Cities are shaped as much by a repertoire of buildings, works and objects, as by cultural institutions, ideas and interactions between forms and practices entangled in identity formations. This is particularly true when seen through a city as forceful and splendid as Venice. The essays in this volume investigate these connections between art and identity, through discussions of patronage, space and the dissemination of architectural models and knowledge in Venice, its territories and beyond. They celebrate Professor Deborah Howard's leading role in fostering a historically grounded and interdisciplinary approach to the art and architecture of Venice. Based on an examination and re-interpretation of a wide range of archival material and primary sources, the contributing authors approach the notion of identity in its many guises: as self-representation, as strong sub-currents of spatial strategies, as visual and semantic discourses, and as political and imperial aspirations. Employing interdisciplinary modes of interpretation, these studies offer ground-breaking analyses of canonical sites and works of art, diverse groups of patrons, as well as the life and oeuvre of leading architects such as Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio. In so doing, they link together citizens and nobles, past and present, the real and the symbolic, space and sound, religion and power, the city and its parts, Venice and the Stato da Mar, the Serenissima and the Sublime Port.

Lorenzo il Magnifico de' Medici was the head of the ruling political party at the apogee of the Golden Age of Quattrocento Florence. Born in 1449, his life was shaped by privilege and responsibility, and his deeds as a statesman were legendary even while he lived. At his death he was master of the largest and most famous private palace in Florence, a building crammed full of the household goods of four generations of Medici as well as the most extraordinary collections of art, antiquities, books, jewelry, coins and cameos, and rare vases in private hands. His heirs undertook an inventory of the estate, a usual procedure following the demise of an important head of the family. An anonymous clerk, pen and paper in hand, walked through the palace from room to room counting and recording the barrels of wine and the water urns, opening cabinets and chests, unfolding and examining clothes, fabrics, and tapestries, describing the paintings he saw on the walls, unlocking jewel boxes, and weighing and evaluating coins, medals, necklaces, brooches, rings, and cameos. The original document he produced has been lost, but a copy was made by another clerk in 1512. Richard Stapleford's critical translation of this document offers the reader a window onto the world of the Medici family, their palace, and the material culture that surrounded them.

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.

Rome as we know it is largely a creation of the Renaissance, restructured and risen anew from a neglected medieval town. This book traces the extraordinary works of painting, sculpture and architecture commissioned by Rome's church and civic nobility as part of their rival bids for power and prestige. With the aid of 118 illustrations, most of them in colour, Loren Partridge charts the course of Rome's transformation into the most magnificent showpiece of the Catholic world.

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.

Lilian Armstrong is Professor of Art at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, and a specialist on Venetian Renaissance book illumination. She is the author of The Paintings and Drawings of Marco Zoppo and Renaissance Miniature Painters and Classical Imagery: The Master of the Putti and His Venetian Workshop, and she was a major contributor to the exhibition catalogue The Painted Page: Italian Renaissance Book Illumination 1450-1550 (ed. by Jonathan Alexander). Her publications have focussed particularly on the transition from illuminated manuscripts to the hand-illuminated early printed book in Venice. The present volume collects Professor Armstrong's papers on miniaturists active in Venice and Northern Italy in the 15th and early 16th centuries, and on the impact of the new invention of printing on these artists and their patrons. Included are papers on Marco Zoppo, primarily a monumentalpainter, who nevertheless also painted in manuscripts and incunables. The studies variously identify miniaturists and designers of woodcuts through stylistic groupings, trace iconographic traditions for Pliny's Natural History and Petrarch's De viris illustribus, demonstrate the importance of heraldry for studying patronage of Venetian printed books, and explore the distribution of Venetian incunables throughout Europe based on analysis of their decoration.

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.

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.

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?

For half a century after its introduction in Europe, printmaking remained the province of a specially trained group of professionals. What changed this situation was the invention of etching, which allowed for print designs to be drawn directly onto a plate so that any competent draftsman could try his hand at it. Many artists did, and as a result, we now have a wide-ranging corpus of major Renaissance and Baroque graphics made by artists who, though famous in other fields, were novices in the print medium.

Featuring essays by Michael Cole, Larry Silver, Susan Dackerman, Graham Larkin, and exhibit co-curator Madeleine Viljoen, The Early Modern Painter-Etcher spans three centuries, roughly from the time of Durer to that of Goya, and looks at works executed by some seventy painters for whom printmaking was primarily an experimental field. The book accompanies an exhibition that opened in April 2006 at the University of Pennsylvania and will travel to the Ringling Museum of Art and to the Smith College Museum of Art.

