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Description: The Age of Undress: Art, Fashion, and the Classical Ideal in the 1790s
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00338
The Age of Undress explores the emergence and meaning of neoclassical dress in the 1790s, tracing its evolution from Naples to London and Paris over the course of a single decade. The neoclassical style of clothing—often referred to as robe à la grecque, empire style, or “undress”—is marked by a sheer, white, high-waisted muslin dress worn with minimal undergarments, often accessorized with a cashmere shawl. This style represented a dramatic departure from that of previous decades and was short lived: by the 1820s, corsets, silks, and hoop skirts were back in fashion.

Amelia Rauser investigates this sudden transformation and argues that women styled themselves as living statues, artworks come to life, an aesthetic and philosophical choice intertwined with the experiments and innovations of artists working in other media during the same period. Although neoclassicism is often considered a cold, rational, and masculine movement, Rauser’s analysis shows that it was actually deeply passionate, with women at its core—as ideals and allegories, as artistic agents, and as important patrons.

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Print publication date March 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300241204
EISBN 9780300272536
Illustrations 181
Print Status in print
Description: The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00212
The painting and carving of altarpieces was one of the most important and characteristic tasks of Italian Renaissance artists, yet the altarpiece as an artistic genre has been surprisingly neglected by art historians. This book—the first detailed study of the altarpiece in a major center of Renaissance art—focuses on Venice from 1450 to 1530. Peter Humfrey, an authority on Venetian painting, explores a wide range of issues surrounding altarpieces as an art form. These include the traditions of decoration of Venetian churches, the sacred and secular functions that altarpieces were expected to perform, the market for altarpieces, and the professional world of the Venetian artist. He discusses altarpieces by Bellini, Cima, the three Vivarini, and the young Titian, as well as by numerous other painters and sculptors of the period.

A central theme of the book is the relation between the altarpieces and their original physical and liturgical context. Throughout, Humfrey tries to reintegrate altarpieces with their intended settings, both for the sake of recapturing their full visual effect and as a basis for examining the ideological relationship between their subject matter and the altar table below. He also examines the complex mixture of motives, worldly as well as pious, that prompted fifteenth-century Venetians to spend large sums of money on commissioning altarpieces for the churches of their city. The first part of the book is thematic, dealing with the making, placement, and function of the altarpiece. The second part is a chronological discussion of specific works, focusing on the ways in which the artists met challenges posed by specific commissions. An appendix to the book gives further factual and bibliographical information about one hundred major Venetian altarpieces of the period.

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Print publication date July 1993 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300053584
EISBN 9780300258035
Illustrations 315
Print Status out of print
Description: Ambitious Form: Giambologna, Ammanati, and Danti in Florence
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00009
Ambitious Form describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors—Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti—as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked.

Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.
Print publication date January 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691147444
EISBN 9780300249712
Illustrations 170
Print Status in print
Description: America’s Rome: Volume I—Classical Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00010
This remarkable book is one of a two-volume set that examines the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. William L. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over two centuries.

Volume I focuses on the influence of classical Rome, showing how the Forum and the Colosseum inspired American thoughts of ideal republics and powerful empires, how the Campagna was an ambiguous image of Arcadia or wasteland in the aftermath of empire, and how the Pantheon and the galleries of antique sculpture presented a pagan challenge to American ideas of divinity, beauty, and sexuality.

America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome is also available on the A&AePortal.

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Print publication date September 1989 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9789998004733
EISBN 9780300243925
Illustrations 173
Print Status out of print
Description: America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00014
This remarkable book, one of a two-volume set, discusses the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over the course of two centuries.

In this volume, Vance begins by examining the three foremost Roman Catholic symbols: the bambino, the madonna, and the pope. He traces for the first time the evolution of American writing on popes from the late eighteenth century to the election of Pope John Paul II, including fictional depictions of an American pope. Then, he explores the predominantly negative American reaction to Catholic baroque sculpture and architecture in the nineteenth century.

In the section on contemporary Rome, the author addresses American attitudes toward Rome’s earliest attempts at democratization, toward its aristocratic social structures, and toward the political changes that occurred after World War II.

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Print publication date September 1989 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300044539
EISBN 9780300243932
Illustrations 34
Print Status in print
Description: Antonio Mancini: Nineteenth-Century Italian Master
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00247
One of Italy’s greatest modern painters, Antonio Mancini (1852–1930) is best known for his daring and innovative painting methods. This overview of his career—the first comprehensive study in English—follows upon the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of fifteen major oil paintings and pastels by Mancini, including the famous Il Saltimbanco (1877–78), all of which are included in this beautiful volume.

Mancini’s paintings are at once realistic and visionary, and they span a career that brought him from the legendary slums of Naples to Paris, Rome, and English country houses. Of particular interest is Mancini’s relevance to the American art world, where he was once a much-discussed controversial figure, supported by a small group of American patrons and artists before becoming famous in Italy. John Singer Sargent is said to have called Mancini the greatest living painter.

