The new paperback edition of Roy Strong's popular introduction to Elizabethan portraiture Written for the general reader, Roy Strong's popular introduction to Elizabethan portraiture synthesizes scholarship and research on this subject into a concise introduction to the Elizabethan aesthetic. Strong surveysthe entirety of Elizabeth I's reign from the Procession Picture to the Rainbow Portrait (1600-1602). A range of social aspects of Elizabethan portraiture are explored, such as patronage, symbolic self-fashioning, Elizabethan pageantry and melancholic humor. Strong reveals the Elizabethan approach to portraiture, while demonstrating a new way to look at these paintings. From celebrated portraits of the Queen and paintings of knights and courtiers, to works depicting an aspiring 'middle class', Strong presents a detailed and authoritative examination of one of the most fascinating periods of British art.

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.

From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of yellow from antiquity to the present In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau-a renowned authority on the history of color and the author of celebrated volumes on blue, black, green, and red-now traces the visual, social, and cultural history of yellow. Focusing on European societies, with comparisons from East Asia, India, Africa, and South America, Yellow tells the intriguing story of the color's evolving place in art, religion, fashion, literature, and science. In Europe today, yellow is a discreet color, little present in everyday life and rarely carrying great symbolism. This has not always been the case. In antiquity, yellow was almost sacred, a symbol of light, warmth, and prosperity. It became highly ambivalent in medieval Europe: greenish yellow came to signify demonic sulfur and bile, the color of forgers, lawless knights, Judas, and Lucifer-while warm yellow recalled honey and gold, serving as a sign of pleasure and abundance. In Asia, yellow has generally had a positive meaning. In ancient China, yellow clothing was reserved for the emperor, while in India the color is associated with happiness. Above all, yellow is the color of Buddhism, whose temple doors are marked with it. Throughout, Pastoureau illuminates the history of yellow with a wealth of captivating images. With its striking design and compelling text, Yellow is a feast for the eye and mind.

A groundbreaking approach to the problem of realism in Tudor art   In Tudor and Jacobean England, visual art was often termed “lively.� This word was used to describe the full range of visual and material culture—from portraits to funeral monuments, book illustrations to tapestry. To a modern viewer, this claim seems perplexing: what could “liveliness� have meant in a culture with seemingly little appreciation for illusionistic naturalism? And in a period supposedly characterised by fear of idolatry, how could “liveliness� have been a good thing?   In this wide-ranging and innovative book, Christina Faraday excavates a uniquely Tudor model of vividness: one grounded in rhetorical techniques for creating powerful mental images for audiences. By drawing parallels with the dominant communicative framework of the day, Tudor Liveliness sheds new light on a lost mode of Tudor art criticism and appreciation, revealing how objects across a vast range of genres and contexts were taking part in the same intellectual and aesthetic conversations. By resurrecting a lost model for art theory, Faraday re-enlivens the vivid visual and material culture of Tudor and Jacobean England, recovering its original power to move, impress and delight.   Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The use of perspective in Renaissance painting caused a revolution in the history of seeing, allowing artists to depict the world from a spectator's point of view. But the theory of perspective that changed the course of Western art originated elsewhere-it was formulated in Baghdad by the eleventh-century mathematician Ibn al Haithan, known in the West as Alhazen. Using the metaphor of the mutual gaze, or exchanged glances, Hans Belting-preeminent historian and theorist of medieval, Renaissance, and contemporary art-narrates the historical encounter between science and art, between Arab Baghdad and Renaissance Florence, that has had a lasting effect on the culture of the West.

In this lavishly illustrated study, Belting deals with the double history of perspective, as a visual theory based on geometrical abstraction (in the Middle East) and as pictorial theory (in Europe). How could geometrical abstraction be reconceived as a theory for making pictures? During the Middle Ages, Arab mathematics, free from religious discourse, gave rise to a theory of perspective that, later in the West, was transformed into art when European painters adopted the human gaze as their focal point. In the Islamic world, where theology and the visual arts remained closely intertwined, the science of perspective did not become the cornerstone of Islamic art. "Florence and Baghdad" addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the world transformed as a result?

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.

