Staging the Ruler’s Body in Medieval Cultures
A Comparative Perspective
Edited by Michele Bacci, Gohar Grigoryan and Manuela Studer-Karlen
This book explores the viewing and sensorial contexts in which the bodies of kings and queens were involved in the premodern societies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, relying on a methodology that aims to overcoming the traditional boundaries between material studies, art history, political theory, and Repräsentationsgeschichte. More specifically, it investigates the multiple ways in which the ruler’s physical appearance was apprehended and invested with visual, metaphorical, and emotional associations, as well as the dynamics whereby such mise-en-scène devices either were inspired by or worked as sources of inspiration for textual and pictorial representations of royalty. The outcome is a multifaced analysis of the multiple, imaginative, and terribly ambiguous ways in which, in past societies, the notion of a God-driven, eternal, and transpersonal royal power came to be associated with the material bodies of kings and queens, and of the impressive efforts made, in different cultures, to elude the conundrum of the latter’s weakness, transitoriness, and individual distinctiveness.
Also Available in Open Access
The Villa Barbaro at Maser
Science, Philosophy, and the Family in Venetian Renaissance Art
By Denis Ribouillault
Through a careful description of its architecture, paintings and sculptures, this book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the Villa Barbaro at Maser, one of the most famous masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. Commissioned and designed by Daniele Barbaro, a leading humanist of the Venetian Renaissance, and his brother Marc’Antonio, an important politician of the Republic of Venice and a talented amateur artist, the villa’s architecture and painted decoration were created by two canonical figures of Renaissance art: the architect Andrea Palladio and the painter Paolo Veronese. By offering a new and holistic reading of the iconographic program of Villa Barbaro, the study highlights in particular the importance of women, childbirth and motherhood. With a strong multidisciplinary approach, the book is also a contribution to the history of astronomy, philosophy and domesticity in sixteenth-century Venice.
Trecento Pictoriality: Diagrammatic Painting in Late Medieval Italy
By Karl Whittington
In dozens of monumental examples across central and northern Italy, late-medieval artists created complex diagrammatic paintings whose content was conveyed not through proto-perspectival spaces but rather through complex circles, trees, hierarchical stemmata, and winding pathways. Trecento Pictoriality is the first comprehensive study of the practice of monumental diagrammatic painting in late-medieval Italy, moving the study of diagrams from the manuscript page to the frescoed wall and tempera panel. Often placed alongside narrative, devotional, and allegorical paintings, the diagrammatic mode was one of a number of pictorial modes available to artists, patrons, and planners, with a unique ability to present complex content to viewers. While monumental diagrams may have sparked some of the experiences usually associated with diagrams in manuscripts, acting as machines for thought, scaffolds for memory, or tools for the visualization of complex concepts, their reception was also shaped by their presence in public spaces, their scale and aura as richly decorated works of monumental visual art, and their insertion into larger pictorial programs. Closely examining the visual and communicative strategies of these paintings expands the horizon of trecento art history beyond narrative and devotional painting, and shifts our understanding of all of the arts of the trecento, calling attention to issues of scale, visual rhetoric, pictorial ingenuity, and reception.
The Architectural Drawings of Antonio da Sangallo the Younger and His Circle
Vol. III: Antiquity and Theory
Edited by Christoph Frommel and Georg Schelbert
These volumes complete the catalogue of the Sangallo workshop drawings collection housed at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Antonio da Sangallo the Younger (1484-1546) and his workshop were involved in St. Peter’s Basilica, the Palazzo Farnese, and Villa Madama in Rome; vast fortification projects in Castro, Florence, Perugia, and Rome; and dozens of other secular and religious buildings throughout Italy. After Bramante, it was the Sangallo workshop that most strongly influenced sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian architecture. Andrea Palladio, Giacomo della Porta, Carlo Maderno, Francesco Borromini and Gianlorenzo Bernini are among those indebted to him. In all of the projects touched by the Sangallo workshop one senses an intense laboratory in action. This volume focuses on the study of ancient architecture, as well as the drawings for palaces and the Vatican. An international team of scholars has written entries for the drawings. The volume also includes essays by Christoph L. Frommel and Pier Nicola Pagliara, as well as a translation of the Codex Stosch-Rothstein by Ian Campbell.
Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard XI.2
Mythological Subjects
Hercules to Olympus
By Elizabeth McGrath, Bert Schepers, Nils Büttner, Gerlinde Gruber, Fiona Healy, Eveliina Juntunen, Gregory Martin, Jeremy Wood
ISBN 978-1-912554-86-7
One remarkable feature of European culture as it developed in the Renaissance was the accommodation it made with ancient paganism. The classical gods and their legends were allegorised, transformed into symbolic figures or emblematic scenes that might accord with Christian morality. At the same time a secular space was created in art for the depiction of the most popular myths, above all the love stories recounted by the ancient poets. These stories were not only attractive in themselves; they offered the opportunity to depict nude figures in narrative action, which the example of antiquity held forth as the highest goal for painting. Rubens was one of the greatest creators of classical allegory; he was also a supreme interpreter of the classical stories. No painter was so at home in the literature of the Greeks and Romans. When he painted for pleasure, which, increasingly in the course of his life, he felt able to do, he used pagan myth to express and celebrate themes of love, beauty and the creative forces of nature, often in wonderfully idiosyncratic ways. At the same time, as a Christian committed to the ideals of the Catholic Reformation, Rubens respected the restrictions generally placed on the depiction of pagan tales. Most of his mythological paintings were made for private settings, for display within houses (including his own) or in the galleries of princes, noblemen and prelates. It is happy accident of history that these splendid paintings are now widely visible in the great museums of the world.
Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard XXII.2
Rubens’s House
By Nora De Poorter, Frans Baudouin
ISBN 978-1-912554-64-5
The house that Rubens built a few years after his return to Antwerp from Italy, and where he lived to the end of his life, was for the most part lost during the course of alterations carried out over the years. Two original parts survive, and they attest to the grandeur of the artist’s house: the portico and garden pavilion. When the house came to be reconstructed in 1938–1946 a great many unsolved questions had to be tackled, but eventually the difficult project was concluded successfully, although the result sometimes departs from what is historically correct. The reconstructed house became a popular museum.
Undoubtedly the house, which included the family’s living quarters and contained Rubens’s much admired art collection as well as his famous studio, was built according to the master’s own ideas. It is thus part of Rubens’s oeuvre and forms the subject of this catalogue raisonné. Regrettably almost nothing survives of Rubens’s designs, which certainly must have existed.
The present volume is the result of a quest to gather together and critically assess all authentic architectural elements and written, pictorial, and archaeological sources. This allows us to form an impression of the appearance of Rubens’s unique house as well as the functions of its various parts. In addition, the sources that the pictor doctus Rubens used for inspiration in his design are discussed at length: architectural treatises, ancient art as well as the Renaissance architecture he had come to know during his stay in Italy.
Baroque Sculpture in Germany and Central Europe (1600-1770)
By Marjorie Trusted
ISBN 978-1-909400-95-5
Around 1600, a new style of sculpture started to evolve and flourish in Central Europe and in the German-speaking lands. Dramatic wood and stone figures peopled the palaces, gardens and churches of Munich, Berlin, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Vienna and Prague. These great works of art are little known outside Germany and Austria, partly because their colour and vivacity are so astoundingly different from the sculpture that was being produced in Italy, France and elsewhere in Northern Europe at that time. They are overpowering, and amongst the greatest works of art produced in Europe in the seventeenth century. This groundbreaking book explores their history and conveys their visual power.
Late Gothic Sculpture in Northern Italy:
Andrea da Giona and I Maestri Caronesi
An Addition to the Pantheon of Venetian Sculptors
By Anne Markham Schulz
ISBN 978-1-912554-80-5
This book explores the sculpture dispersed throughout Northern Italy in the second quarter of the fifteenth century by masters from the shores of Lake Lugano and identifies Andrea da Giona as the elusive author of Venice’s preeminent sculpture at the intersection of Gothic and Renaissance art, the Mascoli Altarpiece in San Marco.