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Print publication date November 2007 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300122206
EISBN 9780300260915
Illustrations 101
Print Status out of print
Description: Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00192
Hailed as one of the most influential and expressive painters of the seventeenth century, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–ca. 1656) has figured prominently in the art historical discourse of the past two decades. This attention to Artemisia, after many years of scholarly neglect, is partially due to interest in the dramatic details of her early life, including the widely publicized rape trial of her painting tutor, Agostino Tassi, and her admission to Florence’s esteemed Accademia del Disegno. While the artist’s early paintings have been extensively discussed, her later work has been largely dismissed.

This elegantly written book provides a revolutionary look at Artemisia’s later career, refuting longstanding assumptions about the artist. The fact that she was semi-illiterate has erroneously led scholars to assume a lack of literary and cultural education on her part. Stressing the importance of orality in Baroque culture and in Artemisia’s paintings, Locker argues for her important place in the cultural dialogue of the seventeenth century.

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Print publication date February 2015 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300185119
EISBN 9780300256970
Illustrations 114
Print Status out of print
Description: Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00026
For all those interested in the relationship between ideas and the built environment, John Onians provides a lively illustrated account of the range of meanings that Western culture has assigned to the Classical orders. Onians shows that during the 2,000 years from their first appearance in ancient Greece through their codification in Renaissance Italy, the orders — the columns and capitals known as Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite — were made to serve expressive purposes, engaging the viewer in a continuing visual dialogue.
Print publication date January 1990 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691002194
EISBN 9780300252910
Illustrations 213
Print Status in print
Description: Bernini and the Bell Towers: Architecture and Politics at the Vatican
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00028
In 1638, the great artist-architect Gianlorenzo Bernini began one of the most ambitious architectural projects of his career: to design and construct massive twin bell towers atop St. Peter’s basilica at the Vatican. But the project failed spectacularly. Bernini’s reputation was permanently tarnished, and the scandal of the bell towers sparked a controversy that persists to this day. What happened? Who was responsible? How did events unfold in this dramatic episode of architectural history?

This engaging book tells the complete story of the bell towers for the first time. Presenting a wealth of new visual and documentary evidence, Sarah McPhee reconstructs the entire affair, the architectural and political milieu, the evolution of the designs, and the varying influences of all those involved in the project. McPhee examines the multiple constraints under which Bernini worked, including the ambitions of the pope, the criticisms of rival architects, the financial and political constraints of the building committee, the monumental history of the basilica, and the geology of the site. She reinterprets Bernini’s role as architect and shows convincingly that the failure of the bell tower was not Bernini’s own. Instead, it was the failure of the institution of the Vatican, driven by liturgical and political imperatives, that doomed the project despite the architect’s heroic efforts.

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Print publication date January 2003 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300089820
EISBN 9780300253320
Illustrations 164
Print Status out of print
Description: Early Christian and Byzantine Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00042
Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

Written by distinguished art historian John Beckwith, this book presents an appreciation of early Christian and Byzantine Art as a sublime expression of religious thought and feeling. Beckwith argues that Byzantine art is both static and dynamic: static in the sense that once an image was established it was felt that no improvement was necessary; dynamic in the sense that there was never one style and these styles or modes were constantly changing. The story is not only complex in its unravelling, but ranges widely over various media: mosaic, wall painting and painted panels, sculpture in marble and ivory, manuscript illumination, gold, silver, and precious stones, jewelry, silk and rich vestments.

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Print publication date September 1986 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300052961
EISBN 9780300223859
Illustrations 316
Print Status in print
Description: European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00351
This fascinating and enlightening book presents a rich variety of European tapestries from the Art Institute of Chicago's collection. These exquisite tapestries include medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque examples, manufactured at almost all the major centers of production in many of the foremost workshops. Among the works discussed are The Annunciation, a Renaissance masterpiece designed by an artist in the circle of Mantegna; Autumn and Winter, based on designs by Charles Le Brun; and The Elephant, woven after a design by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. An international team of scholars explain the history of this previously unpublished collection and offer new designer and workshop attributions, design and source identifications, and provenance information.

High-resolution images of these magnificent works are provided throughout the text and can easily be enlarged for careful study.

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Print publication date November 2008 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300119602
EISBN 9780300273823
Illustrations 331
Print Status in print
Description: The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano, 1290–1320
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00352
The erotic frescoes adorning a chamber in San Gimignano's communal bell tower are among the most fascinating surviving examples of secular art from the late Middle Ages. Despite their fame, neither these frescoes—which include scenes of two lovers in a bathtub and Aristotle ridden by his seductress—nor those of the commune council hall have been well understood as products of the communal culture they represent. Here Jean Campbell explores the sources and significance of the images on these walls by constructing an interdisciplinary microhistory of an early Italian commune. Her investigation addresses notions of nobility, personal display, and public space, describing how the game of courting colored urban life in the age of Dante.

