Raphael is one of the rare artists who have never gone out of fashion. Acclaimed during his lifetime, he was imitated by contemporaries and served as a model for painters through the nineteenth century. Because of the artist s renown, his works have continuously been subject to care, conservation, and restoration. In this book, Cathleen Hoeniger focuses on the legacy of Raphael s art: the historical trajectory or afterlife of the paintings themselves. The appreciation of Raphael was expressed and the restoration of his works debated in contemporary treatises, which provide a backdrop for probing the fortune of his paintings. What happened to his panel-paintings and frescoes in the centuries after his death in 1520? Some were lost altogether; others were severely damaged in natural disasters; and many were affected by uncontrolled climactic conditions, by travel from one place to another, and by the not always cautious and careful hands of restorers. This book reveals the five-hundred-year story of many of Raphael s most well-known paintings.

Michelangelo's extant correspondence is the most abundant of any artist. Spanning 67 years, it comprises roughly 1,400 letters, of which 500 were written by Michelangelo himself. Biographers and art historians have combed the letters for insight into Michelangelo's views on art, his contractual obligations, and his relationships. Literary scholars have explored parallels between the letters and Michelangelo's poetry. Nevertheless, this is the first book to study the letters for their intrinsically literary qualities. In this volume, Deborah Parker examines Michelangelo's use of language as a means of understanding the creative process of this extraordinary artist. His letters often revel in witticisms, rhetorical flourishes, and linguistic ingenuity. Close study of his mastery of words and modes of self-presentation shows Michelangelo to be a consummate artist who deploys the resources of language to considerable effect.

"In Your Face" concentrates on the Renaissance concern with "self-fashioning" by examining how a group of Renaissance artists and writers encoded their own improprieties in their works of art. In the elitist court society of sixteenth-century Italy, where moderation, limitation, and discretion were generally held to be essential virtues, these men consistently sought to stand out and to underplay their conspicuousness at once. The heroes (or anti-heroes) of this book--Michelangelo Buonarroti, Benvenuto Cellini, Pietro Aretino, and Anton Francesco Doni--violated norms of decorum by promoting themselves aggressively and by using writing or artworks to memorialize their assertiveness and intractable delight in parading themselves as transgressive and insubordinate on a grand scale. Focusing on these sorts of writers and visual artists, Biow constructs a version of the Italian Renaissance that is neither the elegant one of Castiglione's and Vasari's courts--so recently favored in scholarly accounts--nor the dark, conspiratorial one of Niccolo Machiavelli's and Francesco Guicciardini's princely states.

Using scientific methods in his investigations of the human body -- the first ever by an artist -- da Vinci was able to produce remarkably accurate depictions of the "ideal" human figure. This exceptional collection reprints 59 of his sketches of the skeleton, skull, upper and lower extremities, human embryos, and other subjects.

Winner of the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize from the Renaissance Society of America Titian, one of the most successful painters of the Italian Renaissance, was credited by his contemporaries with painting a miracle-working image, the San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross. Taking this unusual circumstance as a point of departure, Christopher J. Nygren revisits the scope and impact of Titian's life's work. Nygren shows how, motivated by his status as the creator of a miracle-working object, Titian played an active and essential role in reorienting the long tradition of Christian icons over the course of the sixteenth century. Drawing attention to Titian's unique status as a painter whose work was viewed as a conduit of divine grace, Nygren shows clearly how the artist appropriated, deployed, and reconfigured Christian icon painting. Specifically, he tracks how Titian continually readjusted his art to fit the shifting contours of religious and political reformations, and how these changes shaped Titian's conception of what made a devotionally efficacious image. The strategies that were successful in, say, 1516 were discarded by the 1540s, when his approach to icon painting underwent a radical revision. Therefore, this book not only tracks the career of one of the most important artists in the tradition of Western painting but also brings to light new information about how divergent agendas of religious, political, and artistic reform interacted over the long arc of the sixteenth century. Original and erudite, this book represents an important reassessment of Titan's approach to devotional subject matter. It will appeal to students and specialists as well as art aficionados interested in Titian and in religious painting.

Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin, created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate all 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s greatest poet, Dante Alighieri. A powerful encounter between poet and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never finished. Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity, and his illustrations went missing for 400 years. The nineteenth-century rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars to their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come to mean. Today, Botticelli’s Primavera adorns household objects of every kind. This book is essential to explain not only how and why this artist became iconic, but why we need still need his work—and the spirit of the Renaissance—today. A New Yorker Best Book of 2022

After Vasari's Lives of the Most Famous Artists, The Life of Titian by the seventeenth-century Venetian artist and writer Carlo Ridolfi is the most important contemporary documentary source for our understanding of the great Renaissance artist. This new critical edition, the first translation into English of Ridolfi's biography, illuminates his life, his artistic production, and his early critical reputation. The editors address art-historical questions of attribution, provenance, and documentation that Ridolfi's biography raises. Two introductory essays present the nature, scope, and importance of the biography for the study of Titian and Venetian Renaissance art and place Ridolfi in the tradition of Renaissance biography and artistic literature. The annotations provide a useful and current bibliography drawn from both art history and literature.

The Life of Titian will be of interest to a wide audience of scholars and students of the history of Renaissance art, literature, language, and culture.

A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art provides a diverse, fresh collection of accessible, comprehensive essays addressing key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700, a period that might be termed the beginning of modern history. * Presents a collection of original, in-depth essays from art experts that address various aspects of European visual arts produced from circa 1300 to 1700 * Divided into five broad conceptual headings: Social-Historical Factors in Artistic Production; Creative Process and Social Stature of the Artist; The Object: Art as Material Culture; The Message: Subjects and Meanings; and The Viewer, the Critic, and the Historian: Reception and Interpretation as Cultural Discourse * Covers many topics not typically included in collections of this nature, such as Judaism and the arts, architectural treatises, the global Renaissance in arts, the new natural sciences and the arts, art and religion, and gender and sexuality * Features essays on the arts of the domestic life, sexuality and gender, and the art and production of tapestries, conservation/technology, and the metaphor of theater * Focuses on Western and Central Europe and that territory's interactions with neighboring civilizations and distant discoveries * Includes illustrations as well as links to images not included in the book

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life.

After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments.

Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us.

No city but Florence contains such an intense concentration of art produced in such a short span of time. The sheer number and proximity of works of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence can be so overwhelming that Florentine hospitals treat hundreds of visitors each year for symptoms brought on by trying to see them all, an illness famously identified with the French author Stendhal. While most guidebooks offer only brief descriptions of a large number of works, with little discussion of the historical background, Judith Testa gives a fresh perspective on the rich and brilliant art of the Florentine Renaissance in An Art Lover's Guide to Florence. Concentrating on a number of the greatest works, by such masters as Botticelli and Michelangelo, Testa explains each piece in terms of what it meant to the people who produced it and for whom they made it, deftly treating the complex interplay of politics, sex, and religion that were involved in the creation of those works. With Testa as a guide, armchair travelers and tourists alike will delight in the fascinating world of Florentine art and history.

Leonardo da Vinci was a revolutionary thinker, artist and inventor who has been written about and celebrated for centuries. Lesser known, however, is his revolutionary and empowering portrayal of the modern female, centuries before the first women's liberation movements. Before da Vinci, portraits of women in Italy were still, impersonal and mostly shown in profile. Leonardo pushed the boundaries of female depiction having several of his female subjects, including his Mona Lisa, gaze at the viewer, giving them an authority which was withheld from women at the time. Art historian and journalist Kia Vahland recounts Leonardo's entire life from April 15, 1452, as a child born out of wedlock in Vinci up through his death on May 2, 1519, in the French castle of von Cloux. Included throughout are 80 sketches and paintings showcasing Leonardo's approach to the female form (including anatomical sketches of birth) and other artwork as well as examples from other artists from the 15th and 16th centuries. Vahland explains how artists like Raphael, Giorgione, Giovanni Bellini and the young Titian were influenced by da Vinci's women while Michelangelo, da Vinci's main rival, created masculine images of woman that counters Leonardo's depictions.