Bringing the Holy Land Home
The Crusades, Chertsey Abbey, and the Reconstruction of a Medieval Masterpiece
Edited by Amanda Luyster
ISBN 978-1-912554-94-2
A carefully-integrated group of studies begins with the so-called “Chertsey” ceramic tiles, depicting combat between King Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. Found at Chertsey Abbey not far outside London and admired since the nineteenth century, we present here a new reconstruction of both the tiles and their previously-undeciphered Latin texts. The reconstruction demonstrates not only that the theme of the entire mosaic is the Crusades, but also that the overall appearance of the tiles, when laid as a floor, draws from the composition and iconography of imported Islamic and Byzantine silks. Essays illuminate specific material contexts that similarly witness western Europe’s, and particularly England’s, engagement with the material culture of the eastern Mediterranean, including ceramics, textiles, relics and reliquaries, metalwork, coins, sculpture, and ivories.
Pontormo at San Lorenzo
The Making and Meaning of a Lost Renaissance Masterpiece
By Elizabeth Pilliod
ISBN 978-1-909400-94-8
Pontormo’s frescoes in San Lorenzo were the most important cycle of the sixteenth century after Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes. They had an enormous impact on artists until their destruction in the eighteenth century, and their interpretation has also had a significant bearing not only on the reception of this artist, but also of late Renaissance art in Florence. Based on archival and historical research, this book determines a new date for the inception of the fresco cycle and reconstructs the day-by-day activity in the church that had an impact on Pontormo’s project. It reveals Pontormo’s painstaking working method.
Alabaster Sculpture in Europe (1300-1650)
Edited by Marjan Debaene
ISBN 978-1-912554-92-8
Alabaster was a popular material in European sculpture, especially from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Its relative availability and easy to sculpt characteristic made it a highly suitable material for both large monuments and small objects, for mass production and individual works, from England to Spain and France to the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. This material has been the subject of multidisciplinary research in various European countries for several decades. The research combines material analyses with historical and art-historical approaches. This publication, made for the occasion of the large exhibition on the theme at M Leuven opening on October 14th, brings together all renown specialists on the material and sheds light on the many facets of alabaster, such as its physical and chemical properties as well as its translucency, its whiteness, its softness, and its beautiful sheen, all of which made it a popular material used in different types of sculpture from the middle ages to the baroque, all throughout Europe, ranging from bespoke tombs, funerary monuments and commissioned sculptures and altarpieces to commercially interesting formulas such as English or Mechelen alabaster reliefs.
A Survey of Manuscripts Illuminated in France, vol. 2
Frankish Manuscripts: The Seventh to the Tenth Century
Lawrence Nees
2 volumes, ISBN 978-1-872501-25-3
Frankish Manuscripts covers the earliest period in this series devoted to manuscripts illuminated in France. The two volumes explore those manuscripts that originate in the period before the kingdom of France emerged at the end of the tenth century. From the seventh to the tenth century most of modern France was ruled by kings of the Franks, from dynasties known as Merovingian and Carolingian, whose territories also included significant portions of other modern nations, especially the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo. Series A: Antiquities and Architecture, Part III
Sarcophagi and Other Reliefs
By Amanda Claridge, Eloisa Dodero
4 Volumes, ISBN 978-1-912554-56-0
The 1,055 drawings catalogued in these four volumes are mainly divided between the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and the Department of Greece and Rome of the British Museum, but are also scattered in other public and private collections across the world. They correspond most closely to Cassiano’s definition of the Paper Museum as his attempt to have ‘skilled young draughtsmen’ draw ‘everything good in marbles and bronze which can provide some information about antiquity’. He focused in the first instance on the ancient figurative reliefs which are especially abundant in the city of Rome, carved on marble sarcophagi, tombstones, altars, bases and a wide range of other monuments. The drawings depict both the public reliefs of the city – such as those on the Arch of Constantine or the Column of Marcus Aurelius – and those from the major Roman private collections of the period, including the Aldobrandini, Borghese, Medici, Farnese, Barberini and Giustiniani collections.
