In this lucid account, Stephanie Porras charts the fascinating story of art in northern Europe during the Renaissance period (ca. 1400-1570). She explains how artists and patrons from the regions north of the Alps - the Low Countries, France, England, Germany - responded to an era of rapid political, social, economic, and religious change, while redefining the status of art. Porras discusses not only paintings by artists from Jan van Eyck to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but also sculpture, architecture, prints, metalwork, embroidery, tapestry, and armor. Each chapter presents works from a roughly 20-year period and also focuses on a broad thematic issue, such as the flourishing of the print industry or the mobility of Northern artists and artworks. The author traces the influence of aristocratic courts as centers of artistic production and the rise of an urban merchant class, leading to the creation of new consumers and new art products. This book offers a richly illustrated narrative that allows readers to understand the progression, variety, and key conceptual developments of Northern Renaissance art.

Celebrates one of the greatest and most beloved painters of the Early Renaissance with luxurious, large-format images Sandro Botticelli, one of the greatest painters of the Italian High Renaissance, enjoyed the patronage of the greatest Florentine families. He spent most of his career in the humanist circle of the Medici, for whom he painted such masterpieces as Primavera and Venus and Mars, works that combine a decorative use of line with Classical elements in harmonious and supple compositions. This sumptuously produced volume features an updated, full-colour selection of the artist's works made for the original 1937 edition by Ludwig Goldscheider, co-founder of Phaidon Press. The original essay by Lionello Venturi is accompanied by a new introduction from Renaissance specialist Alessandro Cecchi, putting Botticelli and his school into a contemporary context. Elegant design, fine papers and tipped-on image plates make this a true collector's edition.

This book is not only a fascinating biography of one of the greatest painters of the seventeenth century but also a social history of the colorful extended family to which he belonged and of the town life of the period. It explores a series of distinct worlds: Delft's Small-Cattle Market, where Vermeer's paternal family settled early in the century; the milieu of shady businessmen in Amsterdam that recruited Vermeer's grandfather to counterfeit coins; the artists, military contractors, and Protestant burghers who frequented the inn of Vermeer's father in Delft's Great Market Square; and the quiet, distinguished "Papists Corner" in which Vermeer, after marrying into a high-born Catholic family, retired to practice his art, while retaining ties with wealthy Protestant patrons. The relationship of Vermeer to his principal patron is one of many original discoveries in the book.

After the death of Raphael in 1520, the next generation in Italy was to see the rise of the complex and refined sensibility summed up in the term "Mannerism." In this uniquely comprehensive guide to sixteenth-century Renaissance art, Linda Murray examines the manifold achievements of Italian artists and identifies the individual forms taken by artists in Northern Europe and in Spain, including Durer, Bruegel and El Greco.

The gods of Olympus died with the advent of Christianity - or so we have been taught to believe. But how are we to account for their tremendous popularity during the Renaissance? This illustrated book, now reprinted in a new, larger paperback format, offers the general reader a multifaceted look at the far-reaching role played by mythology in Renaissance intellectual and emotional life. After a discussion of mythology in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Jean Seznec traces the fate of the gods from Botticelli and Raphael to their function and appearance in Ronsard's verses and Ben Jonson's masques.

This book takes a new look at the interpretations of, and the historical information surrounding, Michelangelo's David. New documentary materials discovered by Rolf Bagemihl add to the early history of the stone block that became the David and provide an identity for the painted terracotta colossus that stood on the cathedral buttresses for which Michelangelo's statue was to be a companion. The David, with its placement at the Palazzo della Signoria, was deeply implicated in the civic history of Florence, where public nakedness played a ritual role in the military and in the political lives of its people. This book, then, places the David not only within the artistic history of Florence and its monuments but also within the popular culture of the period as well.

"The chronology of the Italian Renaissance, its character, and context have long been a topic of discussion among scholars. Some date its beginnings to the fourteenthcentury work of Giotto, others to the generation of Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Donatello that fl ourished from around 1400. The close of the Renaissance has also proved elusive. Mannerism, for example, is variously considered to be an independent (but subsidiary) late aspect of Renaissance style or a distinct style in its own right."

