The Great Masters of the Italian Renaissance
The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance by 
Andrea Mantegna: The Adoration of the Magi by
Mantegna's magnificent painting, in the Getty collection, is based on one of Christianity's most beloved stories. The picture is much more than a Christmas-card image though. Dawson Carr explores Mantegna's life and milieu in fifteenth-century Padua and provides a fascinating closer look at the painting itself, considering Mantegna's innovative treatment of the subject, the relationship of the narrative to the viewer, and problems associated with the conservation of its beautiful, but fragile, distemper medium.
Andrea Mantegna and the Italian Renaissance by
Mantegna; humanist, geometrist, archaeologist, of great scholastic and imaginative intelligence, dominated the whole of northern Italy by virtue of his imperious personality. Aiming at optical illusion, he mastered perspective. He trained in painting at the Padua School where Donatello and Paolo Uccello had previously attended. Even at a young age commissions for Andrea's work flooded in, for example the frescos of the Ovetari Chapel of Padua. In a short space of time Mantegna found his niche as a modernist due to his highly original ideas and the use of perspective in his works. His marriage with Nicolosia Bellini, the sister of Giovanni, paved the way for his entree into Venice. Mantegna reached an artistic maturity with his Pala San Zeno. He remained in Mantova and became the artist for one of the most prestigious courts in Italy - the Court of Gonzaga. Classical art was born. Despite his links with Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna refused to adopt their innovative use of colour or leave behind his own technique of engraving.
Architectonics of Humanism: Essays on Number in Architecture by
Reinterpreting the architectural principles of the Renaissance period. This book presents a fresh viewpoint on the use of symmetry and proportion in Alberti and Palladio with the help of new illustrations and examples. Covering the evolution of the Renaissance tradition into the twentieth century, this book offers a new evaluation which veers from Le Corbusier and the French school and moves toward the continuation and transformation in the Viennese and Chicago practices exemplified by Frank Lloyd Wright and the American school. Lionel March (Los Angeles, CA) is a practicing architect and an avid follower of the Modernist tradition in architecture. He also teaches at the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA.
Art and Life in Renaissance Venice by 
Art of Renaissance Rome, 1400-1600 by 
The Art of Renaissance Venice by
In the first contemporary single-volume survey of the three arts of Venice--painting, sculpture, and architecture--Norbert Huse and Wolfgang Wolters offer an important counterbalance to the traditional orientation toward painting as the city's preeminent art by focusing on architecture as the essential Venetian art. They begin their study in 1460, when Venice was one of the key powers of Italy, and end with the death of Tintoretto in 1594, a period of waning international power. In the process, they define the distinctly Venetian terms by which the city and its culture should be understood. With over three hundred illustrations and an exhaustive bibliography, this volume makes an impressive contribution to art historical scholarship. The historical aspect of this book is splendid, but where it excels is in its fearless and thought-provoking critical judgements...it will lead both beginners and experts to new joys.--David Ekserdjian, Times Literary Supplement
Botticelli by
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as simply Sandro Botticelli, was born in Florence, Italy, probably in or around 1445. Serendipitously winning a high-profile commission from the Florentine court, he was catapulted to notoriety as wealthy patrons, in particular the Medici family, hired him to create works that celebrated their lives and their family's lives and marked important events such as weddings. Botticelli's range was wide: he embellished the walls of the Sistine Chapel with three frescoes, illustrated Dante's The Divine Comedy (just under100 drawings still exist), and painted both mythological and religious scenes--Primavera and The Birth of Venus, and Adoration of the Magi, being respective examples of his excellence in the genre. Botticelli never wed, possibly due to his unrequited love for the married Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, who died very young. By the end of 15th century, Botticelli came to believe that Humanism--a philosophy embraced by the Medici family--was amoral. His reaction was to burn many of his paintings and thereafter to produce only religious-themed works.
