Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300.1550 is the first book to reclaim satire as a central component of Catholic altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration, moving beyond humor's relegation to the medieval margins or to the profane arts alone. The book challenges humor's perception as a mere teaching tool for the laity and the antithesis of 'high' veneration and theology, a divide perpetuated by Counter-Reformation thought and the inheritance of Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World, 1965). It reveals how humor, laughter, and material culture played a critical role in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in western Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Its goal is to open a new line of interpretation in medieval and early modern cultural studies by revealing the functions of humor in sacred scenes, the role of laughter as veneration, and the importance of play for pre-Reformation religious experiences.

Inigo Jones, the first English classical architect, was famous in his own time and was the posthumous sponsor of the Palladian movement of the eighteenth century. This authoritative and elegantly written book, first published in 1966, reassessed Jones's life and career, cleared away the myths of attribution that surround his work, and reassigned to him projects that had disappeared from his oeuvre. Summerson's classic text is enhanced by a new foreword and notes by Howard Colvin, updated bibliography, and improved illustrations.

The foundational question this book explores is: What happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing--when the observer's attention is redirected so that the primary object the portrait imitates becomes the likeness not of a person but of an act, the act of sitting for one's portrait? This shift of attention involves another: from the painter's to the sitter's part in the act of (self-)portrayal.
At the ground level, "Fictions of the Pose" develops a hypothesis about the structure and meaning of portraiture. That foundation supports a first story devoted to the practices and politics of early modern Italian and Dutch portraiture and a second story devoted to Rembrandt's self-portraits, especially those in which he poses in fancy dress as if he were a patron. The author approaches the Rembrandt/Renaissance relation not as an art historian but as an interpreter trained in literary studies, taunted by the challenge of extending the practice of "close reading" from verbal to visual media and fascinated by the way this practice can show how individual works "talk back" to their contexts. The context for Rembrandt, the object and target of his "looking-glass theater," is the structure of patron/painter relations that developed during the Renaissance and influenced the very different conditions of patronage that emerged in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the seventeenth century.
The book is in four parts. Parts One and Two comprise an interpretive study of the technical and sociopolitical conditions within which portraiture becomes an important if problematic medium of self-representation in early modern Europe. The major portion of these two sections considers the structure and the consequences of a system of practices and conventions that governs poses in commissioned portraits. In Part Three the scene shifts from Italian to Dutch portraiture. Part Four is devoted to self-portraits by Rembrandt that are interpreted as responses to the conditions depicted in the first three parts. Through a series of close readings of individual works, the author demonstrates the ironic, polemical, and political force of Rembrandt's self-portraits.

Knight, Death and Devil; Melencolia I, and more-all Dürer's known works in all three media, including 6 works formerly attributed to him. 120 plates.

Florence Cathedral, familiarly called Il Duomo, is an architectural masterpiece and home to celebrated works of art. The interrelationship between the brilliant art and architecture and the Cathedral's musical program is explored in depth in this beautiful book. Perhaps the most beloved example is Luca della Robbia's sculptural program for the organ loft, comprising ten sculptural relief panels that depict children singing, dancing, and making music. Luca's charming sculptures are examined alongside luxurious illuminated manuscripts commissioned for musical performances. Essays by distinguished scholars provide new insights into the original function and meaning of Luca's sculptures; organs and organists during the 15th century; the roles played by women and girls-as well as men and boys-in making music throughout Renaissance Florence; and the Cathedral's illuminated choir books. Published in association with the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Exhibition Schedule: High Museum of Art, Atlanta (10/25/14-01/11/15) Detroit Institute of Arts (02/06/15-05/17/15)

Part of the Norton Critical Studies in Art History, this text examines Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The book includes: an illustration section depicting the entire work as well as in detail; documents and literary sources; and critical essays from history of art literature.