Animals were everywhere in the early modern period and they impacted, at least in some way, the lives of every kind of early modern person, from the humblest peasant to the greatest prince. Artists made careers based on depicting them. English gentry impoverished themselves spending money on them. Humanists exercised their scholarship writing about them. Pastors saved souls delivering sermons on them. Nobles forged alliances competing with them. Foreigners and indigenes negotiated with one another through trading them. The nexus between animal-human relationships and early modern identity is illuminated in this volume by the latest research of international scholars working on the history of art, literature, and of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany, France, England, Spain, and South Africa. Collectively, these essays investigate how animals - horses, dogs, pigs, hogs, fish, cattle, sheep, birds, rhinoceroses, even sea-monsters and other creatures - served people in Europe, England, the Americas, and Africa to defend, contest or transcend the boundaries of early modern identities. Developments in the methodologies employed by scholars to interrogate the past have opened up an intellectual and discursive space for - and a concomitant recognition of - the study of animals as a topic that significantly elucidates past and present histories. Relevant to a considerable array of disciplines, the study of animals also provides a means to surmount traditional disciplinary boundaries through processes of dynamic interchange and cross-fertilization.

Extensively illustrated, this is the first accessible publication on the history of tapestry in over two decades. Woven with dazzling images from history, mythology and the natural world, and breath-taking in their craftsmanship, tapestries were among the most valuable and high-status works of art available in Europe from the medieval period to the end of the eighteenth century. Over 600 historic examples hang in National Trust properties in England and Wales - the largest collection in the UK. This beautifully illustrated study by tapestry expert Helen Wyld, in association with the National Trust, offers new insights into these works, from the complex themes embedded in their imagery, to long-forgotten practices of sacred significance and ritual use. The range of historical, mythological and pastoral themes that recur across the centuries is explored, while the importance of the 'revival' of tapestry from the late nineteenth century is considered in detail for the first time. Although focussed on the National Trust's collection, this book offers a fresh perspective on the history of tapestry across Europe. Both the tapestry specialist and the keen art-history enthusiast can find a wealth of information here about woven wall hangings and furnishings, including methods of production, purchase and distribution, evolving techniques and technologies, the changing trends of subject matter across time, and how tapestries have been collected, used and displayed in British country houses across the centuries.

Spanning from the inauguration of James I in 1603 to the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Stuart court saw the emergence of a full expression of Renaissance culture in Britain. Hart examines the influence of magic on Renaissance art and how in its role as an element of royal propaganda, art was used to represent the power of the monarch and reflect his apparent command over the hidden forces of nature. Court artists sought to represent magic as an expression of the Stuart Kings' divine right, and later of their policy of Absolutism, through masques, sermons, heraldry, gardens, architecture and processions. As such, magic of the kind enshrined in Neoplatonic philosophy and the court art which expressed its cosmology, played their part in the complex causes of the Civil War and the destruction of the Stuart image which followed in its wake.

Emphasizing on the one hand the reconstruction of the material culture of specific residences, and on the other, the way in which particular domestic objects reflect, shape, and mediate family values and relationships within the home, this volume offers a distinct contribution to research on the early modern Italian domestic interior. Though the essays mainly take an art historical approach, the book is interdisciplinary in that it considers the social implications of domestic objects for family members of different genders, age, and rank, as well as for visitors to the home. By adopting a broad chronological framework that encompasses both Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and by expanding the regional scope beyond Florence and Venice to include domestic interiors from less studied centers such as Urbino, Ferrara, and Bologna, this collection offers genuinely new perspectives on the home in early modern Italy.

'Packed with absorbing detail and brilliant insights ... I was gripped from the first paragraph.' - Alison Weir No English king is as well-known to us as Henry VIII - famous for his six marriages, for dissolving the monasteries and for the ruthless destruction of his foes. But Henry was also an ardent patron of the arts, whose magnificent tapestries and paintings adorned his lavish court and began the Royal Collection. In contrast to later royal collectors, Henry was more interested in storytelling than art for its own sake, and all his commissions relate to one central tale: the glorification of the king and his realm. Henry's life can be seen through his collection and the works reveal much about both his kingship and his insecurities. King and Collector tells this unique story of art and power, peeling back the layers of propaganda to show the true face of the Tudor monarch.

The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers' natural signs, military engineers' conventions, and, finally, painters' affective goals in an attempt to communicate with a broad public. Inessential Colors traces the use of color in European architectural drawings and prints, revealing how this phenomenon reflected the professional anxieties of an emerging professional practice that was simultaneously art and science. Traversing national borders, the book addresses color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural representation and practice. Featuring a wealth of previously unpublished drawings, Inessential Colors challenges the long-standing misreading of architectural drawings as illustrations rather than representations, pointing instead to their inherent qualities as independent objects whose beauty paved the way for the visual system architects use today.