Botticelli by
He was the son of a citizen in comfortable circumstances, and had been, in Vasari's words, "instructed in all such things as children are usually taught before they choose a calling." However, he refused to give his attention to reading, writing and accounts, continues Vasari, so that his father, despairing of his ever becoming a scholar, apprenticed him to the goldsmith Botticello: whence came the name by which the world remembers him. However, Sandro, a stubborn-featured youth with large, quietly searching eyes and a shock of yellow hair - he has left a portrait of himself on the right-hand side of his picture of the Adoration of the Magi - would also become a painter, and to that end was placed with the Carmelite monk Fra Filippo Lippi. But he was a realist, as the artists of his day had become, satisfied with the joy and skill of painting, and with the study of the beauty and character of the human subject instead of religious themes. Botticelli made rapid progress, loved his master, and later on extended his love to his master's son, Filippino Lippi, and taught him to paint, but the master's realism scarcely touched Lippi, for Botticelli was a dreamer and a poet. Botticelli is a painter not of facts, but of ideas, and his pictures are not so much a representation of certain objects as a pattern of forms. Nor is his colouring rich and lifelike; it is subordinated to form, and often rather a tinting than actual colour. In fact, he was interested in the abstract possibilities of his art rather than in the concrete. For example, his compositions, as has just been said, are a pattern of forms; his figures do not actually occupy well-defined places in a well-defined area of space; they do not attract us by their suggestion of bulk, but as shapes of form, suggesting rather a flat pattern of decoration. Accordingly, the lines which enclose the figures are chosen with the primary intention of being decorative. It has been said that Botticelli, "though one of the worst anatomists, was one of the greatest draughtsmen of the Renaissance." As an example of false anatomy we may notice the impossible way in which the Madonna's head is attached to the neck, and other instances of faulty articulation and incorrect form of limbs may be found in Botticelli's pictures. Yet he is recognised as one of the greatest draughtsmen: he gave to 'line' not only intrinsic beauty, but also significance. In mathematical language, he resolved the movement of the figure into its factors, its simplest forms of expression, and then combined these various forms into a pattern which, by its rhythmical and harmonious lines, produces an effect upon our imagination, corresponding to the sentiments of grave and tender poetry that filled the artist himself. This power of making every line count in both significance and beauty distinguishes the great master- draughtsmen from the vast majority of artists who used line mainly as a necessary means of representing concrete objects.
Botticelli Past and Present by
Botticelli gave us some of the most stunning Renaissance masterpieces. Paintings like Primavera and The Birth of Venus are as beloved today as at the time of their creation, as evidenced by recent exhibitions around the world. Botticelli's influence and innovations also continue to inspire interest and passionate debate among art historians and lovers of art. In four chapters, spanning centuries of Botticelli's artistic fame and reception, Botticelli Past and Present engages with the significant debates about Botticelli. Each chapter collects several essays and includes a short introduction that positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The chapters are organized chronologically, beginning with discussion of the artist and his work in his own time, moving on to the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design.
Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by
Anyone alive in Florence on August 19, 1418, would have understood the significance of the competition announced that day concerning the city's magnificent new cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, already under construction for more than a century. "Whoever desires to make any model or design for the vaulting of the main Dome...shall do so before the end of the month of September." The proposed dome was regarded far and wide as all but impossible to build: not only would it be enormous, but its original and sacrosanct design eschewed (shunned) the flying buttresses that supported cathedrals all over Europe. The dome would literally need to be erected over thin air. Of the many plans submitted, one stood out--a daring and unorthodox solution to vaulting what is still the largest dome (143 feet in diameter) in the world. It was offered not by a master mason or carpenter, but by a goldsmith and clock maker named Filippo Brunelleschi, then 41, who would dedicate the next 28 years to solving the puzzles of the dome's construction. In the process, he did nothing less than reinvent the field of architecture. Brunelleschi's Dome is the story of how a Renaissance genius bent men, materials, and the very forces of nature to build an architectural wonder we continue to marvel at today. Denounced at first as a madman, Brunelleschi was celebrated at the end as a genius. He engineered the perfect placement of brick and stone, built ingenious hoists and cranes (some among the most renowned machines of the Renaissance) to carry an estimated 70 million pounds hundreds of feet into the air, and designed the workers' platforms and routines so carefully that only one man died during the decades of construction--all the while defying those who said the dome would surely collapse and personal obstacles that at times threatened to overwhelm him. This drama was played out amidst plagues, wars, political feuds, and the intellectual ferments of Renaissance Florence--events Ross King weaves into the story to great effect, from Brunelleschi's bitter, ongoing rivalry with the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti to the near capture of Florence by the Duke of Milan. King also offers a wealth of fascinating detail that opens windows onto fifteenth-century life: the celebrated traditions of the brickmaker's art, the daily routine of the artisans laboring hundreds of feet above the ground as the dome grew ever higher, the problems of transportation, the power of the guilds. Even today, in an age of soaring skyscrapers, the cathedral dome of Santa Maria del Fiore retains a rare power to astonish. In telling the story of the greatest engineering puzzle of the Renaissance and one of the world's architectural marvels, Ross King brings its creation to life in a fifteenth-century chronicle with twenty-first-century resonance.
