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215 results in Western art

Page 1 of 11

Reforming Art in Renaissance Venice
  • Marie-Louise Lillywhite
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • The spiritual turmoil of the sixteenth century had a profound impact on religious life throughout Italy. Art and architecture were directly implicated in the seismic historical events of the age, as the Catholic Church countered Protestant iconoclasm through the embrace of sacred images as decreed by the Council of Trent in 1563. In this volume, Marie-Louise Lillywhite considers the impact of religious reform on the devotional art and architecture of sixteenth-century Venice. Interrogating early modern censorship, artistic liberty, notions of decorum tied to depictions of the body, and the role of sacred images in the shaping of local identity, she shows how Venice, a crossroads city exposed to a rich gamut of religious and artistic currents, serves as a fascinating case study through which to explore these themes. Her study reconstructs the conditions that enabled artistic invention to prevail and how artists became interpreters of spiritual values.

Art, Knowledge, and Papal Politics in Medieval Rome
  • Interpreting the Aula Gotica Fresco Cycle at Santi Quattro Coronati
  • Marius B. Hauknes
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2024
  • Discovered in 1995, the remarkable thirteenth-century frescoes in the great hall, or Aula Gotica, of Rome's Santi Quattro Coronati complex are among the most important vestiges of medieval Italian painting. In this volume, Marius Hauknes offers a thorough investigation of the fresco cycle, which includes allegorical representations of the liberal arts, the virtues and vices, the seasons, the signs of the zodiac, and the months of the year. Hauknes relates these subjects to the papacy's growing interest in fields of worldly knowledge, such as music, time, astrology, and medicine. He argues that the Santi Quattro Coronati frescoes function as a large-scale, interactive encyclopedia that not only represented secular knowledge but also produced philosophical speculation, stimulating beholders to draw connections between pictorial motifs across architectural space. Integrating medieval intellectual history with close attention to multi-sensory and architectural conditions of fresco Hauknes' study offers new insights into religion, art, science, and spectatorship in medieval Italy.

The Mirror of Art
  • Painting and Reflection in Early Modern Visual Culture
  • Genevieve Warwick
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2024
    Print publication:
    31 July 2024
  • One of the key pictorial developments of Renaissance art was a conceptualisation of painting as a mirror reflection of the visible world. The idea of painting as specular was argued in Renaissance art theory, demonstrated in art practice, and represented in painting itself. Both within the artist's workshop and within pictorial representation, the mirror-image became the instrument, the emblem, and the conceptual definition of what a painting was. In this volume, Genevieve Warwick brings a dual focus to the topic through an exploration of the early modern elision of the picture plane with the mirror – image. She considers the specular configuration of Renaissance painting from various thematic points of view to offer a fully interdisciplinary analysis of the mirror analogy that pervaded not only art theory and art-making, but also the larger cultural spheres of philosophy, letters, and scientific observation. Warwick's volume recasts our understanding of the inter-visual relationships between disciplines, and their consequences for a specular definition of Renaissance painting.

Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation
  • Training the Literate Eye
  • Stephanie A. Leitch
  • Published online:
    14 March 2024
    Print publication:
    04 April 2024
  • Early modern printmakers trained observers to scan the heavens above as well as faces in their midst. Peter Apian printed the Cosmographicus Liber (1524) to teach lay astronomers their place in the cosmos, while also printing practical manuals that translated principles of spherical astronomy into useful data for weather watchers, farmers, and astrologers. Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up peoples' characters. Neither Albrecht Dürer nor Leonardo escaped the tenacious grasp of such widely circulating manuals called practica. Few have heard of these genres today, but the kinship of their pictorial programs suggests that printers shaped these texts for readers who privileged knowledge retrieval. Cultivated by images to become visual learners, these readers were then taught to hone their skills as observers. This book unpacks these and other visual strategies that aimed to develop both the literate eye of the reader and the sovereignty of images in the early modern world.

Jews, Christians, and the Discourse on Images before Iconoclasm
  • Alexei M. Sivertsev
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • Between the sixth and eighth centuries CE, the image emerged as a rhetorical category in religious literature produced in the Mediterranean basin. The development was not a uniquely Christian phenomenon. Rather, it emerged in the context of broader debates about symbolic forms that took place across a wide range of ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups who inhabited the late Roman and early Byzantine world. In this book, Alexei Sivertsev demonstrates how Jewish texts serve as an important, and until recently overlooked, witness to the formation of image discourse and associated practices of image veneration in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Addressing the role of the image as a rhetorical device in Jewish liturgical poetry, Sivertsev also considers the theme of the engraved image of Jacob in its early Byzantine context and the aesthetics of spaces that bridge the gap between the material and the immaterial in early Byzantine imagination.

Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art
  • Seeing the Songs of the Gods
  • Carolyn Laferrière
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    29 February 2024
  • In this volume, Carolyn M. Laferrière examines Athenian vase-paintings and reliefs depicting the gods most frequently shown as musicians to reconstruct how images suggest the sounds of the music the gods made. Incorporating insights from recent work in sensory studies, she considers formal analysis together with literary and archaeological evidence to explore the musical culture of Athens. Laferrière argues that images could visually suggest the sounds of the gods' music. This representational strategy, whereby sight and sound are blurred, conveys the 'unhearable' nature of their music: because it cannot be physically heard, it falls to the human imagination to provide its sounds and awaken viewers' multisensory engagement with the images. Moreover, when situated within their likely original contexts, the objects establish a network of interaction between the viewer, the visualized music, and the landscape, all of which determined how divine music was depicted, perceived, and reciprocated. Laferrière demonstrates that participation in the gods' musical performances offered worshippers a multisensory experience of divine presence.

Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science
  • Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century
  • Catherine Powell-Warren
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 February 2024
    Print publication:
    30 November 2023
  • At once collector, botanist, reader, artist, and patron, Agnes Block is best described as a cultural producer. A member of an influential network in her lifetime, today she remains a largely obscure figure. The socioeconomic and political barriers faced by early modern women, together with a male-dominated tradition in art history, have meant that too few stories of women's roles in the creation, production, and consumption of art have reached us. This book seeks to write Block and her contributions into the art and cultural history of the seventeenth-century Netherlands, highlighting the need for and advantages of a multifaceted approach to research on early modern women. Examining Block's achievements, relationships, and objects reveals a woman who was independent, knowledgeable, self-aware, and not above self-promotion. Though her gender brought few opportunities and many barriers, Agnes Block succeeded in fashioning herself as Flora Batava, a liefhebber at the intersection of art and science.

Rome in the Ninth Century
  • A History in Art
  • John Osborne
  • Published online:
    10 October 2023
    Print publication:
    12 October 2023
  • Intended as a sequel to Rome in the Eighth Century (Cambridge, 2020), this survey of the material culture of the city of Rome spans the period from the imperial coronation of Charlemagne in 800 to the nadir of the fortunes of the Roman Church a century later. The evidence of standing buildings, objects, historical documents, and archaeology is brought together to create an integrated picture of the political, economic, and cultural situation in the city over this period, one characterized initially by substantial wealth resulting in enormous patronage of art and architecture, but then followed by almost total impoverishment and collapse. John Osborne also attempts to correct the widespread notion that the Franco-papal alliance of the late eighth century led to a political and cultural break between Rome and the broader cultural world of the Christian eastern Mediterranean. Beautifully illustrated, this book is essential for everyone interested in medieval Rome.

Courtly Mediators
  • Transcultural Objects between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic World
  • Leah R. Clark
  • Published online:
    26 July 2023
    Print publication:
    03 August 2023
  • In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.

Michelangelo's Art of Devotion in the Age of Reform
  • Emily A. Fenichel
  • Published online:
    04 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023
  • In this volume, Emily A. Fenichel offers an in-depth investigation of the religious motivations behind Michelangelo's sculpture and graphic works in his late period. Taking the criticism of the Last Judgment as its point of departure, she argues that much of Michelangelo's late oeuvre was engaged in solving the religious and artistic problems presented by the Counter-Reformation. Buffeted by critiques of the Last Judgment, which claimed that he valued art over religion, Michelangelo searched for new religious iconographies and techniques both publicly and privately. Fenichel here suggests a new and different understanding of the artist in his late career. In contrast to the received view of Michelangelo as solitary, intractable, and temperamental, she brings a more nuanced characterization of the artist. The late Michelangelo, Fenichel demonstrates, was a man interested in collaboration, penance, meditation, and experimentation, which enabled his transformation into a new type of religious artist for a new era.