This wide-ranging book elucidates the symbolism of veils and highlights the power of drapery in Italian art from Giotto to Titian. In the cities of the Renaissance, display of luxury dress was a marker of status. Florentines decked out their palaces and streets with textiles for public rituals. But cloths are also the stuff of fantasy: throughout the book, the author moves from the material to the metaphorical. Curtains and veils, swaddling and shrouds, evoke associations with birth and death. The central chapters address the sculpture of Ghiberti and Donatello, focusing on how they deployed drapery to dramatic effect. In the final chapters the focus shifts to the paintings of Bellini, Lotto, and Titian, where drapery both clothes the figures and composes the picture. In the work of Titian, the veiled presence of the body is absorbed within the materials of oil-paint on canvas: medium and subject become one.

Jacob Burckhardt was a scholar who had the gift of being able to combine vast knowledge with a vivid imagination and lively creativity. This book, his contribution to cultural history, was first published in 1860, and has long been recognized as a great work of literature as well as history; its range, powerful style, and breadth of vision make it a classic introduction to the study of the Renaissance, and one that is still a source of inspiration. My starting point has to be a vision, ' Burckhardt wrote to a friend, otherwise I cannot do anything. Vision I call not only optical, but also spiritual realization; for instance, historical vision issuing from the old sources.

Although Saint Cecilia is venerated throughout the Western world as the patron saint of music and Raphael's famous painting The Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia is filled with musical iconography, the ancient origins of Cecilia's association with music have long been shrouded in mystery. This book, a masterful investigation of the Cecilian cult from its beginnings in Christian antiquity down to the Renaissance, explains how Cecilia came to be linked with music and offers a new interpretation of Raphael's painting. Thomas Connolly finds the key to the mystery in a theme he identifies as "mourning-into-joy." This theme, rooted in the Bible and in Aristotle's doctrine of the passions of the soul, became prominent in the visual and literary arts as well as in theology and spirituality and expressed the soul's passages between vice and virtue as a conversion of sadness into joy. According to Connolly, this idea strongly influenced the legend and worship of Saint Cecilia, a model for all who sought spiritual transformation. Connolly argues that the medieval mystical mind saw music as an intimate expression of the experiences of conversion and spiritual growth and that the conjunction of spirit and music became crystallized in the figure of the saint. His explanation not only provides a better understanding of Raphael's work and other Renaissance and Baroque art but also clarifies puzzling literary questions concerning Saint Cecilia, such as Chaucer's treatment of her in "The Second Nun's Tale."

In the summer of 1648, yellow fever appeared for the first time on the Yucatán Peninsula, claiming the lives of roughly one-third of the population. To combat this epidemic, Spanish colonial authorities carried a miracle-working Marian icon in procession from Itzmal to the capital city of Mérida and back again as a means of invoking divine intercession. Idolizing Mary uses this event and this icon to open a discussion about the early and profound indigenous veneration of the Virgin Mary. Amara Solari argues that particular Marian icons, such as the Virgin of Itzmal, embodied an ideal suite of precontact numinous qualities, which Maya neophytes reframed for their community’s religious needs. Examining prints, paintings, and early modern writings about the Virgin of Itzmal, Solari takes up various topics that contributed to the formation of Yucatán Catholicism—such as indigenous Maya notions of sacrality, ritual purity, and the formal qualities of offering vessels—and demonstrates how these aligned with the Virgin of Itzmal in such a way that the icon came to be viewed by the native populations as a deity of a new world order. Thoroughly researched and convincingly argued, Idolizing Mary will be welcomed by scholars and students interested in religious transformation and Marian devotion in colonial Spanish America.

Anxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity from within, sixteenth-century northern Europeans increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and full of mutual contradictions. Examining the work of four unusual but influential northern Europeans as they faced Europe’s changing identity, Jennifer Nelson reveals the ways in which these early modern thinkers and artists grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine. Focusing on northern Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, this book proposes a complementary account of a Renaissance and Reformation for which epistemology is not so much destabilized as pluralized. Addressing a wide range of media—including paintings, etchings and woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabes—Nelson argues that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence. Taking as its starting point Hans Holbein’s famously complex double portrait The Ambassadors, and then examining Philipp Melanchthon’s measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmann’s modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmus’s eclectic Adages, Disharmony of the Spheres is a sophisticated and challenging reconsideration of sixteenth-century northern European culture and its discomforts. Carefully researched and engagingly written, Disharmony of the Spheres will be of vital interest to historians of early modern European art, religion, science, and culture.

The third volume of E H Gombrich's seminal essays on the Renaissance has the classical tradition as its central theme. Apelles, the most famous painter of ancient Greece, was said to have combined perfect beauty with supreme skill in imitating the appearances of nature. These twin ideals of perfect beauty and perfect imitation of nature, which were inherited from classical antiquity and remained unchallenged as the cornerstone of art until the twentieth century, form the starting-point for these learned and always stimulating essays. Whether discussing the rendering of light and lustre, the working methods of Leonardo da Vinci or the principles of criticism, the author's analyses and interpretations are underpinned by a deep conviction that, despite the apparent abandonment of the Renaissance ideals in the twentieth century, questions about traditions, values and standards are still of fundamental importance. This wider concern gives these essays a continuing vitality, not only for students but also for anyone interested in art and culture.

In this second volume of his classic essays on the Renaissance, E H Gombrich focuses on a theme of central importance: visual symbolism. He opens with a searching introduction ('The Aims and Limits of Iconology'), and follows with detailed studies of Botticelli, Mantegna, Raphael, Poussin and others. The volume concludes with an extended study of the philosophies of symbolism, demonstrating that the ideas which preoccupied the philosophers of the Renaissance are still very much alive today. Like its predecessor, Norm and Form, this volume is indispensable for all students of Renaissance art and thought as a work that has itself helped to shape the evolving discipline of art history. Reflecting the author's abiding concern with standards, values and problems of method, it also has a wider interest as an introduction to the fundamental questions involved in the interpretation of images.

Many studies have shown that images--their presence in the daily lives of the faithful, the means used to control them, and their adaptation to secular uses--were at the heart of the Reformation crisis in northern Europe. But the question as it affects the art of Italy has been raised only in highly specialized studies.

In this book, Alexander Nagel provides the first truly synthetic study of the controversies over religious images that pervaded Italian life both before and parallel to the Reformation north of the Alps. Tracing the intertwined relationship of artistic innovation and archaism, as well as the new pressures placed on the artistic media in the midst of key developments in religious iconography, "The Controversy of Renaissance Art "offers an important and original history of humanist thought and artistic experimentation from one of our most acclaimed historians of art.

Ranked by many scholars as the greatest master of early Italian Renaissance painting, Masaccio (1401-1428) was the first artist to use effects of light to create three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional plane. This achievement, revolutionary in Masaccio's day, is one of the painter's significant contributions to art history.
This book explores Masaccio's accomplishment as epitomized by the multipaneled painting of which the Saint Andrew panel is thought to have once formed a part: the Pisa Altarpiece, one of the truly great polyptychs in the history of Italian Renaissance art, produced in 1426 for a chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Pisa.
The text discusses Masaccio's short life and illustrious career; the commission for the altarpiece; its patron and program; the painting's original location; and the role that the church friars played in the actual commission. Finally, after examining the polyptych's individual panels, the book traces their subsequent history and recounts how art historians came to identify them.

Michelangelo was, apart from being a sculptor, architect, and painter of genius, a poet and letter-writer of remarkable accomplishment. George Bull, a distinguished translator of many Italian classics, has brought his skill and experience to bear on translating this new selection of Michelangelo's letters and poetry, as well as the Life, the biography written by Michelangelo's pupil Ascanio Condivi.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Superb reproduction of most popular 16th-century lace design book by Queen of France's favorite patterner. Contains all of the nearly 100 original patterns for point coupe, reticella and guipure; the second part describes square netting and embroidery on cloth. 83 full-page plates.