Focusing on the ways his art and persona were valued and criticized by writers, collectors, and artists subsequent to his death, this book examines the reception of the works of Albrecht Durer. Andrea Bubenik's analysis highlights the intensive and international interest in Durer's art and personality, and his developing role as a paragon in art historiography, in conjunction with the proliferation of portraits after his likeness. The author traces carefully how Durer's paintings, prints, drawings and theoretical writings traveled widely, and were appropriated into new contexts and charged with different meanings. Drawing on inventories and correspondences and taking collecting practices into account, Bubenik establishes who owned what by Durer in the 16th and 17th centuries, and characterizes the key locations where interest in Durer peaked (especially the courts of Maximilian I in Munich, and Rudolf II in Prague). Bubenik treats the emergent artistic appropriations of Durer-borrowings from or transformations of his originals-in conjunction with contemporary sources on art theory. The volume includes illustrations of numerous imitative works after Durer. As well as being the first book to fully address the early reception of the most important of German Renaissance artists, Reframing Albrecht Durer shows how appropriation is a crucial concept for understanding artistic practice during the early modern period.

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.

Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure, as bearers of information on material reality, as mediators between the mind and the outer world, and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy, music and poetry, gardens, food, relics and rituals. Collectively, the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.

Atmospheric and suspenseful, The Colour Storm is an intoxicating story of art and ambition, love and obsession in Renaissance Venice . . . 'A glorious, exuberant read' THE TIMES 'Addictive, ambitious and knife sharp. A compelling thriller and a celebration of art. Ravishing' RACHEL JOYCE 'A rich and rousing tale of art, love, rivalry and obsession in Renaissance Venice' CHLOË ASHBY, AUTHOR OF WET PAINT 'An engaging thriller and a compelling exploration of an artist's obsession with love and colour' SUNDAY TIMES _______ Venice, 1510. The world's greatest artists gather to enjoy fame, fortune, and colour. When a wealthy merchant discovers a mysterious new pigment, he knows it would create a masterpiece in the right hands. For struggling artist Giorgione 'Zorzo' Barbarelli, success is far from reach. Until he's commissioned by the merchant to paint a portrait of his wife, Sybille. Impress him, and Zorzo could acquire the most coveted colour in the world - and write his name in history. But it is Sybille whose eye he catches. And when their relationship drags Zorzo into a conspiracy spanning the entire continent, it is far more than his career in danger . . . _______ 'Art and ambition, love and obsession all come into play in this compelling and spellbinding tale set in Renaissance Venice' STYLIST 'An intoxicating story about an incredible period in history' THE SUN 'A terrific book . . . Absorbing, exciting and, dare I say it, colourful. An original tale told beautifully' A. D. SWANSTON 'Hugely evocative, it's a love story, it's a thriller, it's a fantastic page turner' SOPHIE HAYDOCK, AUTHOR OF THE FLAMES 'An alluring Renaissance mystery of rivalry in love and art, where the gothic dank darkness of Venice is steeped in dreams of exquisite colour' ESSIE FOX Praise for Damian Dibben 'An epic tale of love, of courage, of hope' Evening Standard 'I was captivated from the beginning' Rachel Joyce, bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 'Original, ambitious, moving' Stylist 'Bask in the brilliance' The Mail on Sunday

The first English translation of Erwin Panofsky's long-lost work on Michelangelo In 2012, a manuscript by renowned art historian Erwin Panofsky was rediscovered in a safe in Munich, in the basement of the Central Institute for Art History. Hidden for decades among folders and administrative files was Panofsky's thesis on Michelangelo-originally submitted to Hamburg University in March of 1920, abandoned when Panofsky fled Hitler's Germany in 1934, and thought to have been destroyed in the Allied bombings. A century on, Michelangelo's Design Principles makes this remarkable work available for the first time in English. Casting Panofsky's thought in an entirely new light, Michelangelo's Design Principles is the legendary scholar's only book-length examination of the art of the Italian Renaissance. He provides a compelling analysis of Michelangelo's artistic style and deftly compares it with that of Raphael, situating both Renaissance masters in the broader context of Western art. This illuminating book offers unique perspectives on Panofsky's early intellectual development and the state of research on Michelangelo and the High Renaissance at a period of transition in art history, when formalist readings of artworks began to take precedence over a biographical approach. Featuring an introduction by Gerda Panofsky that discusses the history of the manuscript and the significance of its rediscovery, Michelangelo's Design Principles is a crucial link between Panofsky's formalist training as a young art historian and his later work in iconology.

