino of Duke Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, and Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili - were conceived as mnemonic or pedagogical devices aimed at educating the reader/beholder in the medical science of reproductive physiology and the maintenance of sexual health. It is further argued that the learned courtier Mario Equicola, who conceived the pictorial program of Duke Alfonso's camerino, had read Colonna's text and was extensively inspired by its prior literary argument. The study is organized in two parts, intimately interrelated. The first part is a study of Alfonso d'Este's camerino, with a general introduction, individual chapters on each of Bellini's and Titian's four pictorial "bacchanals," and a conclusion proposing a new and more accurate reconstruction of the layout of the room, also including a completely new way of interpreting the ensemble. The second part of the study concerns Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, again beginning with its own introductory essay and advancing a completely new interpretation of the text. The brief conclusion brings the insights of the two sections together, clarifying the historical relationship between the pictorial and literary works and explaining their larger cultural significance. Emphasizing Equicola's use of the Hypnerotomachia as a model for pictorial invention, the author reveals how Titian's remarkably sensuous paintings and Colonna's erotically-charged romance are related by their common reference to the neo-Aristotelian medical theory of the "libidinal seasons," and by corollary themes of marriage and sexual consummation. This peculiar intersection of cultural themes came to prominence in the context of a courtly world in which medical science was increasingly brought to bear on the problem of dynastic continuity. While the book thus makes a major contribution to historical and art-historical inquiry into Renaissance notions of sexuality, it also relates this theme to the question of masculine identity and fatherhood, the histories of sexuality and marriage, and the interpretation of courtly art and literature as instruments of political or dynastic ideology. In addition, by grafting together the methods of advanced iconographic philology with those of comparative literature, the author provides a new methodological model that could be applied to other cultural monuments.

Concentrating largely on the 'middle ranks' of society in Renaissance Italy - artisans, merchants, and professionals such as bankers and lawyers - this book focuses on new social subjects, new documents and unusual objects. Using innovative methods of inquiry and interdisciplinary analytical tools, contributors explore a little-known but pervasive erotic culture in which sexually explicit artefacts, games and gestures were considered essential to a number of rituals and social occasions. At the same time, they demonstrate how a burgeoning market for erotica, along with a cultural tradition of allusion and innuendo, played an increasingly important role in the Italian peninsula between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This volume fills some pervasive lacunae in both Renaissance studies and the history of sexuality through a series of critical engagements with material culture and social custom. It reflects recent scholarly interest in interdisciplinary areas such as the material Renaissance, visual communications, urban sociability in the domestic context, and court records regarding marital disputes.

Ideal painting in the Renaissance was an art of illusionism that eliminated for the viewer any overt sense of its making. Titian's paintings, in contrast, with their roughly worked and "open" surfaces, unexpected glazes, and thick impasto brushstrokes, made the fact of the paint increasingly visible. Previous scholars have read these paintings as unfinished or the product of lesser studio hands, but in The Muddied Mirror, Jodi Cranston argues that this approach to paint is integral to Titian's later work. Rather than presenting in paint a precise reflection of the visible world, the artist imparted an intrinsic corporeality to his subjects through the varying mass and thickness of the paint. It is precisely the materiality and "disfiguration" of these paintings that offer us the key to understanding their meanings. More important, the subjects of Titian's late paintings are directly related to the materiality of the body--they represent physical changes wrought through violence, metamorphosis, and desire.

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia--three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man's perceptions--and the course of Western history.
In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering Leonardo to be Borgia's chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages, and hill towns of the Italian Romagna--the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli's""frequent dispatches and Leonardo's meticulous notebooks.
Superbly written and thoroughly researched, "The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior" is a work of narrative genius--whose subject is the nature of genius itself.

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe offers a chronological account of political engagement in works by the early modern Northern European painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders. Offering fresh interpretations of canonical paintings, Margaret Carroll illustrates how these artists registered their pictorial responses to the political events and debates of their day. The imagery of gender and power was often intertwined with these debates. Considering a range of works, including Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs, and Rubens's Life of Marie de Medicis series, Carroll examines the ways in which these Netherlandish painters seized on that imagery and creatively transformed it into the materials of art.

The narrative follows the way painters responded to the emergence of "modern" theories of politics and natural law from the classical and medieval tradition. Carroll begins by addressing paintings that identify the natural order with consensual social relations in a stable political hierarchy, then turns to paintings that stress the struggle for mastery in a perilous and unstable world. These paintings may be valued not merely as historical artifacts of a bygone era but as interventions in a cultural discourse that continues to this day.

