A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this "lithic imagination": marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural-or divine-painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

Lucas Cranach the Elder created around 500 works during his lifetime. With his portraits of Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchton and as court painter to Frederick the Wise, he became one of the most sought-after painters of the Reformation. At the same time, Cranach was the first to translate the Italian Renaissance tradition of the life-size nude into art north of the Alps; his lascivious, barely veiled depiction of Venus, the goddess of love, bears witness to this. On the occasion of the large Cranach exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, the Austrian writer Teresa Praauer explores the work of this busy prince of painters from A to Z. She focuses not only on Cranach's art, but also on the society that surrounded him, the subjects he painted, and the events that shaped his development.

Giorgio Vasari's The Lives of the Most Famous Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550 and 1568) is a classic of cultural history. A monumental assembly of artists' lives from Giotto to Michelangelo, it paints a vivid picture of the progress of art in the hands of individual masters. This illustrated standalone edition of Vasari's Life of Raphael offers a new translation of this rich and remarkable 'Life', elegantly rendering Vasari's literary text in modern terms. A work of authoritative skill and precision, the translation preserves Vasari's compelling narrative, while beautifully reproduced illustrations bring it newly to life. Editors Paul Joannides and Rick Scorza bring together the original and expanded Italian editions of 1550 and 1568, with succinct commentary drawing upon their expert knowledge of Raphael's career.

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'A great, thrusting codpiece of a book. It is big, bombastic and richly brocaded... A jewel in its own right' The Times 'Evokes the painter and his world as vividly as a Holbein masterpiece. Beautifully written and illustrated, this book is a must for lovers of Tudor history' Tracy Borman Full of insight... This is a gorgeous book, to which I am sure I shall return again and again' Dan Jones Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realised portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies he encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the world of the Henrician court, Holbein was a protean and multi-faceted genius: a humanist, satirist, political propagandist, and contributor to the history of book design as well as a religious artist and court painter. The rich layers of symbolism and allusion that characterise his work have proved especially fascinating to scholars. Franny Moyle traces and analyses the life and work of an extraordinary artist against the backdrop of an era of political turbulence and cultural transformation, to which his art offers a subtle and endlessly refracting mirror.

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.

Portraits, an inherently personal subject, provide an engaging entry point to an exploration of the politics, patronage, and power in Renaissance Florence The Medici family ruled Florence without interruption between 1434 and 1494, but following their return to power in 1512, Cosimo I de' Medici demonstrated an unprecedented ability to wield culture as a political tool. His rule transformed Florence into a dynastic duchy and give Florentine art the central position it has held ever since. As Florence underwent these dramatic political transformations in the sixteenth century, portraits became an essential means of recording a likeness and conveying a sitter's character, social position, and cultural ambitions. This fascinating book explores the ways that painters (including Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Francesco Salviati), sculptors (such as Benvenuto Cellini), and artists in other media endowed their works with an erudite and self-consciously stylish character that distinguished Florentine portraiture. Featuring more than ninety remarkable paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and medals, this volume is written by a team of leading international authors and presents a sweeping, penetrating exploration of a crucial and vibrant period in Italian art. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 26-October 11, 2021)

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.

This sweeping overview of Rembrandt's extraordinary achievement as a draughtsman fills a gap in the otherwise enormous literature on the artist. Beautifully illustrated, mostly in colour, the more than 150 drawings - culled from a corpus of some 800 - are discussed in detail. The drawings span Rembrandt's entire productive life as an artist, from early self-portraits in the 1620s to late drawings from the 1660s of the victim of an execution, a state coach, and historical and mythological images. The scope of the book allows readers to delve into the very broad range of Rembrandt's oeuvre of drawings.

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

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

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.

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.