Shedding new light on the relatively unknown art of the Wittelsbach dukes's sixteenth-century court, The Court Art of Friedrich Sustris represents the first monograph to focus on this Italian-trained Netherlandish artist. The volume incorporates original archival material, including letters and payment records into the analysis of Sustris's many projects that ranged from large fresco cycles to intimate luxury and devotional objects. Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria transformed Munich into a vital cultural crossroads between northern Europe and Italy. As Wilhelm's court artist and artistic director, Friedrich Sustris created a unified vision that broadcast Bavarian magnificence to princely courts across Europe. Although much of Sustris's work is lost, the remaining body of his drawings provides a unique window onto the reception of drawings by early modern elites within the context of their collecting practices.

The late Renaissance sculptor Leone Leoni (1509-1590) came from modest beginnings, but died as a nobleman and knight. His remarkable leap in status from his humble birth to a stonemason's family, to his time as a galley slave, to living as a nobleman and courtier in Milan provide a specific case study of an artist's struggle and triumph over existing social structures that marginalized the Renaissance artist. Based on a wealth of discoveries in archival documents, correspondence, and contemporary literature, the author examines the strategies Leoni employed to achieve his high social position, such as the friendships he formed, the type of education he sought out, the artistic imagery he employed, and the aristocratic trappings he donned. Leoni's multiple roles (imperial sculptor, aristocrat, man of erudition, and criminal), the visual manifestations of these roles in his house, collection, and tomb, the form and meaning of the artistic commissions he undertook, and the particular successes he enjoyed are here situated within the complex political, social and economic contexts of northern Italy and the Spanish court in the sixteenth century.

How are processes of vision, perception, and sensation conceived in the Renaissance? How are those conceptions made manifest in the arts? The essays in this volume address these and similar questions to establish important theoretical and philosophical bases for artistic production in the Renaissance and beyond. The essays also attend to the views of historically significant writers from the ancient classical period to the eighteenth century, including Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Ibn Sahl, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Gregorio Comanini, John Davies, Rene Descartes, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and George Berkeley. Contributors carefully scrutinize and illustrate the effect of changing and evolving ideas of intellectual and physical vision on artistic practice in Florence, Rome, Venice, England, Austria, and the Netherlands. The artists whose work and practices are discussed include Fra Angelico, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Parmigianino, Titian, Bronzino, Johannes Gumpp and Rembrandt van Rijn. Taken together, the essays provide the reader with a fresh perspective on the intellectual confluence between art, science, philosophy, and literature across Renaissance Europe.

The first book to be dedicated to the topic, Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture reappraises the creative and intellectual roles of sculptor and patron. The volume surveys artistic production from the Trecento to the Cinquecento in Rome, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, and Venice. Using a broad range of approaches, the essayists question the traditional concept of authorship in Italian Renaissance sculpture, setting each work of art firmly into a complex socio-historical context. Emphasizing the role of the patron, the collection re-assesses the artistic production of such luminaries as Michelangelo, Donatello, and Giambologna, as well as lesser-known sculptors. Contributors shed new light on the collaborations that shaped Renaissance sculpture and its reception.

To commemorate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death, world-renowned da Vinci expert Martin Kemp explores 100 of the master's milestones in art, science, engineering, architecture, anatomy, and more. Leonardo da Vinci was born in the small Tuscan town of Vinci in April 1452. Over the centuries, he has become one of the most famous people in the history of visual culture. Spring 2019 marks the 500th anniversary of his death in May 1519, with exhibitions and events planned across Europe and the United States. This lavishly illustrated volume by Martin Kemp--one of the world's leading authorities on da Vinci--offers a fresh way of looking at the master's work. Kemp focuses on 100 key, broadly chronological milestones that cover an extraordinary range of topic across Leonardo's many fields of discipline: painting, where he brought new levels of formal and emotional grandeur to his works, including The Last Supper and Portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (the "Mona Lisa"); anatomical studies, which are extraordinary for their sense of form and function (Studies of the Optics of the Human Eye and Ventricles of the Brain); engineering marvels, noted for their range and extraordinary visual quality (Gearing for a Clockwork Mechanism and Wheels without Axles and Designs for a Flying Machine); and his progressive engagement with a range of sciences--anatomy, optics, dynamics, statics, geology, and mathematics.

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects and painted ceramic jars. In this way, the volume presents an entirely new picture of Renaissance sexuality, stripping away layers of misconceptions and manipulations to reveal an often-misunderstood world. 'Sex acts' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one's (or another's) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.

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.