For nearly three centuries Leonardo da Vinci's work was known primarily through the abridged version of his Treatise on Painting, first published in Paris in 1651 and soon translated into all the major European languages. Here for the first time is a study that examines the historical reception of this vastly influential text. This collection charts the varied interpretations of Leonardo's ideas in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Greek, and Polish speaking environments where the Trattato was an important resource for the academic instruction of artists, one of the key sources drawn upon by art theorists, and widely read by a diverse network of artists, architects, biographers, natural philosophers, translators, astronomers, publishers, engineers, theologians, aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and collectors. The cross-cultural approach employed here demonstrates that Leonardo's Treatise on Painting is an ideal case study through which to chart the institutionalization of art in Europe and beyond for 400 years. The volume includes original essays by scholars studying a wide variety of national and institutional settings. The coherence of the volume is established by the shared subject matter and interpretative aim: to understand how Leonardo's ideas were used. With its focus on the active reception of an important text overlooked in studies of the artist's solitary genius, the collection takes Leonardo studies to a new level of historical inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci's most significant contribution to Western art was his interpretation of painting as a science grounded in geometry and direct observation of nature. One of the most important questions to emerge from this study is, what enabled the same text to produce so many different styles of painting?

In Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique, Giancarlo Fiorenza draws on a wealth of rarely studied primary source material to present the work of the Ferrarese court artist Dosso Dossi in a new light. The artist, who worked mainly for Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara, is celebrated for his mythological paintings that spoke to the courtly imagination. Fiorenza focuses on Dosso's highly allusive and eloquent portrayal of ancient and vernacular subjects found in such well-known works as Jupiter Painting Butterflies, Myth of Pan, Enchantress, and his frescoes of Aesop's fables.

Dosso's art challenges conventional iconographic analysis, and Fiorenza considers how the poetics governing his imagery recasts literary sources, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, by magnifying their most pictorial components. Perhaps more compellingly than any of his contemporaries, Dosso's paintings transformed courtly ideals and princely identity into a new sensual spirit.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) proudly described his monumental painting Prometheus Bound as first among "the flower of my stock." This singular work demonstrates how Rubens engaged with and responded to his predecessors Michelangelo and Titian, with whom he shared an interest in depictions of physical torment. The Wrath of the Gods offers an in-depth case study of the Flemish artist's creative process and aesthetic, while also demonstrating why this particular painting has appealed to viewers over time. Many scholars have elaborated on Rubens's affinity for Titian, but his connection to Michelangelo has received far less attention. This study presents a new interpretation of Prometheus Bound, showing how Rubens created parallels between the pagan hero Prometheus and Michelangelo's Risen Christ from the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment. Christopher D. M. Atkins expands our understanding of artistic transmission by elucidating how Rubens synthesized the works he saw in Italy, Spain, and his native Antwerp, and how Prometheus Bound in turn influenced Dutch, Flemish, and Italian artists. By emulating Rubens's composition, these artists circulated it throughout Europe, broadening its influence from his day to ours. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art (09/12/15-12/06/15)

Expanding interdisciplinary investigations into gender and material culture, Katherine A. McIver here adds a new dimension to Renaissance patronage studies by considering domestic art - the decoration of the domestic interior - as opposed to patronage of the fine arts (painting, sculpture and architecture). Taking a multidimensional approach, McIver looks at women as collectors of precious material goods, as organizers of the early modern home, and as decorators of its interior. By analyzing the inventories of women's possessions, McIver considers the wide range of domestic objects that women owned, such as painted and inlaid chests, painted wall panels, tapestries, fine fabrics for wall and bed hangings, and elaborate jewelry (pendant earrings, brooches, garlands for the hair, necklaces and rings) as well as personal devotional objects. Considering all forms of patronage opportunities open to women, she evaluates their role in commissioning and utilizing works of art and architecture as a means of negotiating power in the court setting, in the process offering fresh insights into their lives, limitations, and the possibilities open to them as patrons. Using her subjects' financial records to track their sources of income and the circumstances under which it was spent, McIver thereby also provides insights into issues of Renaissance women's economic rights and responsibilities. The primary focus on the lives and patronage patterns of three relatively unknown women, Laura Pallavicina-Sanvitale, Giacoma Pallavicina and Camilla Pallavicina, provides a new model for understanding what women bought, displayed, collected and commissioned. By moving beyond the traditional artistic centers of Florence, Venice and Rome, analyzing instead women's artistic patronage in the feudal courts around Parma and Piacenza during the sixteenth century, McIver nuances our understanding of women's position and power both in and out of the home. Carefully integrating extensive archival

The immense effect that Michelangelo had on many artists working in the sixteenth century is widely acknowledged by historians of Italian Renaissance art. Yet until recently greater stress has been placed on the individuality of these artists' styles and interpretation rather than on the elucidation of their debts to others. There has been little direct focus on the ways in which later sixteenth-century artists actually confronted Michelangelo, or how those areas or aspects of their artistic production that are most closely related to his reveal their attitudes and responses to Michelangelo's work. Reactions to the Master presents the first coherent study of the influence exerted by Michelangelo's work in painting and sculpture on artists of the late-Renaissance period including Alessandro Allori, Agnolo Bronzino, Battista Franco, Francesco Parmigianino, Jacopo Pontormo, Francesco Salviati, Raphael, Giorgio Vasari, Marcello Venusti, and Alessandro Vittoria. The essays focus on the direct relations, such as copies and borrowings, previously underrated by art historians, but which here form significant keys to understanding the aesthetic attitudes and broader issues of theory advanced at the time.

