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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600 > Renaissance art
Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
(1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad
boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and
controversial: Violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative
master, and a man on the run. This work offers a comprehensive
reassessment of Caravaggio's entire oeuvre with a catalogue
raisonne of his works. Each painting is reproduced in large format,
with recent, high production photography allowing for dramatic
close-ups with Caravaggio's ingenious details of looks and
gestures. Five introductory chapters analyze Caravaggio's artistic
career from his early struggle to make a living, through his first
public commissions in Rome, and his growing celebrity status. They
look at his increasing daring with lighting and with a
boundary-breaking naturalism which allowed even biblical events to
unfold with an unprecedented immediacy before the viewer.
From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have
understood the obvious connection between portraiture and
commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our
understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be
complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and
pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer
memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject
against his own potentially unmourned death. This book recognizes a
socio-cultural anxiety - the fear not merely of death but also of
being forgotten - and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and
theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To
explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally
art historical project merges early modern visual culture and
critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive
selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female
portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and
court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary
discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis,
feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and
disability. Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both
male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even
more questions about the experiences and representations of
widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of
masculinity - from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man'
to postmodern manhood.
The goal of the twelve essays in this volume, contributed by
scholars in the fields of history, literature, art history, and
medicine, is to enrich our understanding of cultural discourses on
ageing in early modern Europe. While a number of books examine old
age in other eras, and a few touch on the early modern period, this
is the first to focus explicitly on representations of ageing in
Europe from 1350-1700. These studies invite the reader to take a
closer look at images of ageing; they show that representations are
embedded in specific communities, life situations, and structures
of power. As well, the book explores how representations of old age
function in various and often surprising ways: as repositories of
socio-cultural anxieties, as strategies of self-fashioning, and as
instruments of ideology capable of disciplining the body and the
body politic. Since this book is about how old age as a cultural
category was produced and maintained through representation, the
essays in this volume are organised thematically across geographic,
disciplinary, and media boundaries to foreground the politics and
poetics of representational strategies. The contributors to this
collection show that our understanding not only of ageing, but also
of power, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and the body is enriched
by the study of cultural representations of old age. Through
sensitive and sophisticated readings of a wide range of sources,
these papers collectively demonstrate the formative influence and
generative force of images of old age within early modern European
culture.
This study compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem
books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinee, or
French-language comic strip. It moves beyond the issue of defining
the emblematic genre to examine the ways in which emblems - and
their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture,
and what they disclose about that culture. Drawing largely on
primary material from the Bibliotheque nationale de France and from
Glasgow University Library's Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem
literature, Laurence Grove builds on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan,
Elizabeth Eisenstein and, more recently, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan
Sawday. Divided into four sections-Theoretics, Production,
Thematics and Reception-Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture
broaches topics such as theoretical approaches (past and present)
to text/image forms, the question of narrative within the scope of
text/image creations, and the reuse of visual iconography for
diametrically opposed political or religious purposes. The author
argues that, despite the gap in time between the advent of emblems
and that of comic strips, the two forms are analogous, in that both
are the products of a 'parallel mentality'. The mindsets of the
periods that popularised these forms have certain common features
related to repeated social conditions rather than to the pure
evolution over time. Grove's analysis and historical
contextualisation of that mentality provide insight into our own
popular culture forms, not only the comic strip but also other
hybrid media such as advertising and the Internet. His
juxtaposition of emblems and the bande dessinee increases our
understanding of all such combinations of picture and text.
The remarkable career of the architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580)
is largely due to an extraordinary moment of prosperity in the
Veneto mainland, both in the city and in the countryside: a boom
due in large measure to a little-studied revolution in
manufacturing. This book brings to light for the first time the
architecture of these early industries, especially the production
of textiles (wool, silk), mining and metalworking, paper
manufacture, ceramics, sawmilling and leather-tanning. The huge
surge in patent applications to the Venetian Senate in the period
highlights the parallel technological improvements in both
efficiency and quality. Former proto-industrial buildings across
the Veneto, studied at first-hand, reveal the efficiency of
hydraulic power and smooth-running mechanical processes.
Water-power, a clean, renewable energy source, and structures made
of natural, traditional materials, have much to teach today’s
civilisation.
