This visually stunning and technically detailed book is an in-depth analysis of the materials and techniques used on thirty eight of the V&A's Renaissance frames. The book will teach the reader to recognise frame style, structure and surface decoration of the period, as well as additions and alterations and later frames in the style. * First detailed technical analysis of the V&A's most important Renaissance frames * Highly illustrated with 100 + colour photos of front back and details, digital reconstructions, section profiles, and illustrations of frame types, joints and mouldings. * Provides a comparative reference for Renaissance frames in other publications Christine Powell has worked at the V&A since 1993. She is a Senior Furniture Conservator specialising in gilt wood European Furniture, mirror and picture frames. She has also worked at The National Gallery London for seven years as conservator working on European painted and gilt wood altarpieces and frames and The Wallace Collection for two years on European gilt wood frames and furniture. She has taught and published articles on the history, materials techniques and conservation of gilding. Christine studied furniture making and restoration of furniture at the London College of Furniture (latterly the Metropolitan University) including wood finishing, carving and gilding. Before this she worked in private practice for furniture restoration and special paint effects firms. She also attended Epsom School of Art and Design. Zoe Allen first joined the V&A in 2000 to work on gilt wooden objects for the British Galleries and returned to the V&A in 2003 where she has worked since as Frames and Gilded Furniture Conservator. Before joining the V&A full time she worked as a conservator for both public institutions, such as English Heritage, and private practices including projects at the Royal Academy, St Paul's Cathedral and Somerset House. Zoe has published articles on her work. After a first degree in French Literature, Zoe studied conservation at the City & Guilds of London Art School. Her training covered the conservation of objects made from wood, stone and other sculptural materials, gilding and decorative surfaces. Internships included the National Institute for Restoration, Croatia, the Royal Collection, London and the Museum of London.

Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici and the Medici Family in the Fifteenth Century is a fresh, new biography of a Renaissance woman who lived during the heyday of Medici power. A remarkable person in her own right, the author of religious poems and sacred narratives, as well as an accomplished businesswoman, Lucrezia was the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the grandmother of two popes, and the great-great grandmother of Catherine de' Medici, Queen of France. This glimpse of her life and times is a window onto the political intrigues and intellectual achievements of Medici Florence.

Bringing the existence and significance of the lost riches of Henry VIII back to life, this book sheds new light on Henrician and Tudor court culture. Henry VIII amassed the most spectacular collection of gold and silver of any British monarch. Plate and jewels were hugely prominent in medieval and Renaissance courts and played an essential role in dynastic marriages and diplomacy as well as in cementing the bonds between king and court. Ranging from plain domestic wares to extraordinary bejewelled works of art, Henry's collection embraced virtuoso continental objects as well as vast quantities of plate commissioned from London goldsmiths or inherited from his father. But nearly all of these holdings were destroyed over the following century, and of the thousands that he owned no more than a handful have survived to modern times. This book makes use of the wealth of surviving documentation - inventories, drawings, lists of payments, dispatches by foreign ambassadors and other records - to explore this lost collection and the light it sheds on the monarchy. Starting with an assessment of the young king's inheritance from his father, the book considers the role of plate at state banquets, in great church services and in the regular exchange of gifts between courtiers and ambassadors; the role of plate and jewels as a potent symbol of power; how the king used confiscation as an instrument of humiliation of those who fell from grace, including Cardinal Wolsey and Katherine of Aragon; and how Henry's avaricious seizure of church plate towards the end of his life throws light on his changing character. While the focus is on plate and goldsmiths' work, the context ranges from court ceremonial to rivalry between princes, the role of the church, the vulnerability of persons and institutions with covetable assets, and relations between the king and his own family. Bringing the existence and significance of these lost riches back to life, the book sheds new light on Henrician and Tudor court culture.

In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.

In this book, Leah R. Clark examines collecting practices across the Italian Renaissance court, exploring the circulation, exchange, collection, and display of objects. Rather than focusing on patronage strategies or the political power of individual collectors, she uses the objects themselves to elucidate the dynamic relationships formed through their exchange. Her study brings forward the mechanisms that structured relations within the court, and most importantly, also with individuals, representations, and spaces outside the court. The volume examines the courts of Italy through the wide variety of objects - statues, paintings, jewellery, furniture, and heraldry - that were valued for their subject matter, material forms, histories, and social functions. As Clark shows, the late fifteenth-century Italian court an be located not only in the body of the prince, but also in the objects that constituted symbolic practices, initiated political dialogues, caused rifts, created memories, and formed associations.