Der Basler Druckerverleger Pietro Perna legte mit seiner zwischen 1575 und 1578 gedruckten Neuausgabe der Schriften des italienischen Historikers Paolo Giovio ein fur die Entwicklung des fruhneuzeitlichen Portratbuchs paradigmatisches Werk vor. Mehr als 200 Portratkopien - gerissen vom oberrheinischen Kunstler Tobias Stimmer - zieren die Bande der aufwendigen Schmuckedition. Mit ihnen verband sich das Versprechen einer 'UEbersetzung' von Giovios beruhmter Sammlung in das gedruckte Buch. Die Studie untersucht Stimmers Bildnisse im Zusammenhang mit zeitgenoessischen Portrattheorien und Authentizitatskonzepten sowie mit verlegerischen Vermarktungs- und Inszenierungsstrategien. Dabei wird die Spur der Portrats als kulturhistorische Sammlungsobjekte und Kopiervorlagen bis in die Neuzeit hinein verfolgt.

Die Studie verbindet einen monographischen mit einem systematischen Ansatz: Ausgehend von einer umfassenden Analyse des Werks des Florentiner Kunstlers Lodovico Cigoli (1559-1613) untersucht sie die Bedingungen kunstlerischen Schaffens um 1600 - einer Zeit, die durch die Gegenreformation, aber auch durch den Wandel traditioneller Naturauffassungen gepragt war. Cigolis Fresko des durchkraterten "Galileo-Monds" in der roemischen Kirche Santa Maria Maggiore ist nur ein Beispiel fur sein Bestreben, konkurrierende Wahrheitsanspruche von Seiten der Theologen, Historiker, Naturforscher, Philosophen und Kunsttheoretiker auszubalancieren und neue Darstellungsformen zu erproben. Zentral ist dabei das Konzept der veritas historica, die haufig in Konflikt mit anderen Anspruchen an Bilder geriet. Gedruckt mit Unterstutzung der VG Wort und der Gerda Henkel Stiftung.

1936 stellte der Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph Edgar Wind sein Manuskript zu Michelangelos Deckenfresken der Sixtinischen Kapelle fertig. Wind begriff den christlichen Erloesungsgedanken als fundamentales Thema des gesamten Raumes und erkannte ein polares Beziehungsgeflecht, welches ihm das Bildprogramm vollstandig erschloss. Methodische Ansatze Aby Warburgs aufnehmend, dessen Mitarbeiter Wind in Hamburg war, analysierte er die Themenwahl Michelangelos. Obwohl fertiggestellt, wurde das Werk nie veroeffentlicht. Es liegt nun erstmals in gedruckter Fassung vor, begleitet von einem ausfuhrlichen Nachwort des Herausgebers.

"Roman Charity" investigates the iconography of the breastfeeding daughter from the perspective of queer sexuality and erotic maternity. The volume explores the popularity of a topic that appealed to early modern observers for its eroticizing shock value, its ironic take on the concept of Catholic "charity", and its implied critique of patriarchal power structures. It analyses why early modern viewers found an incestuous, adult breastfeeding scene "good to think with" and aims at expanding and queering our notions of early modern sexuality. Jutta Gisela Sperling discusses the different visual contexts in which "Roman Charity" flourished and reconstructs contemporary horizons of expectation by reference to literary sources, medical practice, and legal culture.

Richly illustrated, and featuring detailed descriptions of works by pivotal figures in the Italian Renaissance, this enlightening volume traces the development of art and architecture throughout the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. * A smart, elegant, and jargon-free analysis of the Italian Renaissance what it was, what it means, and why we should study it * Provides a sustained discussion of many great works of Renaissance art that will significantly enhance readers understanding of the period * Focuses on Renaissance art and architecture as it developed throughout the Italian peninsula, from Venice to Sicily * Situates the Italian Renaissance in the wider context of the history of art * Includes detailed interpretation of works by a host of pivotal Renaissance artists, both well and lesser known

The Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace houses a fascinating variety of collected objects from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. It owes its unique collection of plain and ornate tools, for example, to the founder of the Kunstkammer, Elector August (1526-1586). They range from gardening equipment to goldsmithing, carpentry and ironworking tools and even to so-called Brechzeugen (tools for prising or breaking things open). In addition, the museum guide presents elaborately decorated art-room cabinets, two richly embellished Augsburg cabinets, tables inlaid with iridescent mother-of-pearl, precious board games, and musical instruments alongside filigree woodturned pieces, items of decorative art, and objects from distant cultures. Numerous previously unpublished masterpieces from the Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace

This exhibition, being held at the musee du Louvre in Paris, and its catalogue follow those dedicated to Florentine sculpture in the early Renaissance, 1400-1460, that took place in 2013-14 (Le Printemps de la Renaissance). The period scrutinised is 1460-1520 but the geographical coordinates are widened to include Northern Italy (Venice, Milan, Pavia, Padua, Bologna) and Rome as the artistic landscape of Italy becomes more complex. Some of the great sculptors, in fact, travelled and their style and their ideas influenced pre-existing local tradition. These new artistic languages share a common characteristic: the relationship to Greco-Roman Antiquity, especially in the representation of grace and passion: the expression of pathos and the theatrical quality of religious works, the symbolic richness of profane works and finally the development of a new and refined style which will find its highest expression in Roman classicism and in the work of Michelangelo. The catalogue includes the works of, among others, Donatello, Antonio Pollaiolo, Bertoldo di Giovanni, Giovanfrancesco Rustici, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Guido Mazzoni, Bartolomeo Bellano, Cristoforo Solari, Tullio Lombardo, Andrea Riccio, and Bambaia, Sansovino, and Michelangelo. Text in Italian.

Petrarch intensively examined the visual arts of his time. He possessed a Madonna painting by Giotto and commissioned Simone Martini to create the unique frontispiece of his codex on Vergil. His works are key texts with respect to the discovery of the landscape and humanistic villa culture as well as the female portrait and the triumphant iconography of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The myth of the poet-prince associated with Petrarch has continued to offer a productive projection screen for both literati and artists up to modern times. The texts in the book open up new perspectives on central aspects of Petrarch's life and work and his importance as a charismatic phenomenon in the history of European art in a dialogue between literary studies and art history.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) brought the quality of coloring in copperplate engraving and the woodcut to new levels. Print interpretations of paintings made under his direction were a watershed in the development of printmaking as a medium. Relying on a range of carefully selected examples, this book presents an analysis of each step in the printmaking production technique Rubens used in making prints based on his paintings. In addition to woodcuts and copperplate engravings, the specimens examined include oil sketches, paintings, drawings, modellos, and corrected test prints. Like the editions on French and Italian printmaking, the book also includes a complete section on sources organized by topic.

Zar Peter der Grosse legte 1714 nahe St. Petersburg den Grundstein zu Schloss Peterhof, dem "russischen Versailles", das zwei Jahrhunderte lang als Sommerresidenz der Zaren diente. Wahrend die Schlossbauten im Zweiten Weltkrieg beinahe vollstandig zerstoert wurden und bis heute aufwendig rekonstruiert werden, gelang es, viele der Kunst- und Ausstattungsgegenstande des Palastkomplexes zu evakuieren. Der Katalog stellt mit zahlreichen Abbildungen und Textbeitragen die im Augsburger Schaezlerpalais erstmals in Deutschland gezeigte Auswahl von weit uber 100 original erhaltenen Objekten russischer und westeuropaischer Provenienz aus Schloss Peterhof vor. Sie umfasst samtliche Gattungen der Kunst und des Kunsthandwerks und spiegelt damit die hoefische Kunst und Wohnkultur des 18. Jahrhunderts.

Aktuelle Perspektive auf Palladio Weltweit werden Architekturen darauf getrimmt, mediale Aufmerksamkeit auf sich zu ziehen. Palladio, der bedeutendste Architekt der Renaissance, steht am Anfang dieses Trends: Seine Architekturbilder basieren auf dem Vorrang der orthogonalen Projektion. Das Entwerfen und das Darstellen sind davon durchdrungen - dies wird nicht nur im Falle der Abbildungen seiner Vier Bucher, sondern auch bei seinen realisierten Gebauden selbst anschaulich. Aus dieser Perspektive lassen sich viele, stark diskutierte Arbeiten Palladios neu verstehen. Der Autor analysiert das gebaute Werk in diesem Sinne und zeigt: Sowohl im Inneren wie im AEusseren pragt die Frontalitat des Betrachterstandpunkts massgeblich den architektonischen Entwurf und in der Folge auch die Raumwirkung. Palladios grosse Wirkung ist unbestritten, er wird weltweit rezipiert. Gebaude erzeugen Bilder: Palladio steht als Bildermacher am Anfang eines aktuellen Trends. Die Aspekte der Bildlichkeit sowie der Raumlichkeit sind hochaktuell.