Bøger i Visual Culture in Early Modernity serien

Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) was as an artist and scholar of the Ming period. Considering Chen's paintings and prints alongside Chen's romance drama commentaries and prefaces and his collected writings (particularly poetry), this title focuses not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Focusing on the ways his art and persona were valued and criticized by writers, collectors, and artists subsequent to his death, this book examines the reception of the works of Albrecht Durer. The author traces carefully how Durer's paintings, prints, drawings and theoretical writings traveled widely.

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters - Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz de Heem, this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form.

Shedding light on the relatively unknown art of the Wittelsbach dukes' sixteenth-century court, this is a monograph to focus on this Italian-trained Netherlandish artist. It incorporates original archival material, including letters and payment records into the analysis of Sustris' many projects that ranged from large fresco cycles.

Examining their production practices in various genres including manuscript illustration, glass painting and staining, tapestry manufacture, portrait painting, and engraving, this book explores how Netherlandish artists migrating to England in the early modern period overcame difficulties raised by their outsider status.

Tracing the history of St Antoninus' cult and burial from the time of his death in 1459 until his remains were moved to their final resting place in 1589, this study demonstrates that the saint's relic cult was a key element of Florence's sacred cityscape.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that Pieter Bruegel the Elder eschewed Italianate influences, this title demonstrates how the artist's later peasant paintings reveal a complicated artistic dialogue in which visual concepts and pictorial motifs from Italian and classical ideas are employed for a specifically Northern phenomenon.

Argues that Diego Velazquez painted two of his most famous works, "The Spinners" and "Las Meninas", as theoretically informed manifestos of painterly brushwork. This book also argues that the two paintings form a learned retort to the prevailing critical disdain for the painterly.

Examines Giorgio Vasari's interest, as an art historian and as an artist, in engravings and woodblock prints, focusing not only on aspects of Vasari's career, but also on aspects of sixteenth-century artistic culture and artistic practice.

Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, the author nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings: "Crowning with Thorns", the "Crucifixion", "Doubting Thomas" and the "Calling of Matthew".

The late Renaissance sculptor Leone Leoni (1509-1590) came from modest beginnings, but died as a nobleman and knight with a house and art collection envied by the nobility. This book focuses on Leoni's background and character, and on unknown aspects of his career, his social position in Milan, and the contents of his impressive art collection.

Focuses on sacred art and Catholicism in Rome during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study addresses the responses of members of all social classes - not just elites - to art created for the public. It also provides a view of the range of religious ideas that circulated in early modern Rome.

The Spectacle of Clouds examines the different ways Heaven has been conceived and represented from the 15th to the 17th century, crossing over into the fields of history, religion and philosophy. By examining visual sources such as paintings, frescos and stage designs, together with letters, guild-ledgers.

Structured around the interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers.

This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors and patrons dealt with the practical and esoteric issues of material choices and acquisition, production, shipping and transportation, and the changing meanings of sculptures.

This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective, but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind.

This book encourages the rethinking of collecting not as an elite, often aristocratic pursuit, but rather as a vital activity that has engaged many different groups within society.

This volume reframes recent scholarship on 'cultures of knowledge and discernment' in the early modern period. The collection is innovative in its focus on investigating types of knowledge linked to the 'science' (scientia) of art, to artistic expertise and connoisseurship, and 'secrets of art and nature.'

Drawing on recent research by scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, this volume reconsiders the art and architecture produced after 1563. As the first text to cover this formative period from an international perspective, this volume casts new light on the aftermath of the Renaissance and the beginnings of "Baroque."

During the early modern period, visual imagery was put to ever new uses as many disciplines adopted visual criteria for testing truth claims, representing knowledge, or conveying information. Religious propagandists, political writers, satirists, cartographers, the scientific community, and others experimented with new uses of visual images. Artists, writers, preachers, musicians, and performers, among others, often employed visual images or conjured mental images to connect with their audiences. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection creatively explore how the exponential growth in images, especially prints, impacted the intellectual horizons and the visual awareness of viewers in early modern Germany. Each of the chapters serves as a case study for one or more of the volumeΓÇÖs sub-themes: art, visual literacy, and strategies of presentation; audience and the art of persuasion; the art of envisioning; the ephemeral arts and theatricality; the built environment and spatial settings; and the history of the visual.