Published in 1979: This book is about the History of the work of painter and architect, Raffaello around the Renaissance era.

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences. This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press. Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1955 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

The Path of Humility: Caravaggio and Carlo Borromeo establishes a fundamental relationship between the Franciscan humility of Archbishop of Milan Carlo Borromeo and the Roman sacred works of Caravaggio. This is the first book to consider and focus entirely upon these two seemingly anomalous personalities of the Counter-Reformation. The import of Caravaggio's Lombard artistic heritage has long been seen as pivotal to the development of his sacred style, but it was not his only source of inspiration. This book seeks to enlarge the discourse surrounding Caravaggio's style by placing him firmly in the environment of Borromean Milan, a city whose urban fabric was transformed into a metaphorical Via Crucis. This book departs from the prevailing preoccupation - the artist's experience in Rome as fundamental to his formulation of sacred style - and toward his formative years in Borromeo's Milan, where humility reigned supreme. This book is intended for a broad, yet specialized readership interested in Counter-Reformation art and devotion. It serves as a critical text for undergraduate and graduate art history courses on Baroque art, Caravaggio, and Counter-Reformation art.

Reviewers of a recent exhibition termed Federico Barocci (ca. 1533-1612), 'the greatest artist you've never heard of'. One of the first original iconographers of the Counter Reformation, Barocci was a remarkably inventive religious painter and draftsman, and the first Italian artist to incorporate extensive color into his drawings. The purpose of this volume is to offer new insights into Barocci's work and to accord this artist, the dates of whose career fall between the traditional Renaissance and Baroque periods, the critical attention he deserves. Employing a range of methodologies, the essays include new ideas on Barocci's masterpiece, the Entombment of Christ; fresh thinking about his use of color in his drawings and innovative design methods; insights into his approach to the nude; revelations on a key early patron; a consideration of the reasons behind some of his most original iconography; an analysis of his unusual approach to the marketing of his pictures; an exploration of some little-known aspects of his early production, such as his reliance on Italian majolica and contemporary sculpture in developing his compositions; and an examination of a key Barocci document, the post mortem inventory of his studio. A translated transcription of the inventory is included as an appendix.

The famous Italian artist Raphael's illustrations, drawings and portraits, shown in this book of plates by Oskar Fichnel.

Occasionally, when something seems very familiar you lose sight of what makes it so special: Flemish Masters. From van Eyck to Bruegel sets out to counteract this effect and opens our eyes once again to the revolution that took place in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th centuries that shaped the course of European art. In 48 lavishly illustrated analyses, Matthias Depoorter explores how painters such as Van Eyck, Van der Weiden, Massys, Bosch, and Bruegel reached unprecedented heights, and are rightfully considered innovators to this day. The defining factor was their perfecting and mastery of the oil painting technique as well as their ground-breaking attention to optical lighting effects. The new technical possibilities offered a different way of looking at the world and ultimately a new way of painting. No less innovative was the level of detail. These painters were thoroughly acquainted with each other’s work—this volume shows the fundamental artistic cross-fertilization. A must-read for anyone who wants to fall in love with the old masterpieces anew.

The famous Italian artist Raphael's illustrations, drawings and portraits, shown in this book of plates by Oskar Fichnel.

Beginning with a dissertation on Raphael's drawings, Oskar Fischel made it his endeavor, with an ever growing knowledge of Raphael, to arrive at a comprehensive representation, and this he has left behind this book. The illustrations gathered together by him over a period of many years are intended, in the selection here provided, to induce the reader to seek out the works of the artist. The book speaks of Raphael's influential manner on society.