The New Vienna School of Art History
  • Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism
  • Ian Verstegen
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    19 October 2023
    Print publication:
    30 April 2023
  • This book is an account of the theory and practice of practitioners of the so-called 'second' or 'younger' Viennese school associated with Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt and their short-lived journal, 'Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen'. It demonstrates the strong dependence of these writers on the work of Gestalt psychology which was emerging at the time. Gestalt theory emerges as the master key to interpreting Sedlmayr and Pächt's ideas about art and history and how it affected their practices.This fresh interpretive apparatus casts light on the power and originality of Sedlmayr's and Pächt's theoretical and empirical writings, revealing a practice-based approach to history that is more attuned to the visuality of art. Verstegen demonstrates the existence of a genealogy of Vienna formalism coursing throughout most of the twentieth-century, encompassing Johannes Wilde and his students at the Courtauld as well as Otto Demus in Byzantine studies. By bringing Gestalt theory to the surface, he dispels misunderstandings about the Vienna School theory and attains a deeper understanding of the promise that a Gestalt analytic holism - a non-intuitionist account of the relational logic of sense - is offered.

Painting in Renaissance Perugia
  • Perugino, Raphael, and their Circles
  • Sheri Francis Shaneyfelt
  • Published online:
    20 April 2023
    Print publication:
    11 May 2023
  • This volume offers the first comprehensive study of painting in Renaissance Perugia from the late fifteenth to the mid- sixteenth centuries. Showcasing works by Perugino, Raphael, and Pintoricchio, as well as less familiar artists who worked in Perugia from ca. 1480–1540, Sheri Shaneyfelt traces  the influence and impact of Perugino's workshop in central Italy over more than a half a century. She demonstrates why Perugia, which has been overlooked in modern scholarship, was such a vital center for the production of early modern Italian art. Shaneyfelt's study also shifts the focus away from the analysis of individual artistic creativity by highlighting the importance and significance of collaboration and workshop production in Renaissance Italy. Interweaving historical and archival evidence with analyses of numerous paintings and drawings, her book, richly illustrated with 115 color illustrations, offers many new insights into the vibrant artistic culture of early modern Perugia.

Saints, Miracles, and Social Problems in Italian Renaissance Art
  • Diana Bullen Presciutti
  • Published online:
    14 April 2023
    Print publication:
    04 May 2023
  • In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.

Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West
  • New Perspectives on Post-Roman Art
  • Matthias Friedrich
  • Published online:
    14 January 2023
    Print publication:
    16 March 2023
  • Scholarship often treats the post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe as representative of the pagan identities of the new 'Germanic' rulers of the early medieval world. In this book, Matthias Friedrich offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. He scrutinises early medieval visual culture by combining archaeological approaches with art historical methods based on contemporary theory. Friedrich examines the transformation of Roman imperial images, together with the contemporary, highly ornamented material culture that is epitomized by 'animal art.' Through a rigorous analysis of a range of objects, he demonstrates how these pathways produced an aesthetic that promoted variety (varietas), a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various ethnic and religious identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.

The Imagery and Politics of Sexual Violence in Early Renaissance Italy
  • Péter Bokody
  • Published online:
    13 January 2023
    Print publication:
    26 January 2023
  • This book is the first comprehensive study of images of rape in Italian painting at the dawn of the Renaissance. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Péter Bokody examines depictions of sexual violence in religion, law, medicine, literature, politics, and history writing produced in kingdoms (Sicily and Naples) and city-republics (Florence, Siena, Lucca, Bologna and Padua). Whilst misogynistic endorsement characterized many of these visual discourses, some urban communities condemned rape in their propaganda against tyranny. Such representations of rape often link gender and aggression to war, abduction, sodomy, prostitution, pregnancy, and suicide. Bokody also traces how the new naturalism in painting, introduced by Giotto, increased verisimilitude, but also fostered imagery that coupled eroticism and violation. Exploring images and texts that have long been overlooked, Bokody's study provides new insights at the intersection of gender, policy, and visual culture, with evident relevance to our contemporary condition.