Vasari's celebration of the art of the central Italian cities of
Florence, Rome and Venice, has long left in shadow the art of
northern Italy. The economic and historical decline of the region
compounded this effect with the dispersal of the treasures of the
Farnese to Naples, the Este to Dresden and the Gonzaga to Madrid
and Paris. Each chapter in this volume celebrates a stunning work
from the region, among them Correggio's famed Camera di San Paolo
in Parma, Parmigianino's Camerino in the Rocca Sanvitale near
Parma, the studiolo of Alberto Pio at Carpi, and the Tomb of the
Ancestors in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. The volume as a
whole offers fascinating insights into the tussle between the
maniera moderna and the maniera devota in the first half of the
sixteenth century, when the unity between the elegance and beauty
of art and its religious significance came under debate. Around the
year 1550, when Michelangelo's Last Judgement came under attack for
impiety and lasciviousness and the reformists called for an art
that would invoke in the viewer a devotional response that
identified manifestations of the divine with human feelings and
emotions. In northern Italy, it was on the foundation laid by
Correggio, with his tenderness and ability to evoke the softness of
living flesh, that the Carracci brothers built their reform of
painting.
Built in 1290, the cathedral at Orvieto, Italy, is a masterpiece of
Italian gothic architecture. The decoration of the Cappella Nuova,
commenced by Fra Angelico in 1447 and magnificently completed by
Luca Signorelli in 1499 and 1504, displays an awe-inspiring Last
Judgement and Apocalypse and, below it, scenes from Dante and
classical literature. Drawing on years of detailed research into
the history of the chapel, Sara Nair James identifies Signorelli's
theological advisors as a group of Dominican scholars, known as the
'Masters of the Sacred Page of this city'. She presents the
decoration as an integrated whole, a program complex in
iconography, message, source material and theory and, through a
detailed response to Dante's Divine Comedy and a moralized reading
of classical legends, explains how the events of the end-time join
the literary narratives to form a sermon on salvation through
penance. The book is not simply a work of traditional iconography,
explaining the stories behind the pictures. It is an important
study in the theory and techniques of the visual representation of
religious belief and its reception by the laity. The detailed
illustration includes many photographs taken after the restoration
of the chapel in 1996.
Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social,
economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often
ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of
widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern
Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important
relationship between ritual and representation. The fifteen new
interdisciplinary essays assembled here read widowhood as a
catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual
material-representations of, for and by widows, whether through
traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or
through the so-called 'minor arts,' including popular print
culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament,
costume and gift objects, in early modern Austria, England, France,
Germany, Italy and Spain. Arranged thematically, this unique
collection allows the reader to recognize and appreciate the
complexity and contradiction, iconicity and mutability, and
timelessness and timeliness of widowhood and representation.
The immense effect that Michelangelo had on many artists working in
the sixteenth century is widely acknowledged by historians of
Italian Renaissance art. Yet until recently greater stress has been
placed on the individuality of these artists' styles and
interpretation rather than on the elucidation of their debts to
others. There has been little direct focus on the ways in which
later sixteenth-century artists actually confronted Michelangelo,
or how those areas or aspects of their artistic production that are
most closely related to his reveal their attitudes and responses to
Michelangelo's work. Reactions to the Master presents the first
coherent study of the influence exerted by Michelangelo's work in
painting and sculpture on artists of the late-Renaissance period
including Alessandro Allori, Agnolo Bronzino, Battista Franco,
Francesco Parmigianino, Jacopo Pontormo, Francesco Salviati,
Raphael, Giorgio Vasari, Marcello Venusti, and Alessandro Vittoria.
The essays focus on the direct relations, such as copies and
borrowings, previously underrated by art historians, but which here
form significant keys to understanding the aesthetic attitudes and
broader issues of theory advanced at the time.