The transformation of the Venetian glass industry during the Renaissance was not only a technical phenomenon, but also a social one. In this volume, Patrick McCray examines the demand, production and distribution of glass and glassmaking technology during this period and evaluates several key topics, including the nature of Renaissance demand for certain luxury goods, the interaction between industry and government in the Renaissance, and technological change as a social process. McCray places in its broader economic and cultural context a craft and industry that has been traditionally viewed primarily through the surviving artefacts held in museum collections. McCray explores the social and economic context of glassmaking in Venice, from the guild and state level down to the workings of the individual glass house. He tracks the dissemination of Venetian-style glassmaking throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its effects on Venice's glass industry. Integrating evidence from a wide variety of sources - written documents such as shop records and recipe books, pictorial representations of glass and glassmaking, and the careful physical and chemical analysis of glass pieces that have survived to the present - he examines the relation between consumer demand and technological change. In the process, he traces the organizational changes that signified a transition from an older and more traditional manner of 'artisan' manufacture to a modern, 'factory-style' manner of production.

This reference guide aims to explain and discuss four important periods in the history of Western art - the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque. Its goal is to create a sense of understanding, recognition and appreciation of art by analyzing, within the four periods, three distinct artistic genres: painting; sculpture; and architecture.

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 16th-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.

During the later 15th and in the 16th centuries pictures began to be made without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory. In part, Renaissance art adjusted to the social and economic pressures with an art we may be hard pressed to recognize under that same rubric-an art not so much of perfected nature as simply artless. Granted, the heroic and epic mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and proudly. Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from the Vitruvian ideal. The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice, of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of the present, of attitudes toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of sight
Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as signs of quite personal emotions rather than as subscriptions to publicly vaunted ideologies. Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of them-not even Giorgione's "La tempesta"-is a classic pastoral idyll. The"rosso stile" is to be understood as more comprehensive than that. The issue is not only who is represented, but whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically affirmative art.

In this quincentennial year of Holbein's birth, this is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of texts relating to this important Northern European Renaissance artist, with an accompanying historiographic essay on various aspects of Holbein's reception.
The first part of the book, "Some Notes on Reception," contains overviews of texts about specific works such as "The Dead Christ, The Solothurn Madonna, " and "The Meyer Madonna." Other themes addressed include the perception of Holbein's character and his place among other Renaissance masters, his work as a portraitist, his use of illusion, authenticity controversies, and a brief chronicle of Holbein collectors. Previously unaddressed topics include Holbein's influence on later artists, and his impact on fiction, including his influence seen in the works of writers such as Dostoevsky, Henry James and Edith Wharton. This part of the book also contains synopses of the most significant and recent Holbein scholarship. These vignettes constitute a multi-dimensional approach to Holbein reception, sharpened by selected quotations from his critics.
The second part of the book is a comprehensive listing of over 2,500 bibliographic citations for works dealing with Holbein and his oeuvre, each accompanied by an annotation outlining the authors' principal contributions. The range of material covered includes not only books and scholarly journals but also newspapers and other popular publications. Individual sections include texts dealing with primary sources, monographs, compendia, and exhibition catalogues. Others are devoted to texts about Holbein's paintings, drawings and prints, as well as to iconography, technical studies, patronage, collections, influences on Holbein, and Holbein reception. General Index. Author Index.

This book sets out to establish Michele Tosini's critical role in sixteenth-century Mannerist art in Florence. He was well-trained, well-educated and well-liked, and created a highly productive workshop environment that not only succeeded but thrived in one of the most competitive ages of artistic production in the history of art. To date, scholarship executed on Tosini (Carlo Gamba in 1928, Sydney Freedberg in 1974) has produced a plethora of misunderstandings about Tosini's role in the Florentine artistic community. The verdict that Tosini was a 'hack' painter who could make his works look like those of more 'established' painters in order to get commissions, and that he was an uneducated 'second-rate' painter who could not formulate complex iconographical programs, is at odds with the evidence presented in this current research. Tosini was much more than just 'the right man in the right place at the right time'. He not only promoted Mannerism, but was part of its process; indeed, the formation of the Accademia del Disegno took place at the height of his artistic career. Given his business acumen it is perhaps understandable that ;misunderstandings; have arisen. (To borrow from William Wallace, Tosini can legitimately be thought of as 'Genius as Entrepreneur'.) This is not only essential reading for all students of Late Renaissance / Mannerist art history, but a majestic story of the process of artistic endeavour and how it unfolds that is so deeply admired today.