This beautifully illustrated and exquisitely designed volume of paintings, sculpture, medals, and drawings celebrates the extraordinary flowering of female portraiture, mainly in Florence, beginning in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Included are many of the finest portraits of women (and a few of men) by Filippo Lippi, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Botticelli, Verrocchio, and Leonardo da Vinci--whose remarkable double-sided portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, which departs notably from tradition, is the focus of special attention.

It was in Florence during this period that portraiture expanded beyond the realm of rulers and their consorts to encompass women of the merchant class. This phenomenon, long known to scholars, is here presented to a larger audience for the first time. The catalogue, which accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, traces how the humanist praise of women influenced and enlivened their depiction. It also considers how meaningful costumes and settings were chosen. Works from outside Florence by such masters as Pisanello, Rogier van der Weyden, and Ercole Roberti shed additional light on the evolution of female portraiture during the century from c. 1440 to c. 1540.

An introduction by editor and exhibition organizer David Alan Brown and four engaging essays by other experts on Renaissance art--Dale Kent, Joanna Woods-Marsden, Mary Westerman Bulgarella and Roberta Orsi Landini, and Victoria Kirkham--perfectly complement the more than one hundred illustrations, which include ninety-seven full-color plates. The catalogue entries are concise while revealing the key aspects of each portrait--from style and sources to ongoing scholarly debates. This elegant, enlightening book is itself a telling portrait not only of the art but also of the broader issues of women's freedom, responsibility, and individuality in a most exceptional era.

EXHIBITION SCHEDULE

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
September 30, 2001-January 6, 2002

Featuring detailed scenes of court pageantry and life-size portraits of members of the French Valois dynasty woven in wool, silk, and precious metal-wrapped threads, the Valois Tapestries are one of the most extravagant sets of hangings produced in the 16th century. The precise circumstances surrounding the tapestries' commission and their arrival at the Medici court in Florence, as well as the significance of the specific scenes depicted, however, have eluded scholars for years. Presenting new research into the political maneuvering of the Valois and Medici courts and providing extensive physical analysis gathered during a recent cleaning of the tapestries, this volume offers brand new insight into why these magnificent works were made and what they represent. Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Cleveland Museum of Art (11/18/18-01/21/19)

Around 1515, Raphael (1483-1520) designed a set of tapestries for Leo X, the first Medici pope. Each was sumptuously woven in gold, silver, and silk, and depicted scenes from classical mythology with inventive grotesques. Now lost, these spectacular, grand-scale textiles are reconstructed in Raphael's Tapestries and set among a series of unprecedented decorative projects that Pope Leo commissioned from the artist. Likely produced by the Brussels weaver Pieter van Aelst, the tapestries pioneered a new all'antica style analogous with contemporary painted and sculpted interior programs. Tapestries played a central role at Leo's court, as spectacle and as propaganda, and the Grotesques of Leo X would inform tapestry design for the next three centuries. Their beauty and complexity rivaled those of contemporary painting, and their luxurious materials made them highly prized. With this new study, the Grotesques take their rightful place as Renaissance masterworks and as documents of the fervent humanist culture of early 16th-century Rome.

An innovative study of the relationship between Andrea Mantegna and Giovanni Bellini, two masters of the Italian Renaissance Andrea Mantegna (c. 1431-1506) and Giovanni Bellini (active c. 1459; died 1516) each produced groundbreaking paintings, marked by pictorial and technical innovations, that are among the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Exploring the fruitful dynamic between Mantegna's inventive compositional approach and interest in classical antiquity and Bellini's passion for landscape painting, this fascinating volume examines how these two artists, who were also brothers-in-law, influenced and responded to each other's work. Full of new insights and captivating juxtapositions-including comparisons of each of the artist's depictions of the Agony in the Garden and the Presentation to the Temple-this study reveals that neither Mantegna's nor Bellini's achievements can be fully understood in isolation and that their continuous creative exchanges shaped the work of both. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery, London (10/01/18-01/27/19) Gemaldegalerie, Berlin (03/01/19-06/30/19)

