How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent age This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region's creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel's encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens. Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel's writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.

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.

"Quite simply the most fascinating record of a '[fashion] victim' one could hope for." The Spectator This captivating study reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, it chronicles how style-conscious accountant Matthaus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the 16th century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress - seemingly both ephemeral and trivial - is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and everyday culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of 16th-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.

Mater Misericordiae-Mother of Mercy-emerged as one of the most prolific subjects in central Italian art from the late thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. With iconographic origins in Marian cult relics brought from Palestine to Constantinople in the fifth century, the amalgam of attributes coalesced in Armenian Cilicia then morphed as it spread to Cyprus. An early concept of Mary of Mercy-the Virgin standing with outstretched arms and a wide mantle under which kneel or stand devotees-entered the Italian peninsula at the ports of Bari and Venice during the Crusades, eventually converging in central Italy. The mendicant orders adopted the image as an easily recognizable symbol for mercy and aided in its diffusion. In this study, the author's primary goals are to explore the iconographic origins of the Madonna della Misericordia as a devotional image by identifying and analyzing key attributes; to consider circumstances for its eventual overlapping function as a secular symbol used by lay confraternities; and to discuss its diaspora throughout the Italian peninsula, Western Europe, and eastward into Russia and Ukraine. With over 100 illustrations, the book presents an array of works of art as examples, including altarpieces, frescoes, oil paintings, manuscript illuminations, metallurgy, glazed terracotta, stained glass, architectural relief sculpture, and processional banners.

This book offers a wide-ranging introduction to the way that art was made, valued, and viewed in northern Europe in the age of the Renaissance, from the late fourteenth to the early years of the sixteenth century. Drawing on a rich range of sources, from inventories and guild regulations to poetry and chronicles, it examines everything from panel paintings to carved altarpieces.
While many little-known works are foregrounded, Susie Nash also presents new ways of viewing and understanding the more familiar, such as the paintings of Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Hans Memling, by considering the social and economic context of their creation and reception. Throughout, Nash challenges the perception that Italy was the European leader in artistic innovation at this time, demonstrating forcefully that Northern art, and particularly that of the Southern Netherlands, dominated visual culture throughout Europe in this crucial period.

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicaments In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance-Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari-measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however-Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wo lfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich-struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline. Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history.

This edition prints all three parts of Dante's great poem about the journey of the soul - INFERNO, PURGATORIO and PARADISO - in the recent English translation by Allen Mandelbaum, with an introduction and explanatory notes on each canto by the noted Dante scholar, Peter Armour. This is the only reasonably priced hardback edition of one of the world's greatest masterworks and should prove to be the most accessible for students and general readers alike. It includes Botticelli's glorious and relatively unknown illustrations of THE DIVINE COMEDY, drawn in the 1480s.

Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed sweeping innovations in the art of sculpture. Sculptors rediscovered new types of images from classical antiquity and invented new ones, devised novel ways to finish surfaces, and pushed the limits of their materials to new expressive extremes. The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy surveys the sculptural production created by a range of artists throughout the peninsula. It offers a comprehensive overview of Italian sculpture during a century of intense creativity and development. Here, nineteen historians of Quattrocento Italian sculpture chart the many competing forces that led makers, patrons, and viewers to invest sculpture with such heightened importance in this time and place. Methodologically wide-ranging, the essays, specially commissioned for this volume, explore the vast range of techniques and media (stone, metal, wood, terracotta, and stucco) used to fashion works of sculpture. They also examine how viewers encountered those objects, discuss varying approaches to narrative, and ponder the increasing contemporary interest in the relationship between sculpture and history.

The fifteenth century saw the evolution of a distinct and powerfully influential European artistic culture. But what does the familiar phrase Renaissance Art actually refer to? Through engaging discussion of timeless works by artists such as Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, and supported by illustrations including colour plates, Tom Nichols offers a masterpiece of his own as he explores the truly original and diverse character of the art of the Renaissance.