For too long, the 'centre' of the Renaissance has been considered to be Rome and the art produced in, or inspired by it. This collection of essays dedicated to Deborah Howard brings together an impressive group of internationally recognised scholars of art and architecture to showcase both the diversity within and the porosity between the 'centre' and 'periphery' in Renaissance art. Without abandoning Rome, but together with other centres of art production, the essays both shift their focus away from conventional categories and bring together recent trends in Renaissance studies, notably a focus on cultural contact, material culture and historiography. They explore the material mechanisms for the transmission and evolution of ideas, artistic training and networks, as well as the dynamics of collaboration and exchange between artists, theorists and patrons. The chapters, each with a wealth of groundbreaking research and previously unpublished documentary evidence, as well as innovative methodologies, reinterpret Italian art relating to canonical sites and artists such as Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Sebastiano del Piombo, in addition to showcasing the work of several hitherto neglected architects, painters, and an inimitable engineer-inventor.

Beginning with a dissertation on Raphael's drawings, Oskar Fischel made it his endeavor, with an ever growing knowledge of Raphael, to arrive at a comprehensive representation, and this he has left behind this book. The illustrations gathered together by him over a period of many years are intended, in the selection here provided, to induce the reader to seek out the works of the artist. The book speaks of Raphael's influential manner on society.

An outstanding piece of interdisciplinary scholarship, "The Body Emblazoned" is a study of the Renaissance culture of dissection which informed intellectual inquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. Though the dazzling displays in Renaissance art and literature of the "exterior" of the body have long been a subject of enquiry, Jonathan Sawday considers in detail the "interior" of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture.
Sawday links the frequently illicit activities of the great anatomists of the period, to whose labors we are indebted for so much of our understanding of the structure and operation of the human body, to a wider cultural discourse which embraces not only the great moments of Renaissance art, but the very foundation of a modern idea of knowledge. Illustrated with thirty-two black and white prints, "The Body Emblazoned" re-assesses modern understanding not only of the literature and culture of the Renaissance, but of the modern organization of knowledge which is now so familiar that it is only rarely questioned.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is one of the world's most original artists who founded a dynasty of painters. His most popular works include Children's Games, Hunters in the Snow and Peasant Wedding Feast. He collaborated with Rubens on several important works. The first part of the book tells the story of the Bruegel family, including his sons Pieter the Younger and Jan theElder. The second part is a glorious wide-ranging gallery of their work. Unlike other Old Masters, the Bruegels focused on ordinary people: farmers, workers, children, dancing, celebrating, working. Their work, often surprisingly modern in tone, still speaks to us today.

The first book in over twenty-five years devoted solely to allegory and personification in art history, this anthology complements current literary and cultural studies of allegory. The volume re-examines early modern allegorical imagery in light of crucial material, contextual and methodological questions: how are allegories conceived; for whom; and for what purposes? Contributors consider a wide range of allegorical representations in the visual arts and material culture, of both early modern Europe and the colonial "New World" 1400-1800. Essays included here examine paintings, sculpture, prints, architecture and the spaces of public ritual while discussing the process and theory of interpretation, formation of audiences, reception history, appropriation and censorship. A special focus on the medium of the body in visual allegory unites the volume's diverse materials and methods.

The studies in which history of art and theatre are considered together are few, and none to date investigate the evolution of the representation of clouds from the early Renaissance to the Baroque period. This book reconsiders the origin of Italian Renaissance and Baroque cloud compositions while including the theatrical tradition as one of their most important sources. By examining visual sources such as paintings, frescos and stage designs, together with letters, guild-ledgers, descriptions of performances and relevant treatises, a new methodology to approach the development of this early modern visuality is offered. The result is an historical reconstruction where multiple factors are seen as facets of a single process which led to the development of Italy's visual culture. The book also offers new insights into Leonardo da Vinci's theatrical works, Raphael's Disputa, Vasari's Lives, and Pietro da Cortona's fresco paintings. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650 examines the different ways Heaven has been conceived, imagined and represented from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, crossing over into the fields of history, religion and philosophy.