Roston demonstrates that what emerges is not a fixed or monolithic pattern for each generation but a dynamic series of responses to shared challenges. The book relates leading English writers and literary modes to contemporary developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture, exploring by a close reading of the texts and the artistic works the insights such comparison offers.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Largely neglected for the four centuries after his death, the fifteenth century Italian artist Piero della Francesca is now seen to embody the fullest expression of the Renaissance perspective painter, raising him to an artistic stature comparable with that of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. But who was Piero, and how did he become the person and artist that he was? Until now, in spite of the great interest in his work, these questions have remained largely unanswered. Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man puts that situation right, integrating the story of Piero's artistic and mathematical achievements with the full chronicle of his life for the first time. Fortified by the discovery of over one hundred previously unknown documents, most unearthed by the author himself, James R. Banker at last brings this fascinating Renaissance enigma to life. The book presents us with Piero's friends, family, and collaborators, all set against the social background of the various cities and courts in which he lived - from the Tuscan commune of Sansepolcro in which he grew up, to Renaissance Florence, Ferrara, Ancona, Rimini, Rome, Arezzo, and Urbino, and eventually back to his home town for the final years of his life. As Banker shows, the cultural contexts in which Piero lived are crucial for understanding both the man and his paintings. From early masterpieces such as the Baptism of Christ through to later, Flemish-influenced works such as the Nativity, we gain a fascinating insight into how Piero's art developed over time, alongside his growing achievements in geometry in the later decades of his life. Along the way, the book addresses some persistent myths about this apparently most elusive of artists. As well as establishing a convincing case to clear up the long controversy over the year of Piero's birth, there are also answers to some big questions about the date of some of his major works, and a persuasive new interpretation of the much-debated Flagellation of Christ. This book is for all those who wish to know about the development of Piero as man, artist, and scholar, rather than simply to see him through a series of isolated great works. What emerges is a thoroughly intriguing Renaissance individual, firmly embedded in his social milieu, but forging an historic identity through his profound artistic and mathematical achievements.

Volume 1 of 2. Lorenzo Ghiberti, sculptor and towering figure of the Renaissance, was the creator of the celebrated Bronze Doors of the Baptistery at Florence, a work that occupied him for twenty years and became known (at Michelangelo's suggestion, according to tradition) as the Doors of Paradise. Here Richard Krautheimer takes what Charles S. Seymour, Jr., describes as "a fascinating journey into the mind, career, and inventiveness of one of the indisputably outstanding sculptors of all the Western tradition." This one-volume edition includes an extensive new preface and bibliography by the author. Richard Krautheimer, Professor Emeritus of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, currently lives in Rome. He is the author of numerous works, including the Pelican Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture and Rome: Profile of a City, 312-1308 (Princeton). Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, 31. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Renaissance was a diverse phenomenon, marked by innovation and economic expansion, the rise of powerful rulers, religious reforms, and social change. Encompassing the entire continent, Renaissance Architecture examines the rich variety of buildings that emerged during these seminal centuries of European history.
Although marked by the rise of powerful individuals, both patrons and architects, the Renaissance was equally a time of growing group identities and communities -- and architecture provided the public face to these new identities. Religious reforms in northern Europe, spurred on by Martin Luther, rejected traditional church function and decoration, and proposed new models. Political ambitions required new buildings to satisfy court rituals. Territory, nature, and art intersected to shape new landscapes and building types. Classicism came to be the international language of an educated architect and an ambitious patron, drawing on the legacy of ancient Rome. Yet the richness of the medieval tradition continued to be used throughout Europe, often alongside classical buildings.
Examining each of these areas by turn, this book offers a broad cultural history of the period as well as a completely new approach to the history of Renaissance architecture. The work of well-known architects such as Michelangelo and Andrea Palladio is examined alongside lesser known though no less innovative designers such as Juan Guas in Portugal and Benedikt Ried in Prague and Eastern Europe. Drawing on the latest research, it also covers more recent areas of interest such as the story of women as patrons and the emotional effect of Renaissance buildings, as well as the impact of architectural publications and travel on the emerging new architectural culture across Europe. As such, it provides a compelling introduction to the subject for all those interested in the history of architecture, society, and culture in the Renaissance, and European culture in general.