Creating the "Divine" Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo by
Turning a skeptical eye on the idea that Renaissance artists were widely believed to be as utterly admirable as Vasari claimed, this book re-opens the question of why artists were praised and by whom, and specifically why the language of divinity was invoked, a practice the ancients did not license. The epithet divino is examined in the context of claims to liberal arts status and to analogy with poets, musicians, and other uomini famossi. The reputations of Michelangelo and Brunelleschi are compared not only with each other but with those of Dante and Ariosto, of Aretino and of the ubiquitous beloved of the sonnet tradition. Nineteenth-century reformulations of the idea of Renaissance artistic divinity are treated in the epilogue, and twentieth-century treatments of the idea of artistic ingegno" in an appendix."
The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture by
Why do the paintings and poetry of the Italian Renaissance--a celebration of classical antiquity--also depict the Florentine countryside populated with figures dressed in contemporary silk robes and fleur-de-lys crowns? Dempsey argues that a fusion of classical form with contemporary content was the defining characteristic of the period.
Fra Angelico by
Secluded within cloister walls, a painter and a monk, and brother of the order of the Dominicans, Angelico devoted his life to religious paintings. Little is known of his early life except that he was born at Vicchio, in the broad fertile valley of the Mugello, not far from Florence, that his name was Guido de Pietro, and that he passed his youth in Florence, probably in some bottegha, for at twenty he was recognised as a painter. In 1418 he entered in a Dominican convent in Fiesole with his brother. They were welcomed by the monks and, after a year's novitiate, admitted to the brotherhood, Guido taking the name by which he was known for the rest of his life, Fra Giovanni da Fiesole; for the title of Angelico, the "Angel," or Il Beato, "The Blessed," was conferred on him after his death. Henceforth he became an example of two personalities in one man: he was all in all a painter, but also a devout monk; his subjects were always religious ones and represented in a deeply religious spirit, yet his devotion as a monk was no greater than his absorption as an artist. Consequently, though his life was secluded within the walls of the monastery, he kept in touch with the art movements of his time and continually developed as a painter. His early work shows that he had learned of the illuminators who inherited the Byzantine traditions, and had been affected by the simple religious feeling of Giotto's work. Also influenced by Lorenzo Monaco and the Sienese School, he painted under the patronage of Cosimo de Medici. Then he began to learn of that brilliant band of sculptors and architects who were enriching Florence by their genius. Ghiberti was executing his pictures in bronze upon the doors of the Baptistery; Donatello, his famous statue of St. George and the dancing children around the organ-gallery in the Cathedral; and Luca della Robbia was at work upon his frieze of children, singing, dancing and playing upon instruments. Moreover, Masaccio had revealed the dignity of form in painting. Through these artists the beauty of the human form and of its life and movement was being manifested to the Florentines and to the other cities. Angelico caught the enthusiasm and gave increasing reality of life and movement to his figures.
Galileo's Muse: Renaissance Mathematics and the Arts by
Mark Peterson makes an extraordinary claim in this fascinating book focused around the life and thought of Galileo: it was the mathematics of Renaissance arts, not Renaissance sciences, that became modern science. Painters, poets, musicians, and architects brought about a scientific revolution that eluded the philosopher-scientists of the day.
History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture by
For survey courses in Italian Renaissance art. A broad survey of art and architecture in Italy between c. 1250 and 1600, this book approaches the works from the point of view of the artist as individual creator and as an expression of the city within which the artist was working. History of Italian Renaissance Art, Seventh Edition, brings you an updated understanding of this pivotal period as it incorporates new research and current art historical thinking, while also maintaining the integrity of the story that Frederick Hartt first told so enthusiastically many years ago. Choosing to retain Frederick Hartt's traditional framework, David Wilkins' incisive revisions keep the book fresh and up-to-date.
Hollow Men: Writing, Objects, and Public Image in Renaissance Italy by
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.