Giotto's Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility
  • Henrike Christiane Lange
  • Published online:
    12 January 2023
    Print publication:
    09 February 2023
  • In this book, Henrike Lange takes the reader on a tour through one of the most beloved and celebrated monuments in the world – Giotto's Arena Chapel. Paying close attention to previously overlooked details, Lange offers an entirely new reading of the stunning frescoes in their spatial configuration. The author also asks fundamental questions that define the chapel's place in Western art history. Why did Giotto choose an ancient Roman architectural frame for his vision of Salvation? What is the role of painted reliefs in the representation of personal integrity, passion, and the human struggle between pride and humility familiar from Dante's Divine Comedy? How can a new interpretation regarding the influence of ancient reliefs and architecture inform the famous “Assisi controversy” and cast new light on the debate around Giotto's authorship of the Saint Francis cycle? Illustrated with almost 200 color plates, this volume invites scholars and students to rediscover a key monument of art and architecture history and to see it with new eyes.

The Death of Myth on Roman Sarcophagi
  • Allegory and Visual Narrative in the Late Empire
  • Mont Allen
  • Published online:
    13 January 2023
    Print publication:
    29 December 2022
  • A strange thing happened to Roman sarcophagi in the third century:  their Greek mythic imagery vanished. Since the beginning of their production a century earlier, these beautifully carved coffins had featured bold mythological scenes. How do we make sense of this imagery's own death on later sarcophagi, when mythological narratives were truncated, gods and heroes were excised, and genres featuring no mythic content whatsoever came to the fore? What is the significance of such a profound tectonic shift in the Roman funerary imagination for our understanding of Roman history and culture, for the development of its arts, for the passage from the High to the Late Empire and the coming of Christianity, but above all, for the individual Roman women and men who chose this imagery, and who took it with them to the grave? In this book, Mont Allen offers the clues that aid in resolving this mystery.

Seeing Color in Classical Art
  • Theory, Practice, and Reception, from Antiquity to the Present
  • Jennifer M. S. Stager
  • Published online:
    25 November 2022
    Print publication:
    15 December 2022
  • The remains of ancient Mediterranean art and architecture that have survived over the centuries present the modern viewer with images of white, the color of the stone often used for sculpture. Antiquarian debates and recent scholarship, however, have challenged this aspect of ancient sculpture. There is now a consensus that sculpture produced in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as art objects in other media, were, in fact, polychromatic. Color has consequently become one of the most important issues in the study of classical art. Jennifer Stager's landmark book makes a vital contribution to this discussion. Analyzing the dyes, pigments, stones, earth, and metals found in ancient art works, along with the language that writers in antiquity used to describe color, she examines the traces of color in a variety of media. Stager also discusses the significance of a reception history that has emphasized whiteness, revealing how ancient artistic practice and ancient philosophies of color significantly influenced one another.

The Mythological Origins of Renaissance Florence
  • The City as New Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem
  • Irina Chernetsky
  • Published online:
    07 August 2023
    Print publication:
    13 October 2022
  • In this book, Irina Chernetsky examines how humanists, patrons, and artists promoted Florence as the reincarnation of the great cities of pagan and Christian antiquity – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The architectural image of an ideal Florence was discussed in chronicles and histories, poetry and prose, and treatises on art and religious sermons. It was also portrayed in paintings, sculpture, and sketches, as well as encoded in buildings erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over time, the concept of an ideal Florence became inseparable from the real city, in both its social and architectural structures. Chernetsky demonstrates how the Renaissance notion of genealogy was applied to Florence, which was considered to be part of a family of illustrious cities of both the past and present. She also explores the concept of the ideal city in its intellectual, political, and aesthetic contexts, while offering new insights into the experience of urban space.

The Villa Farnesina
  • Palace of Venus in Renaissance Rome
  • James Grantham Turner
  • Published online:
    06 October 2022
    Print publication:
    06 October 2022
  • The frescoes of Peruzzi, Raphael and Sodoma still dazzle visitors to the Villa Farnesina, but they survive in a stripped-down environment bereft of its landscape, sealed so it cannot breathe. Turner takes you outside that box, restoring these canonical images to their original context, when each element joined in a productive conversation. He is the first to reconstruct the architect-painter Peruzzi's original, well-proportioned, well-appointed building and to re-visualize his lost façade decoration‒erotic scenes and mythological figures who make it come alive and soar upward. More comprehensively than any previous scholar, he reintegrates painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, topographical prints and drawings, archaeological discoveries and literature from the brilliant circle around the patron Agostino Chigi, the powerful banker who 'loved all virtuosi' and commissioned his villa-palazzo from the best talents in multiple arts. It can now be understood as a Palace of Venus, celebrating aesthetic, social and erotic pleasure.

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