The Renaissance began in Italy, but it grew out of European civilization, with roots in Antiquity, in Christian dogma, and in Byzantium. The artistic ferment which had taken hold of Florence by 1420 was also reflected in the regional schools of Siena, Umbria, Mantua and Rome; and the new ideas spread from Italy through France, the Netherlands, Austria, Spain and Portugal. The book includes artists as diverse as Piero della Francesca, Van Eyck, Durer, Mantegna and Bellini, as well as the High Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. With superb illustrations of the artists' work and crucial historical information about the "rebirth" of arts and letters, the authors illuminate one of the most important periods of art history. 251 illus., 51 in color.

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was hailed in his lifetime as a founder of the Northern Renaissance, and his work revolutionized the art of printmaking. Durer was also the first artist outside Italy to leave behind a large body of writing. Contemporaries and succeeding generations added their accounts of him to this documentary legacy. Jeffrey Ashcroft's new book provides the first English translation of the whole corpus of Durer's writings; the legal, financial, and administrative documentation of his life and work; and what others wrote about him during his life and in the following century. Translations of primary documents are accompanied by extensive commentary, providing Anglophone scholars access to German-language research. This unique combination of documentary evidence, current research, and exhaustive bibliography will doubtless become a definitive source for students and scholars of Durer and his work, as well as for historians of early modern culture, language, and literature.

Renaissance art history is traditionally identified with Italian centers of production, and Florence in particular. Instead, this book explores the dynamic interchange between European artistic centers and artists and the trade in works of art. It also considers the impact of differing locations on art and artists and some of the economic, political, and cultural factors crucial to the emergence of an artistic center.
During c.1420-1520, no city or court could succeed in isolation and so artists operated within a network of interests and local and international identities. The case studies presented in this book portray the Renaissance as an exciting international phenomenon, with cities and courts inextricably bound together in a web of economic and political interests.

When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war. Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions-expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images-and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.

Il Sassoferrato: Devout Beauty reconstructs, for the first time, the creative process of Giovan Battista Salvi, known as Sassoferrato (1609-85), from drawing to finished work. Living in Baroque-era Rome but keeping his distance from contemporary trends, Sassoferrato worked in the spirit of a craftsman, creating devotional images for the Counter-Reformation market with such pure intensity that he earned himself the title "pictor virginum." The studies presented in this volume examine how Sassoferrato developed his sparse, archaizing style, the patrons he served and the extent of his influence in the artistic debates of the 19th century (favored by the Purists and Nazarenes and critiqued by John Ruskin, Sassoferrato's pictures found new life). Il Sassoferrato charts the painter's trajectory and his forging, via the example of Raphael, of a unique style as far removed from Baroque theatricality as it was from Caravaggio-esque naturalism.

Titian's works are often seen as embodying the famous tradition of Venetian Renaissance painting. But how 'Venetian' was Titian, and can his unique works be taken as truly representative of his adoptive city? This comprehensive new study, covering Titian's long career and varied output, highlights the tensions between the individualism of his work and the conservative mores of Venice. Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance argues that Titian's works were self-consciously original, freely and intentionally undermining the traditional, more modest approach to painting in Venice - a position that frequently caused disputes with local artists and patrons. This book charts Titian's early stylistic independence from his master Giovanni Bellini, his radical innovations to the classical altarpiece and his meteoric break from the normal confines of Venice's artistic culture. Titian competitively cultivated a professional identity and his dynamic career was epitomized by the development of his 'late style', which set him apart from all predecessors and was intended to defy emulation by any followers. It was through this final individualistic departure that Titian effectively brought the Renaissance tradition of painting to an end. This ground-breaking interpretation will be of interest to all scholars and students of Renaissance and Venetian art history.