Four introductory essays explore the context in which the project evolved and discuss the collecting history of the Paper Museum as attested by the mounts and numbering found on many of the drawings. The range of different hands at work are identified, and a detailed survey is provided of the existing albums or the past configurations of others now dismembered.
Revisiting Raphael’s Vatican Stanze
Edited by Edited by Kim Butler Wingfield and Tracy Cosgriff
ISBN 978-1-912554-03-4
This volume revisits Raphael’s famous Vatican ‘Rooms’ on the occasion of the quincentennial of the artist’s death. It introduces new scholarship that addresses questions of meaning and invention, artistic process and design, patronage and ritual, and workshop collaborations. With all rooms and details published in color, including ceilings and basamenti, it constitutes an essential resource for further study of these important Renaissance artworks.
Carlo Cesare Malvasia‘s
Felsina Pittrice:
The Lives of the Bolognese Painters
The Lives of Francesco Francia and Lorenzo Costa
Edited by Elizabeth Cropper and Lorenzo Pericolo
ISBN 978-1-912554-79-9
Illustrated with numerous color images (many of them taken expressly for this publication), this volume provides a critical edition and annotated translation of Malvasia’s lives of Francia and his disciples, among them prominently Costa. The integral transcription (for the first time) in this volume of Malvasia’s preparatory notes (Scritti originali) to the lives of Francia, Costa, and Chiodarolo presents important material that could foster the study of Bolognese painting in the age of humanism under the rulership of the Bentivoglio.
The Allure of Glazed Terracotta in Renaissance Italy
By Zuzanna Sarnecka
ISBN 978-1-912554-78-2
Also Available in Open Access
In her richly illustrated study Sarnecka brings together devotional glazed terracotta produced in Italy by the Della Robbia family and by unidentified contemporaries working in the same medium to propose a new way of thinking about the religious art in Renaissance Italy.
Italy by Way of India
Translating Art and Devotion in the Early Modern World
By Erin Benay
ISBN 978-1-912554-77-5
Italy by Way of India recovers peripheral narratives of image-making from the margins of cultural exchange between India and Italy during early modernity and promotes indigenous artists as central to the construction of Christian art in India and to the representation of India in Europe.
Reading Dante with Images
A Visual Lectura Dantis
Edited by Matthew Collins
ISBN 978-1-912554-50-8
Many Antwerp Hands
Collaborations in Netherlandish Art
Edited by Abigail D. Newman and Lieneke Nijkamp
ISBN 978-1-912554-73-7
Artists everywhere and across all time periods have collaborated with one another. Yet in the early modern Low Countries, collaboration was particularly widespread, resulting in a number of distinctive visual forms that have become strongly associated with artistic – and especially painterly – practice in this region. While art historians long glossed over this phenomenon, which appeared to discomfitingly counter nineteenth-century notions of authorship and artistic genius that have long shaped the field, the past few decades have seen increased attention to this rich and complicated subject. The essays in this book together constitute a current state of the question, while at once pointing the way forward.
From Kairos to Occasio through Fortuna. Text / Image / Afterlife
On the Antique Critical Moment, a Grisaille in Mantua (School of Mantegna, 1495-1510), and the Fortunes of Aby Warburg (1866-1929)
By Barbara Baert
ISBN 978-1-912554-62-1
The author discusses the Mantuan fresco’s key position in the iconographic Nachleben of the Kairos/Occasio figure, and the way the theme was accustomed in the Quattrocento and the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Santa Maria Antiqua
The Sistine Chapel of the Early Middle Ages
Edited by Eileen Rubery, Giulia Bordi, John Osborne
ISBN 978-1-909400-53-5
Lavishly illustrated and containing the most recent images and research on this unique church, this is an essential resource for early medieval historians and archeologists working on Rome, the medieval West and Byzantium.
Murillo
Persuasion and Aura
By Benito Navarrete Prieto
ISBN 978-1-912554-40-9
Awarded with the 2022 Eleanor Tufts Award of the Society for Iberian Global Art.
This book examines how Murillo constructed his paintings and the devices he employed to provoke responses in the viewer, both then and now.