Exploring the rich variety of pictorial rhetoric in early modern northern European genre images, this volume deepens our understanding of genre''s place in early modern visual culture. From 1500 to 1700, artists in northern Europe pioneered the category of pictures now known as genre, portrayals of people in ostensibly quotidian situations. Critical approaches to genre images have moved past the antiquated notion that they portray uncomplicated ''slices of life,'' describing them instead as heavily encoded pictorial essays, laden with symbols that only the most erudite contemporary viewers and modern iconographers could fully comprehend. These essays challenge that limiting binary, revealing a more expansive array of accessible meanings in genre''s deft grafting of everyday scenarios with a rich complex of experiential, cultural, political, and religious references. Authors deploy a variety of approaches to detail genre''s multivalent relations to older, more established pictorial and literary categories, the interplay between the meaning of the everyday and its translation into images, and the multifaceted concerns genre addressed for its rapidly expanding, unprecedentedly diverse audience.

Bringing together established and emerging specialists in seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, Material Bernini is the first sustained examination of the conspicuous materiality of BerniniΓÇÖs work in sculpture, architecture, and paint. The various essays demonstrate that material Bernini has always been tied (whether theologically, geologically, politically, or in terms of art theory) to his immaterial twin. Here immaterial Bernini and the historiography that sustains him is finally confronted by material Bernini. Central to the volume are BerniniΓÇÖs works in clay, a fragmentary record of a large body of preparatory works by a sculptor who denied any direct relation between sketches of any kind and final works. Read together, the essays call into question why those works in which BerniniΓÇÖs bodily relation to the material of his art is most evident, his clay studies, have been configured as a point of unmediated access to the artistΓÇÖs mind, to his immaterial ideas. This insight reveals a set of values and assumptions that have profoundly shaped Bernini studies from their inception, and opens up new and compelling avenues of inquiry within a field that has long remained remarkably self-enclosed.

Spanning two centuries and two continents, Art, Piety and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500-1700 addresses the impact of religious tensions on art, design, and architecture in the early modern world. Beyond famous works of art such as Kraft''s Eucharistic Tabernacle, the volume examines less-studied objects, including church plate and vestments, stained glass, graffiti, and Mexican images of St. Anne, created throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The collection''s contributors present religious artworks from Germany, England, Italy, France, Spain, and Mexico; the media include sculpture, oil painting, fresco, metalwork, dress, and architecture. Questions of art''s destruction, preservation, and censorship are discussed against the ever-present backdrop of religious conflict and varying degrees of tolerance. New information and original perspectives demonstrate the ways in which art illuminates history, and the close links between the changing values of a society and the images it displays to represent itself.

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects and painted ceramic jars. In this way, the volume presents an entirely new picture of Renaissance sexuality, stripping away layers of misconceptions and manipulations to reveal an often-misunderstood world. ''Sex acts'' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one''s (or another''s) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.

Emphasizing on the one hand the reconstruction of the material culture of specific residences, and on the other, the way in which particular domestic objects reflect, shape, and mediate family values and relationships within the home, this volume offers a distinct contribution to research on the early modern Italian domestic interior. Though the essays mainly take an art historical approach, the book is interdisciplinary in that it considers the social implications of domestic objects for family members of different genders, age, and rank, as well as for visitors to the home. By adopting a broad chronological framework that encompasses both Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and by expanding the regional scope beyond Florence and Venice to include domestic interiors from less studied centers such as Urbino, Ferrara, and Bologna, this collection offers genuinely new perspectives on the home in early modern Italy.

As this collection of essays makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of CaravaggioΓÇÖs art are multiple and variable. Art historians from the UK and North America offer new or recently updated interpretations of the works of seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and of his many followers known as the Caravaggisti. The volume deals with all the major aspects of CaravaggioΓÇÖs paintings: technique, creative process, religious context, innovations in pictorial genre and narrative, market strategies, biography, patronage, reception, and new hermeneutical trends. The concluding section tackles the essential question of CaravaggioΓÇÖs legacy and the production of his followers-not only in terms of style but from some highly innovative strategies: concettismo; art marketing and the price of pictures; self-fashioning and biography; and the concept of emulation.

Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure, as bearers of information on material reality, as mediators between the mind and the outer world, and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy, music and poetry, gardens, food, relics and rituals. Collectively, the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.