In 1505, Michelangelo began planning the magnificent tomb for Pope Julius II, which would dominate the next forty years of his career. Repeated failures to complete the monument were characterized by Condivi, Michelangelo's authorized biographer, as "the tragedy of the tomb." This definitive book thoroughly documents the art of the tomb and each stage of its complicated evolution. Edited by Christoph Luitpold Frommel, who also acted as the lead consultant on tge recent restoration campaign, this volume offers new post-restoration photography that reveal the beauty of the tomb overall, its individual statues, and its myriad details. This book traces Michelangelo's stylistic evolution; documents the dialogue between the artist and his great friend and exacting patron, Pope Julius II (who died long before the work was completed); unravels the complicated relationship between the master and his assistants, who executed large parts of the design; and sheds new light on the importance of Neo-Platonism in Michelangelo's thinking, which gave shape to the tomb's most famous statue, the Moses, and the work as a whole. A rich trove of documents in the original Latin and archaic Italian-many unpublished-relates the story firsthand through letters, contracts, and other records covering Michelangelo's travels, the purchase of the marble, the concerns that arose as work progressed, and numerous disagreements and negotiations. The book also includes catalogues of fifteen sculptures designed for the tomb and more than 80 related drawings, as well as an extensive and up-to-date bibliography.

2019, 450 years after the Old Master's death, will be celebrated as the Year of Bruegel, culminating in the exhibition 'The Age of Bruegel' at The Royal Museum of Fine Arts (KMSKA), Antwerp. In the run up to the numerous exhibitions and festivities that are planned for next year, Lannoo Publishers releases this glossy guidebook. It contains images of the Old Master's paintings with astonishing detail. It contains expert commentary by Till-Holger Borchert, director of all Bruges-based museums. Also available in the series: Masterpiece: Peter Paul Rubens (ISBN: 9789401441612) and Masterpiece: Jan Van Eyck (ISBN: 9789401441629).

During the past few decades, admirers of Petrus Christus have been astonishingly fortunate. Unknown or forgotten paintings in the style of Christus have turned up with surprising regularity: in the 1950s, the wonderful Kansas City Holy Family; in the 1960s the Birmingham Christ and the Bruges Isabella of Portugal Presented by Saint Elisabeth in the 1980s, the Cleveland Baptist and the problematic Bruges panels of the Annunciation and the Nativity. Nothing, of course, can compensate for the loss, during World War II, of the Dessau Crucifixion, and the Berlin wing panels of the Baptist and Saint Catherine. We had to wait until 1974 for the first monograph devoted to Christus, but since then two more books on Christus have been published and important discoveries have been made about his career in Bruges. Thanks to Maryan Ainsworth and her colleagues, we had a truly marvellous exhibition, where we had the privilige of studying more of Chrsitus' paintings than he himself can ever have seen gathered in one place. The exhibition itself initiated a new phase in Christus studies and it is the ideal beginning. If problems of attribution and chronology are ever to be settled, they had to be settled during the exhibition. This publication offers the papers of the 1994 Petrus Christus Symposium at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. L. Campbell, Approaches to Petrus Christus, W. Blockmans, The Creative Environment: Inventions and Functions of Bruges Art Production, C. Harbison, Fact, Symbol, Ideal, Roles for Realism in Early Netherlandish Painting, G.B. Canfield, The Reception of Flemish Art in Renaissance Florence and Naples, M.P.J. Martens, Discussion, J. Upton, PETRUS.XPI.ME.FECIT, The Transformation of a Legacy, S. Buck, Petrus Christus' Berlin Wings and the Metropolitan Museum's Eyckian Diptych, S. Jones, The Virgin of Nicholas van Maelbeke and the Followers of Jan Van Eyck, C. Eisler, Discussion, L. Gellman, Two Lost Portraits by Petrus Christu