For women at the early modern courts, clothing and jewellery were essential elements in their political arsenal, enabling them to signal their dynastic value, to promote loyalty to their marital court and to advance political agendas. This is the first collection of essays to examine how elite women in early modern Europe marshalled clothing and jewellery for political ends. With essays encompassing women who traversed courts in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Habsburg Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden, the contributions cover a broad range of elite women from different courts and religious backgrounds as well as varying noble ranks.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A revisionist history of the early life and career of Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini Widely recognized as one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Bellini is revered for his mastery of color, atmosphere and light. However, his early life and career remain something of a mystery. Daniel Wallace Maze expands on groundbreaking research that argues Jacopo Bellini was not Giovanni Bellini's father, but rather his half-brother, and that Giovanni was born between 1424-26, up to fifteen years earlier than current scholars' estimates. In light of this, Young Bellini explores the artist's early life, including his birth, his unusual upbringing in Venice, and his first-known works of art. Presenting a clear narrative of his early career, and offering a number of newly attributed paintings, Maze provides answers to longstanding questions about Bellini, and poses new questions that will frame future research on the artist's contribution to the Renaissance.

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.

This publication will be the only available English-language monograph to date on sixteenth-century sculptor Pier Jacopo Alari Bonacolsi (c. 1455-1528), who earned the nickname 'Antico' with his highly refined reductions of Greco-Roman antiquities. His bronzes - many of which were produced at the brilliant court of Isabella d'Este at Mantua - were remarkable for being meticulously cast and finely cleaned and finished, designed for close appreciation in the privacy of a courtly studio. His black patination and exquisite detailing, such as gilded hair and silver-inlaid eyes, are characteristic. Given Antico's importance for the history of sculpture, this book is a much needed resource in the field, presenting new scientific research and the results of technical studies undertaken at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. A series of essays places Antico's life, work and technique in a contextual framework useful for understanding his body of work. In addition to providing an overview of the artist's career, the catalogue will address key topics from his workmanship and craft to his relationship with the court of Mantua. Eleonora Luciano, associate curator of sculpture at the National Gallery of Art, provides a biography of the artist; Claudia Kryza-Gersch, curator of Italian sculpture at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, discusses Antico as a pioneer of Renaissance sculpture; Stephen Campbell, professor and chair of the department of the history of art at John Hopkins University, writes about 'Antico and Humanism at the Court of Mantua'; Davide Gasparotto, curator at the Galleria Nazionale di Parma, considers Antico's portraiture; Denise Allen, curator at the Frick Collection, New York, writes about 'Materials, Workmanship and Meaning' in the artist's work. Two appendices present new scientific work: Dylan Smith and Shelley Sturman, both conservators at the National Gallery of Art, explore the technology of Antico's bronzes, and Richard Stone, conservator emeritus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, examines Antico's patinas. Exhibition held at National Gallery of Art, Washington.

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.

In December 1820, at twenty-one years old, Edward Geoffrey Stanley, the future 14th earl of Derby and three-times prime minister, began an extensive tour of continental Europe. By the time of his return to England twenty months later, he had visited many of the foremost centres for art and culture in Europe, and mostly in Italy. In his travel diaries he recorded his intensive social life, his visits to historical sites, his viewings of art collections, his comments on architecture, his admiration of landscapes and his impressions of foreign societies. He was energetic, enthusiastic and discerning: the bridge of Augustus in Umbria gave him 'a stupendous idea of Roman grandeur'; the charm of the towns crowning the Tuscan hills struck him with the same delight that he felt when gazing at one of Poussin's paintings; the waterfall at Terni, which dropped 370 feet into an abyss of spray, was 'awfully magnificent'; while the ceremonies of the Italian Catholic Church he judged to be a blend of mummery, superstition and bigotry. Sights and experiences like these influenced him for the rest of his life. This precious collection of diaries, found only recently and published here for the first time, reveal Edward Stanley to have been a young man of diligence, courage and decisiveness: a future leader with a conspicuous and burgeoning sense of political and social justice. It was these characteristics, seen in early development within these pages, that shaped the man and the extraordinary career to come.