In this absorbing illustrated history, Loren Partridge takes the reader on an insightful tour of Renaissance Florence and sheds new light on its celebrated art and culture by examining the city's great architectural and artistic achievements in their political, intellectual, and religious contexts. This essential and accessible text, the only up-to-date volume on Renaissance Florence currently available, incorporates insights from recent scholarship, including gender studies, while emphasizing the artists' social status, rivalries, and innovations. The result is a multilevel exploration of how the celebrated Florentine culture formally registers in specific works of art or architecture and how these works interactively informed and often shaped the culture.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ's post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici's impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman's contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family's domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi's Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi's painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de' Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women's agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

A provocative account of the philosophical problem of 'difference' in art history, Tintoretto's Difference offers a new reading of this pioneering 16th century painter, drawing upon the work of the 20th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Bringing together philosophical, art historical, art theoretical and art historiographical analysis, it is the first book-length study in English of Tintoretto for nearly two decades and the first in-depth exploration of the implications of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy for the understanding of early modern art and for the discipline of art history. With a focus on Deleuze's important concept of the diagram, Tintoretto's Difference positions the artist's work within a critical study of both art history's methods, concepts and modes of thought, and some of the fundamental dimensions of its scholarly practice: context, tradition, influence, and fact. Indicating potentials of the diagrammatic for art historical thinking across the registers of semiotics, aesthetics, and time, Tintoretto's Difference offers at once an innovative study of this seminal artist, an elaboration of Deleuze's philosophy of the diagram, and a new avenue for a philosophical art history.

Epic Arts in Renaissance France studies the relationship between epic literature and other art forms such as painting, sculpture, and architecture. Why, the book asks, the epic heroes and themes so ubiquitous in French Renaissance art are widely celebrated whereas the same period's literary epics, frequently maligned, now go unread? To explore this paradox, the book investigates a number of epic building sites, i.e. specific situations in which literary epics either become the basis for realisations in other art forms or somehow contest or compete with them. Beginning with a detour about the appearance of epic heroes (Odysseus and Aeneas) on marriage chests in fifteenth-century Florence, the study traces how French communities of readers, writers, translators, and artists reinvent epic forms in their own-or their patron's-image. Following extended discussion of three galleries in different regions of France, which all depicted key scenes from the classical epics of Homer, Virgil, and Lucan, the book turns to epics written in the period. Chapters of Epic Arts focus on Etienne Dolet's Fata, which praise the victories (but also failures) of Francois Ier in ways that make it both a continuum of Fontainebleau and a response to the celebration of French defeat in foreign paintings; on Ronsard's Franciade, whose muse was depicted on the facade of the Louvre and whose story was eventually taken up in a long series of paintings by Toussaint Dubreuil; and on Agrippa d'Aubigne's Protestant Tragiques, which allude to, and frequently function as graffiti over, Catholic works of art in Paris and Rome. Situated at the frontier of literary criticism and art history, Epic Arts in Renaissance France is a compelling call for a revaluation of French epic literature and indeed of how we read.

This book relates developments in the visual arts and printing to humanist theories of literary and bodily imitation, bringing together fifteenth- and sixteenth-century frescoes, statues, coins, letters, dialogues, epic poems, personal emblems, and printed collections of portraits. Its interdisciplinary analyses show that Renaissance theories of emulating classical heroes generated a deep skepticism about self-presentation, ultimately contributing to a new awareness of representation as representation. Hollow Men shows that the Renaissance questioning of "interiority" derived from a visual ideal, the monument that was the basis of teachings about imitation. In fact, the decline of exemplary pedagogy and the emergence of modern masculine subjectivity were well underway in the mid-fifteenth century, and these changes were hastened by the rapid development of the printed image.

The volume, investigating the extraordinary season of the Italian Renaissance, highlights the great contribution offered to the culture of that period by the Jewish world, still little documented in today's studies. Indeed, there is no doubt that Judaism, with its long-lasting identity and tradition strongly rooted in territorial states, has made a peculiar contribution to the sphere of arts, literature and humanistic philosophy, contributing to giving many original and inimitable intonations to the Italian Renaissance. The investigation proposed here focuses on the relationship - harmonious in some cases and conflicting in others - between the Christian majority society and the Jewish identity in the period between the early fifteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries, meaning from the full affirmation of the Humanism to the conclusion of the Council of Trento, offering at the same time a precise geographical overview of the phenomenon. The volume is divided into thematic chapters, it contains a rich catalogue of testimonies ranging from liturgical objects to those of daily use, from manuscripts to furnishings to some art masterpieces, and is supplemented by bibliographical apparatus. Essays by: Guido Bartolucci, Giulio Busi, Donatella Calabi, Saverio Campanini, J.H. Chajes, Andreina Contessa, Miriam Davide, Silvana Greco, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Mauro Perani, David B. Ruderman, Angela Scandaliato, Salvatore Settis, Giacomo Todeschini, Francesca Trivellato, Giuseppe Veltri, Gianni Venturi, Joanna Weinberg.