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 frescoes of the Cappella Nuova in the Cathedral of Orvieto have fascinated visitors from Michelangelo to Freud and Czeław Miłosz because of their dramatic portrayal of the end of the world and the Last Judgment. Creighton Gilbert's study draws on previously overlooked documents to explain the commissioning of this extraordinary cycle of paintings, begun by Fra Angelico in the early 1400s and completed a half-century later by Luca Signorelli. In contrast to most other art historians, who ascribe the iconographic and formal structure of the paintings to Signorelli, Gilbert contends that his predecessor, Fra Angelico, devised the entire program of decoration. Gilbert also situates the cycle in the contexts of liturgical practice, humanistic studies, and the rich body of texts and images shaping the Renaissance conception of the coming of the Antichrist and the world's final moments.

How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World examines every element in the Cappella Nuova's architecture and complex decoration, which not only represents the coming of the Antichrist, the end of the world, and the Last Judgment but also, on a high dado, features portraits of Dante and other poets, scenes from their texts, and sinuous grotesque ornament. Although Dante's likeness has long been recognized, Gilbert is the first scholar to establish that his great epic, The Divine Comedy, exerted a profound influence on the Chapel's iconographic program.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Der Augsburger Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647) gilt als die bedeutendste kunstdiplomatische Vermittler-Persoenlichkeit seiner Zeit noerdlich der Alpen. Er verknupfte Kunsthandel und Kunstproduktion mit politischer Korrespondenz und diplomatischem Handeln und schuf so kurz vor Ausbruch des Dreissigjahrigen Krieges geordnete Mikrokosmen als Antwort auf eine konfessionell und politisch auseinanderdriftende Welt. Die Publikation stellt erstmalig den Akteur und "cultural broker" in den Mittelpunkt und thematisiert Korrespondenz, Reise- und Kunstbeschreibungen, Stammbucher und Kunstkammerschranke als miteinander verwobene Medien seines Handelns. Zahlreiche Einzelanalysen bieten neue Erkenntnisse zu bekannten Werken wie etwa dem Pommerschen Kunstschrank sowie zu bislang weniger bekannten Objekten. .

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.

The author interprets the drapery of the Cappella Albertoni (1674-75) for the first time as a curtain - a leitmotif in Bernini's sculptural oeuvre - and as an overt figure of speech before the backdrop of the Counter Reformation and of Bruno and Galilei's "open vault of the sky". The curtain falls so as to be opened, as on the Baroque stage and in Bernini's comedies, and like the "metaphorical curtain" in theories of poetry of the seventeenth century, is linked with the eventfully induced affect of ecstasy. Metaphors reinterpret the unambiguous as the ambiguous. The mystical therefore becomes poetic ecstasy. No biographical narrative is hence provided; it is instead about a declaration of belief in an art that liberates the creative powers of the intellect by means of aesthetic experience rather than by linking it to perception.

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.

Der geburtige Mailander Camillo Rusconi (1658-1728) gilt als der bedeutendste roemische Bildhauer des Spatbarock. In dieser Studie widmet sich Frank Martin erstmalig grundlegend Rusconis beachtlichem OEuvre. Seine grossen Werkkomplexe, darunter die beruhmten Apostelstatuen in der Lateranbasilika in Rom, werden detailliert erlautert und in ihrem Entstehungskontext gedeutet. Die Schilderung von Rusconis kunstlerischer Karriere, die der einflussreiche Maler Carlo Maratti massgeblich befoerderte, gewahrt Einblick in die Mechanismen des roemischen Kunstbetriebs. Camillo Rusconi etablierte ein klassisch orientiertes Stilideal in der Skulptur, das in den Arbeiten seiner Schuler Filippo della Valle, Giovanni Battista Maini, Pietro Bracci sowie Giuseppe Rusconi fortlebte und sich vom hochbarocken Pathos Gian Lorenzo Berninis signifikant abhob. Das langst uberfallige kritische Werkverzeichnis sowie die Auswertung zahlreicher Quellen und Dokumente runden die Monographie ab. Damit erweist sich der Band als Standardwerk fur die Erforschung der Skulptur im 18. Jahrhundert.