Humanism and the Urban World: Leon Battista Alberti and the Renaissance City by
In Humanism and the Urban World, Caspar Pearson offers a profoundly revisionist account of Leon Battista Alberti's approach to the urban environment as exemplified in the extensive theoretical treatise De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building in Ten Books), brought mostly to completion in the 1450s, as well as in his larger body of written work. Past scholars have generally characterized the Italian Renaissance architect and theorist as an enthusiast of the city who envisioned it as a rational, Renaissance ideal. Pearson argues, however, that Alberti's approach to urbanism was far more complex--that he was even "essentially hostile" to the city at times. Rather than proposing the "ideal" city, Pearson maintains, Alberti presented a variety of possible cities, each one different from another. This book explores the ways in which Alberti sought to remedy urban problems, tracing key themes that manifest in De re aedificatoria. Chapters address Alberti's consideration of the city's possible destruction and the city's capacity to provide order despite its intrinsic instability; his assessment of a variety of political solutions to that instability; his affinity for the countryside and discussions of the virtues of the active versus the contemplative life; and his theories of aesthetics and beauty, in particular the belief that beauty may affect the soul of an enemy and thus preserve buildings from attack.
Infinity and Perspective by
Much postmodern rhetoric, suggests Karsten Harries, can be understood as a symptom of our civilization's discontent, born of regret that we are no longer able to experience our world as a cosmos that assigns us our place. But dissatisfaction with the modern world may also spring from a conviction that modernism has failed to confront the challenge of an inevitably open future. Such conviction has frequently led to a critique of modernity's founding heroes. Challenging that critique, Harries insists that modernity is supported by nothing other than human freedom.
The Invention of Infinity: Mathematics and Art in the Renaissance by
Renaissance craftsmen, such as painters, were educated in `practical mathematics'. This book tells us the fascintating story of how the artisan tradition made important contributions not only to art but also to `proper' mathematics. Beautiful works of art and famous theorems are linkedtogether in a way that leads to a clearer understanding and greater enjoyment of both.Covering roughly the period from 1300 to 1650, the author shows how, during this time, a new form of geometry - projective geometry - emerged in the context of the artists' mathematics of perspective. Stories of taking measurements while balanced on scaffolding are interspersed with delightfulscholarly analyses of the mathematics of great works of art. The text is beautifully illustrated throughout with both photographs and drawings.
Italian Panel Paint Early Renaissance by 
Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by
A critical-theoretical reading of the strange, dreamlike work of Leon Battista Alberti. The enigmatic, polyglot Hypnerotomachia Poliphili--the inspiration for the bestselling novel The Rule of Four--has fascinated architects and historians since its publication in 1499. Part fictional narrative and part scholarly treatise, richly illustrated with wood engravings, the book is an extreme case of erotic furor, aimed at everything--especially architecture--that the protagonist, Poliphilo, encounters in his quest for his beloved, Polia. Among the instances of the book's manifesto-like character is Polia's tirade defending the right of women to express their own sexuality, probably the first sustained argument of this type, which lifts the book's erotic theme from the realm of ribaldry to the more daring one of sexual politics. Liane Lefaivre offers the closest critical-theoretical reading of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili to date, placing it within both the historical context of the quattrocento and the rethinking of the metaphor of the architectural body. Lefaivre is the first to attribute this strange, dreamlike book definitively to none other than the arch-rationalist Leon Battista Alberti. Intended as his final text, she argues, the book is the legacy of a humanist passionate about his life's work, a treatise on the role of dreamwork in design by one of the most creative minds of the Renaissance, and a manifesto in defense of humanism by a man who had been dismissed by an anti-humanist pope after a thirty-year career in the papal service.
Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence by
In the past half century scholars have downplayed the significance of Lorenzo de' Medici (1449-1492), called "the Magnificent," as a patron of the arts. Less wealthy than his grandfather Cosimo, the argument goes, Lorenzo was far more interested in collecting ancient objects of art than in commissioning contemporary art or architecture. His earlier reputation as a patron was said to be largely a construct of humanist exaggeration and partisan deference. Although some recent studies have taken issue with this view, no synthesis of Lorenzo as art patron and art lover has yet emerged. In Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence historian F. W. Kent offers a new look at Lorenzo's relationship to the arts, aesthetics, collecting, and building--especially in the context of his role as the political boss (maestro della bottega) of republican Florence and a leading player in Renaissance Italian diplomacy. As a result of this approach, which pays careful attention to the events of his short but dramatic life, a radically new chronology of Lorenzo's activities as an art patron emerges, revealing them to have been more extensive and creative than previously thought. Kent's Lorenzo was broadly interested in the arts and supported efforts to beautify Florence and the many Medici lands and palaces. His expertise was well regarded by guildsmen and artists, who often turned to him for advice as well as for patronage. Lorenzo himself was educated in the arts by such men, and Kent explores his aesthetic education and taste, taking into account what is known of Lorenzo's patronage of music and manuscripts, and of his own creative work as a major Quattrocento poet. Richly illustrated with photographs of Medici landmarks by Ralph Lieberman, Lorenzo de' Medici and the Art of Magnificence offers a masterful portrait of Lorenzo as a man whose achievements might have rivaled his grandfather's had he not died so young.