Few, if any, early modern European cities boasted a population as racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse as Renaissance Venice, from German merchants living in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi to the Jewish inhabitants of the Ghetto. This fascinating book focuses on the wealthy elite of that immigrant population. From monumental palaces to pictorial cycles, Blake de Maria examines the artistic patronage commissioned by and associated with rich immigrant merchants who relocated to Venice with the aim of becoming Venetian "cittadini, " or citizens.

As newcomers to the city, immigrant merchant families had to acquire the material commodities necessary for everyday life, and the need to establish an appropriate spiritual identity proved equally pressing. De Maria investigates important aspects of the artistic, commercial, and familial activities of naturalized citizen families, and considers the communal functions of this merchant clan, their social identity as naturalized citizens, their contributions to the fabric of early modern Venice, and their complex relationship with Venice's native population. Rich in new material and full of human interest, the book sheds light on a significant, hitherto little-known sector in Venetian artistic patronage.

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.

Frederick de Armas argues in this work that throughout his literary career, Cervantes was engaged in a conversation with the classical authors of Greece and Rome, especially through the interpretations of antiquity presented by the artist Raphael. Rather than looking at Cervantes' texts in relation to other literary works, this book demonstrates how Cervantes' trip to Italy and his observation of Italian Renaissance art--particularly the works of Raphael at the Vatican--led him to create new images and structures in his works.

"A considerable work of assimilative scholarship and common sense...races along merrily."—The Boston Globe.

This book is the first comprehensive study of images of rape in Italian painting at the dawn of the Renaissance. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Peter Bokody examines depictions of sexual violence in religion, law, medicine, literature, politics, and history writing produced in kingdoms (Sicily and Naples) and city-republics (Florence, Siena, Lucca, Bologna and Padua). Whilst misogynistic endorsement characterized many of these visual discourses, some urban communities condemned rape in their propaganda against tyranny. Such representations of rape often link gender and aggression to war, abduction, sodomy, prostitution, pregnancy, and suicide. Bokody also traces how the new naturalism in painting, introduced by Giotto, increased verisimilitude, but also fostered imagery that coupled eroticism and violation. Exploring images and texts that have long been overlooked, Bokody's study provides new insights at the intersection of gender, policy, and visual culture, with evident relevance to our contemporary condition.

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero lived. At the same time, Piero's paintings depict a world that is distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never visited. The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this paradoxical aspect of Piero's art. It tells the story of an artist who could think of the local churches, palaces, and landscapes in and around his hometown of Sansepolcro as miraculously built replicas of the monuments of Jerusalem. Piero's application of perspective, to which he devoted a long treatise, was meant to convince his contemporaries that his paintings report on things that Piero actually observed. Piero's methodical way of painting seems to have offered no room for his own fantasy. His art looks deliberately styleless. This book uncovers a world in which painting needed to validate itself by cultivating the illusion that it reported on things observed instead of things imagined by the artist. Piero's painting claimed truth in a world of increasing uncertainties.

346 in all: Old Testament, St. Jerome, Passion, Life of Virgin, Apocalypse, many others. Introduction by Campbell Dodgson. "...it was in woodcut design that the creative genius of Dürer reached its highest expression...The only available source for many of these works."-Antique Monthly.

This volume combines a number of approaches to the history of the conflict between religions and cultures. Contributions from history, art and legal history, as well as Judaistic studies deal with new conceptual considerations on the history of perceptions in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period; above all interpretations of non-European religions, of paganism in their own European tradition, and how ecclesiastic law treated a oenon-believersa in relation to the heretics. The second volume is in preparation.

The latest addition to Phaidon's best-selling Colour Library series of affordable introductory books on the great masters and movements in art features all of Leonardo' da Vinci's painted works and a detailed illustrated introduction.

Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His works, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo's work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist's highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures explicates many of Michelangelo's most celebrated sculptures, applying principles gleaned from long, hard looking. Almost everything Steinberg wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but here put to the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo's rendering of figures as well as their gestures and interrelations conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body and its actions to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers--or, as Steinberg put it, in Michelangelo's art, "anatomy becomes theology." Michelangelo's Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of Steinberg's selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a book review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master's work, a lighthearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession and, finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.