Contents: Volume I 1. The Inventors of the New Architecture 2. Towards the Ideal City 3. Beginning and End of the 'Third Style' 4. Urban Changes in the Sixteenth Century
Have you ever dreamt of having your own private museum tour with
one of the world's most-celebrated artists? Take a walk through art
history in the company of one of the pre-eminent American painters
of our time, Alex Katz. Describing his personal encounters with the
work of over 90 key artists, Katz's observations offer a fluent,
vivid and incisive view, making Looking at Art with Alex Katz the
perfect guide both for those looking for an introduction to the
world of visual art, and anyone looking for a fresh view on their
favorite artist. Includes entries on: Francis Bacon, Louise
Bourgeois, Paul Cezanne, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Doig, Alberto
Giacometti, Philip Guston, David Hockney, Henri Matisse, Joan Miro,
Edvard Munch, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Rembrandt, Henri
Rousseau, Titian, Luc Tuymans, Vincent van Gogh, Johannes Vermeer
and more.
Professor Slim deals here with the several roles that music can
play in the artworks of the Renaissance, looking in particular at
Italian painting of the 16th century. For understandable reasons,
art historians sometimes neglect the role of music and, especially,
that of musical notation when studying works of art. These studies
not only identify musical compositions, wholly or partially
inscribed in paintings - and tapestries, ceramics, prints as well -
but also seek reasons why these particular musical compositions
were included and analyse their relevance to the scene depicted.
Furthermore, as many of these studies show, identifying a musical
composition, especially if it has a text, leads to the formation of
ideas about iconographical functions and thus augments
interpretations of the visual art.
Before reaching the tender age of 30, Michelangelo Buonarroti
(1475-1564) had already sculpted Pieta and David, two of the most
famous sculptures in the entire history of art. As a sculptor,
painter, draftsman, and architect, the achievements of this Italian
master are unique-no artist before or after him has ever produced
such a vast, multifaceted, and wide-ranging oeuvre. This fresh
TASCHEN edition traces Michelangelo's ascent to the cultural elite
of the Renaissance. Ten richly illustrated chapters cover the
artist's paintings, sculptures, and architecture, including a close
analysis of the artist's tour de force frescoes in the Sistine
Chapel. Full-page reproductions and enlarged details allow readers
to appreciate the finest details in the artist's repertoire, while
the book's biographical essay considers Michelangelo's more
personal traits and circumstances, such as his solitary nature, his
thirst for money and commissions, his immense wealth, and his skill
as a property investor.
This evocative history reviews both the artistic production of the European Renaissance, and the social and economic soil in which it flourished. This is a beautifully presented and lavishly illustrated history which brings together all Renaissance arts throughout Europe - plays, music, literature and philosophy. With Italy at its center, but encompassing the visual and literary arts throughout Renaissance Europe, it examines the familiar literary and artistic giants of the time and also pays attention to less recognized artists and craftsmen, and examines the crafts of marquetry, silver-work and architectural ornamentation which were central to that period.
An illuminating look at a fundamental yet understudied aspect of
Italian Renaissance painting The Italian Renaissance picture is
renowned for its depiction of the human figure, from the dramatic
foreshortening of the body to create depth to the subtle blending
of tones and colors to achieve greater naturalism. Yet these
techniques rely on a powerful compositional element that often goes
overlooked. Groundwork provides the first in-depth examination of
the complex relationship between figure and ground in Renaissance
painting. "Ground" can refer to the preparation of a work's
surface, the fictive floor or plane, or the background on which
figuration occurs. In laying the material foundation, artists
perform groundwork, opening the ground as a zone that can precede,
penetrate, or fracture the figure. David Young Kim looks at the
work of Gentile da Fabriano, Giovanni Bellini, Giovanni Battista
Moroni, and Caravaggio, reconstructing each painter's methods to
demonstrate the intricacies involved in laying ground layers whose
translucency and polychromy permeate the surface. He charts
significant transitions from gold ground painting in the Trecento
to the darkened grounds in Baroque tenebrism, and offers close
readings of period texts to shed new light on the significance of
ground forms such as rock face, wall, and cave. This beautifully
illustrated book reconceives the Renaissance picture, revealing the
passion and mystery of groundwork and discovering figuration beyond
the human figure.
One of the most accomplished human beings who ever lived, Leonardo
da Vinci remains the quintessential Renaissance genius. Creator of
the world's most famous paintings, this scientist, artist,
philosopher, inventor, builder, and mechanic epitomized the great
flowering of human consciousness that marks his era. As part of our
Bibliotheca Universalis series, Leonardo da Vinci - The Graphic
Work features top-quality reproductions of 663 of Leonardo's
drawings, more than half of which reside in the Royal Collection of
Windsor Castle. From anatomical studies to architectural plans,
from complex engineering designs to pudgy infant portraits, delve
in and delight in the delicate finesse of one of the most talented
minds, and hands, in history. About the series Bibliotheca
Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic
TASCHEN universe!
Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of
designing and describing the physical environment. But during the
sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe
increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of
motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented,
movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and
uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for
shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the
Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions
to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in
Motion examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays
encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking
lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to
English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis
considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the
cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of
motion in early modern Europe.
A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance,
examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance
images and artifacts. In this widely anticipated book, two leading
contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound
reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance.
Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood examine the meanings, uses,
and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of
originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts.
Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and
artists-a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary
compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings,
paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals discussed were
shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to
prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of
transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to
be Early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoieton (or "image made
without hands"), the activities of spoliation and citation,
differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable
buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as
basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. Although a work of
art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and
Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal
instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a
remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an
origin outside of time, in divinity. This book is not the story
about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the
infrastructure of many possible stories.
In this vivid account Ana Debenedetti examines the life and work of
Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli, through the lens of the
organization of his workshop and the commercial strategies he
devised to make his way in the very competitive art market in
Florence at that time. She looks at the remarkable career of this
pivotal artist and his production with fresh eyes, presenting the
analysis within the wider context of Florentine society and
culture. Many of Botticelli's most celebrated works such as The
Birth of Venus are evaluated alongside less familiar forms such as
tapestry and embroidery, showing the wide breath of the artist's
oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.
Inspired by research undertaken for the new Medieval &
Renaissance Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
"Re-thinking Renaissance Objects" explores and often challenges
some of the key issues and current debates relating to Renaissance
art and culture.Puts forward original research, including evidence
provided by an in-depth study arising from the Medieval &
Renaissance Gallery projectContributions are unusual in their
combination of a variety of approaches, but with each paper
starting with an examination of the objects themselvesNew theories
emerge from several papers, some of which challenge current
thinking
A genius immortalized her. A French king paid a fortune for her. An
emperor coveted her. Every year more than 9 million visitors trek
to view her portrait in the Louvre. Yet while everyone recognizes
her smile, hardly anyone knows her story. Mona Lisa: A Life
Discovered, a blend of biography, history, and memoir, truly is a
book of discovery-about the world's most recognized face, most
revered artist, and most praised and parodied painting. Who was
she, this ordinary woman who rose to such extraordinary fame? Why
did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model?
What became of her? And why does her smile enchant us still? Lisa
Gherardini (1479-1542) was a quintessential woman of her times,
caught in a whirl of political upheavals, family dramas, and public
scandals. Her life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the
history of Florence-and of the greatest artistic outpouring the
world has ever seen. Her story creates an extraordinary tapestry of
Renaissance Florence, with larger-than-legend figures such as
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli. In Mona Lisa: A
Life Discovered, Dianne Hales takes readers with her to meet Lisa's
descendants; uncover her family's long and colourful history; and
explore the neighbourhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife, and a
mother.
Emile Verhaeren (1855-1916), art critic, poet and homme de lettres,
was a man whose vision transcended his native Belgium. With close
ties to Mallarme in France and Rilke in Germany, Verhaeren, a
peripatetic student of the arts, readily traveled to Paris, Berlin,
Cassel, Vienna and Amsterdam. From the mid-1880s until his death in
1916, his many trips abroad resulted in a raft of essays and short
monographs on the arts of the Northern Renaissance. Yet, despite
the insights, scholarship and markedly precise and revealing
descriptions of these studies, they have long been neglected in art
historical circles, overshadowed, perhaps, by Verhaeren's own
poetic outpourings and his numerous essays on contemporary art. In
this book, Albert Alhadeff translates, edits, annotates and
contextualizes these often brilliant and always revealing studies
on artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens, Memling, Bruegel and
Grunewald, masters from the North who worked mostly in Flanders,
Holland and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As
Alhadeff reveals, Verhaeren's studies of the masters of old in
Germany, Flanders and the newly born Dutch Republic are as much
about Verhaeren the man as they are about the subjects of his
inquiries.
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