The self-portrait of Baccio Bandinelli in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, shows the scupltor pointing not to a work of marble or bronze, but to a drawing. Bandinelli was particularly proud of his skills as a draughtsman, and he was prolific in his production of works on paper. This set him apart from contemporaries in his profession; many Renaissance sculptors left us no drawings at all. Accompanying an exhibition at the Gardner Museum, this publication will put Bandinelli's portrait in context by looking at the practice of drawing by scupltors from the Renaissance to the Baroque in Central Italy. A focus of the book will be Bandinelli's own drawings and the development of his practice across his career and his experimentation with different media. Bandinelli's drawings will be compared with those of Michelangelo and Cellini. The broader question considered, however, is when, how, and why scupltors drew. EVery Renaissance sculptor who set out to make a work in metal or stone would first have made a series of preparatory models in wax, clay, and/or stucco. Drawing was not an essential practice for sculptors in teh way it was for painters, and indeed, most surviving sculptors' drawings are not preparatory studies for works they subsequently executed in three dimensions. By comparing bot rough sketches and more finished drawings with related three-dimensional works by the same artists, the importance of drawing for various individual sculptors will be examined. When sculptors did draw, it often indicated something about the artist's training or about his ambitions. Among the most accomplished draftsmen were artists like Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and Cellini, who had come to sculpture by way of goldsmithery, a profession that required profieciency in ornamental design. Artists who soought to become architects, meanwhile - the likes of Michelangelo, Giambologna, and Ammanati - similarly needed to learn to draw, since architects had to provide plans, elevations, and other drawings to assistants and clients and had to imagine the place of individual figures within a larger multi-media ensemble. Certain kinds of projects, moreover - fountains and tombs, for example - required drawings to a degree that others did not. Sections on the Renaissance goldsmith-sculptor and sculptor-architect will allow comparison of the place drawing had in various artists' careers. Beginning with a chapter dedicated to the importance of draftsmanship in the education of sculptors, showing works by Finiguerra, Cellini Bandinelli, and Giambologna, the book will be split up into chapters dealing with the various challenges scupltors faced while drawing objects in the round, reliefs, and architectural structures. A central section will focus on Bandinelli, demonstrating the importance drawing held for him while he was preparing sculptures and as an independent token of his artistry.

This volume provides an account of the art and architecture of Venice and the principal cities of the Venetian mainland empire in the Renaissance, from 1450 to1600. Thematically organized, it puts special emphasis on the relationship between art and the political, social, and religious institutions of the Venetian Republic. Major painters such as Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese and of major architects such as Sansovino and Palladio are viewed in the context of the particular needs and ideologies of individual and institutional patrons. Moreover, the distinctive character of Venice as an artistic center is complemented by the discussion of the art produced in the mainland cities of Padua, Treviso, Vicenza, Verona, Brescia, and Bergamo, all of which similarly used visual means to assert their own separate identities. An up-to-date account of the art of early modern Venice, with specially commissioned essays by a team of internationally-known scholars is also included.

This book explores the poetics of literary defences of women written by men in late-medieval and early-modern France. It fills an important lacuna in studies of this polemic in imaginative literature by bridging the gap between Christine de Pizan and a later generation of women writers and male, Neo-Platonist writers who have recently all received due critical attention. Whereas male-authored defences composed between 1440 and 1538 have previously been dismissed as "insincere" or "mere intellectual games," Swift formulates reading strategies to overcome such critical stumbling blocks and engage with the particular rhetorical and historical contexts of these works. Edited and as yet unedited texts by Martin Le Franc, Jacques Milet, Pierre Michault, and Jean Bouchet-catalogues of women, allegorical narratives, and debate poems-are brought together and analysed in detail for the first time in order to explore, for example, how such works address the misogynistic spectre of Jean de Meun's Roman de la rose.
The book seeks to understand the contemporary popularity of the case for women (la querelle des femmes) as literary subject matter. It investigates the publication history across this period, from manuscript to print, of Le Franc's Le Champion des dames. Swift further aims to show how these texts hold interest for modern audiences. A nexus of theoretical concerns centred on performance - Judith Butler's gender performativity, Derrida's re-working of Austin's linguistic performativity through spectrality, and dramatic performance - is enlisted to articulate the interpretative engagement expected by querelle writers of their audience. The reading strategies proposed foster a nuanced andenriched perspective on the question of a male author's "sincerity" when writing in defence of women.