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) is arguably the first truly international artist, a celebrity both during his own lifetime and since. A major artist of the northern Renaissance, he was praised by his contemporaries and described shortly after his death as 'the prince among German painters'. Durer's achievements as a painter were matched by his remarkable manipulation of the traditional techniques of woodcut and engraving, which altered the history of printmaking and ensured that his works were admired and collected throughout Europe. The British Museum holds one of the finest collections of Durer's graphic art in the world, with superlative prints and drawings from all phases of his career. Beginning with an introduction to the life of the artist, the book presents a selection of Durer's best-known works including early figure studies, landscape watercolours, animal studies drawn from nature and his imaginative famous prints such as Adam and Eve, Rhinoceros and Melancholia. As well as demonstrating Durer's astonishing range of subject matter, the book explores his working method and the versatile, spontaneous nature of his draughtsmanship. The development of Durer's ideas from drawings to related woodcuts and engravings is also investigated, making the book a perfect concise introduction to this fascinating and much-admired artist.

From the late 15th to the mid-16th century, an impressive corpus of architecture, sculpture, and painting was created to embellish monastic sites affiliated with the Benedictine Cassinese Congregation of Italy. A religious order of humanistically trained monks, the Cassinese engaged with the most eminent artists and architects of the early modern period, supporting the production of imagery and architecture that was often highly experimental in nature: from Raphael's Sistine Madonna in Piacenza to Andrea Riccio's Moses/Zeus Ammon, from Andrea Palladio's church of San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice) to the superbly crafted choirstalls of San Severino and Sossio (Naples). Applying a network framework to the congregation's infrastructure of monasteries makes clear that the circulation of sophisticated Renaissance art and architecture constituted only a segment of the monks' investment in the arts. Monks also served as custodians of an antique monumental heritage and popular votive images, assuring the survival of ancient buildings and artifacts of limited aesthetic value that supplied opportunities for early modern masters to confront an array of artworks for the reinvention of reformed Christian art and architecture. Text in English, Italian and German.

Saint Marks invokes and pluralizes the figure of Mark in order to explore relations between painting and writing. Emphasizing that the saint is not a singular biographical individual in the various biblical and hagiographic texts that involve someone so named, the book takes as its ultimate concern the kinds of material life that outlive the human subject. From the incommensurate, anachronic instances in which Saint Mark can be located-among them, as Evangelist or as patron saint of Venice-the book traces Mark's afterlives within art, sacred texts, and literature in conversation with such art historians and philosophers as Aby Warburg, Giorgio Agamben, Georges Didi-Huberman, T. J. Clark, Adrian Stokes, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Goldberg begins in sixteenth-century Venice, with a series of paintings by Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, Tintoretto, and others, that have virtually nothing to do with biblical texts. He turns then to the legacy of John Ruskin's Stones of Venice and through it to questions about what painting does as painting. A final chapter turns to ancient texts, considering the Gospel of St. Mark together with its double, the so-called Secret Gospel that has occasioned controversy for its homoerotic implications. The posthumous persistence of a life is what the gospel named Mark calls the Kingdom of God. Saints have posthumous lives; but so too do paintings and texts. This major interdisciplinary study by one of our most astute cultural critics extends what might have been a purely theological subject to embrace questions central to cultural practice from the ancient world to the present.

November 19, 1479: a dynastic alliance, two noble scions, a regal wedding, short-lived and with an unhappy ending. These pages reconstruct the story of the magnificent bas relief in the Acton Collection (Villa La Pietra, Florence), commissioned to celebrate the marriage between Antonio Basso Della Rovere, nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, and Caterina Marzano d'Aragona, the niece of King Ferdinand I of Naples. The heraldic symbols of the three coats of arms leave no doubt about the identities of the characters and events surrounding its creation, and lead us to the original location of the work, born as the overdoor to the main portal of the Basso Della Rovere Palace in piazza della Maddalena in Savona. Through close examination of the Della Rovere in Rome, this study highlights some previously unknown facts about the family's origins and returns to Savona and its role as a political, cultural, and artistic protagonist in late 15th-century Italy.