Mantegna's Camera Degli Sposi by
This volume focuses solely on Andrea Mantegna's cleaned and restored fresco decorations for La Camera Degli Sposi (The Wedding Chamber) in Mantua's Palazzo Ducale. These frescoes are major achievements in the art of the Italian Renaissance and influenced all the leading artists of the age. This book examines the technique, iconography and historical interpretation of the fresco cycle, as well as the difficulties of its restoration. Each scene is reproduced in its entirety and in close-up, revealing its myriad details and giving an intimate view of the whole of the room.
Medici Women: Portraits of Power, love and Betrayal from the Court of Duke Cosimo I by
Lavishly illustrated, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal in the Court of Duke Cosimo I is an indispensable work for anyone with a passion for Italian renaissance history, art, and court culture.
Norm and Form by
Norm and Formis the first volume of E.H. Gombrich's highly influential collected contributions to the study of Renaissance art and thought. Its 11 essays deal with some of the most fundamental questions of style, patronage, taste, working methods and theories of art, presented with the author's customary learning and lucidity. Required reading for all students of the Renaissance, these essays are sure to be enjoyed by all who wish to deepen their understanding of one of the most creative periods of Western art.
On Alberti and the Art of Building by
A digest of Alberti's architecture which examines a variety of themes such as the relationship between the architect and his patrons, his writings on the visual arts and his practical example, his significance for the extension of architectural theory into practice, and his success in raising the status of architecture to an art.
Padua and Venice: Transcultural Exchange in the Early Modern Age by
Venice and Padua are neighboring cities with a topographical and geopolitical distinction. Venice is a port city in the Venetian Lagoon, which opened up towards Byzantium and the East. Padua on the mainland was founded in Roman times and is a university city, a place of Humanism and research into antiquity. The contributions analyze works of art as aesthetic formulations of their places of origin, which however also have an effect on and expand their surroundings. International experts investigate how these two different concepts stimulated each other in the Early Modern Age, and how the exchange worked.
Renaissance by
The rebirth of culture. Art as we know it today could not exist had not the revolutionary work of the Renaissance artists paved the way. Widely considered the most important and influential movement in the history of fine arts, literature, architecture, and science, the Renaissance marked the emergence of Western civilization from the Middle Ages into the modern era. Beginning in the 14th century in Italy, the movement spread throughout Europe by the late 15th century, the main centers of fine art activity being in Florence, the Low Countries, and Germany. For the first time, art became intellectual; influenced by humanism, artists experimented with secular subjects and revived classical antiquity. Advances in anatomy and geometry produced more realistic depictions in terms of space and perspective for the Italians, while new oil painting techniques made their mark in Flemish painting and woodcuts and engravings were the specialties of the Germans. Artists featured: Albrecht Altdorfer, Fra Angelico, Giovanni Bellini, Hieronymus Bosch, Sandro Botticelli, Pieter Breughel, Agnolo Bronzino, Vittore Carpaccio, Francois Clouet, Correggio, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Albrecht Durer, El Greco, School of Fontainebleau, Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Giorgione, Matthias Grenewald, Maerten van Heemskerck, Hans Holbein the Younger, Fra Filippo Lippi, Lorenzo Lotto, Andrea Mantegna, Masaccio, Antonello da Messina, Michelangelo, Parmigianino, Pontormo, Raphael, Luca Signorelli, Tintoretto, Titian, Paolo Uccello, Veronese, Leonardo da Vinci .
The Renaissance by
The era now referred to as the Renaissance represented an unparalleled blossoming of art and culture. Take a tour of the period through the imagination of Walter Pater, one of England's most renowned art historians and critics. In this volume, Pater turns his attention to a series of Renaissance masterpieces in visual art and literature. An informative and engaging read for fans of early modern art and culture.
Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art by 
S. Andrea in Mantua: The Building History by
S. Andrea in Mantua is the final architectural work and the masterpiece of Leon Battista Alberti, the great 15th-century Italian humanist. As a key monument of Renaissance architecture and a seminal work for later developments including the work of Bramante and endless repetitions in Baroque Europe, the novelty of the spatial creation in S. Andrea has long been recognized. What has been obscured by the long period of construction--over 300 years--is the extent to which the existing building reflects Alberti's plan. This book, through a careful investigation of the church fabric and a sound interpretation of all relevant documents, demonstrates the fidelity of the current building to Alberti's original design. The author publishes all known documents relating to the building, including previously unpublished material, and presents new photographic documentation. The book also discusses the place of the church in Alberti's work, sources for its design in ancient, medieval and Renaissance architecture, and its role in the dynastic and civic ambitions of the ruling family of Mantua, the Gonzaga. The changes made in Alberti's plan, particularly those of the 18th century, Juvarra's dome, and Pozzo's neo-quattrocento restoration of the interior, are re-evaluated. This is the first extensive treatment of the building in English, and the first serious monograph on S. Andrea since the 19th century.
Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art by
During the Renaissance, new ideas progressed alongside new ways of communicating them, and nowhere is this more visible than in the art of this period. In The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art, François Quiviger explores the ways in which the senses began to take on a new significance in the art of the sixteenth century. The book discusses the presence and function of sensation in Renaissance ideas and practices, investigating their link to mental imagery--namely, how Renaissance artists made touch, sound, and scent palpable to the minds of their audience. Quiviger points to the shifts in ideas and theories of representation, which were evolving throughout the sixteenth century, and explains how this shaped early modern notions of art, spectatorship, and artistic creation. Featuring many beautiful images by artists such as Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Pontormo, Michelangelo, and Brueghel, The Sensory World of Renaissance Art presents a comprehensive study of Renaissance theories of art in the context of the actual works they influenced. Beautifully illustrated and extensively researched, it will appeal to students and scholars of art history.
The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance by
This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood. David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Artists, in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.
Virtue and Magnificence: Art of the Italian Renaissance courts by 
Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy by
In the late fifteenth century, votive panel paintings, or tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images throughout Italy. Although often dismissed as popular art of little aesthetic consequence, more than 1,500 panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are extant, a testimony to their ubiquity and importance in religious practice. Humble in both their materiality and style, they represent donors in prayer and supplicants petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. In this book, Fredrika H. Jacobs traces the origins and development of the use of votive panels in this period. She examines the form, context and functional value of votive panels, and considers how they created meaning for the person who dedicated them as well as how they accrued meaning in relationship to other images and objects within a sacred space activated by practices of cultic culture.
Women in Italian Renaissance Art by
Between c1350 and c1650, Italian urban societies saw much debate on women¹s nature, roles, education, and behaviour. This book fills a gap in the still burgeoning literature on all aspects of women¹s lives in this period. Using a broad range of material, most of which never translated before, this book illuminates the ideals and realities informing the lives of women within the context of civic and courtly culture in Renaissance Italy. The text is divided into three sections: contemporary views on the nature of women, and ethical and aesthetic ideals seen as suitable to them; life cycles from birth to death, punctuated by the rites of passage of betrothal, marriage and widowhood; women¹s roles in the convent, the court, the workplace, and in cultural life.Through their exploration of these themes, Mary Rogers and Paola Tinagli demonstrate that there was no single 'Renaissance woman'. The realities of women¹s experiences were rich and various, and their voices speak of diverse possibilities for emotionally rich and socially useful lives.
The Word Made Visible in the Painted Image: Perspective, Proportion, Witness and Threshold in Italian Renaissance Painting by
"This book explores the areas of perspective, proportion, witness and theological threshold in the devotional art of the Italian Renaissance, with particular reference to the painted image of Christ. While the Incarnation, in a very real way, legitimised the idea of the portrayal of God in human form (as Jesus Christ), problems remained as to how this might be achieved and whether it should be restricted to the second person of the Holy Trinity.This book looks at the creation of pictorial space and the presentation of the image - paying special attention to schemes of perspective, as a way to better describe reality, as well as to considerations of proportion through such geometric methodology as the Golden Section and dynamic root-rectangles (based on certain 'perfect' or divine ratios) to balance and harmonise form.The Word Made Visible in the Painted Image also explores the theological theme of threshold and liminal space, describes how themes such as the Incarnation and Revelation were represented, and looks at the symbolism employed in so doing. It shows how such themes were captured, set in space and communicated in the painted image.This study is necessarily interdisciplinary, combining the subject areas of art history and theory, theology, biblical study, philosophy, aesthetics, physics, metaphysics, mathematics, geometry, optics, physiology, psychology, and sociology, in greater and lesser degrees. Few books take such an interdisciplinary stance on art, theology, science and related disciplines to this extent.