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Print publication date February 1998 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691012100
EISBN 9780300274202
Illustrations 62
Print Status out of print
Description: Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00055
From the late Middle Ages, when it embodied spirituality, through the end of the eighteenth century, when it offered pleasurable surroundings for banquets, poetry readings, and amorous pursuits, the garden figured prominently in everyday Roman life. In this fascinating history, David Coffin provides a wealth of information on how Italian gardeners worked with the elements of color, fragrance, sound, shade, architecture, sculpture, and wildlife to achieve a wide variety of sensual effects. In so doing he presents the stages of evolution in classic Italian gardening, which was replaced in the late eighteenth century by the more naturalistic English style. Coffin first considers the role of cloistered gardens in the Middle Ages and shows how they were later incorporated as private spaces within the larger Renaissance gardens. Describing the introduction of sculptural collections and waterworks into gardens during the sixteenth century, he explores some of the rich, often complicated, iconographical programs that emerged. The extension of garden parks in the seventeenth century marks the decline of architecture in landscaping and the advent of landscape design as a dominant factor. Throughout this book Coffin concentrates on the garden as a site for entertainment and on the development of design components that eventually permitted gardens to be freely open to the public.
Print publication date January 1991 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691040899
EISBN 9780300251715
Illustrations 193
Print Status out of print
Description: Hadrian’s Villa and Its Legacy
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00061
The great Villa constructed by the Emperor Hadrian near Tivoli between A.D. 118 and the 130s is one of the most original monuments in the history of architecture and art. The inspiration for major developments in villa and landscape design from the Renaissance onward, it also influenced such eminent twentieth-century architects as Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. In this beautiful book, two distinguished architectural historians describe and interpret the Villa as it existed in Roman times and track its extraordinary effect on architects and artists up to the present day.

William L. MacDonald and John A. Pinto begin by evaluating the numerous buildings comprising the complex, and then describe the art, decorated surfaces, gardens, waterworks, and life at the Villa. The authors then turn to the ways the Villa influenced writers, artists, architects, and landscape designers from the fifteenth century to the present. They discuss, for example, Piranesi's archaeological, architectural, and graphic Villa studies in the eighteenth century; connections between Hadrian's Villa and the English landscape garden; the array of European verbal and artistic depictions of the Villa; and architectural studies of the Villa by twentieth-century Americans.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date June 1995 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300053814
EISBN 9780300222067
Illustrations 411
Print Status out of print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00142
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The Eighteenth Century features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery’s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

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Author
Print publication date November 2011 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052635
EISBN 9780300244687
Illustrations 294
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00141
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Europe and the World Beyond focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa—but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade.

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Author
Print publication date November 2011 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052628
EISBN 9780300244748
Illustrations 273
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume III: From the “Age of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00140
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The much-awaited Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque has been written by an international team of distinguished scholars, and covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of slavery and the presence of black people in Europe irrevocably affected the works of the best artists of the time. Essays on the black Magus and the image of the black in Italy, Spain, and Britain, with detailed studies of Rembrandt and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, all presented with superb color plates, make this new volume a worthy addition to this classic series.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052611
EISBN 9780300244496
Illustrations 193
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume IV: From the American Revolution to...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00144
In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten classic books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Black Models and White Myths examines the tendentious racial assumptions behind representations of Africans that emphasized the contrast between “civilization” and “savagery” and the development of so-called scientific and ethnographic racism. These works often depicted Africans within a context of sexuality and exoticism, representing their allegedly natural behavior as a counterpoint to inhibited European conduct.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date May 2012 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052604
EISBN 9780300244700
Illustrations 209
Print Status in print
Description: Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00066
Renaissance Florence, of endless fascination for the beauty of its art and architecture, is no less intriguing for its dynamic political, economic, and social life. In this book Patricia Lee Rubin crosses the boundaries of all these areas to arrive at an original and comprehensive view of the place of images in Florentine society. The author asks an array of questions: Why were works of art made? Who were the artists who made them, and who commissioned them? How did they look, and how were they looked at? She demonstrates that the answers to such questions illuminate the contexts in which works of art were created, and how they were valued and viewed.

Rubin seeks out the meeting places of meaning in churches, in palaces, in piazzas—places of exchange where identities were taken on and transformed, often with the mediation of images. She concentrates on questions of vision and visuality, on “seeing and being seen.” With a blend of illustrations; close analyses of sacred and secular paintings by artists including Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Filippino Lippi, and Botticelli; and wide-ranging bibliographic essays, the book shines new light on fifteenth-century Florence, a special place that made beauty one of its defining features.

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Print publication date August 2007 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300123425
EISBN 9780300226959
Illustrations 256
Print Status in print
Description: The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00147
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, painters and sculptors were seldom regarded as more than artisans and craftsmen, but within little more than a hundred years they had risen to the status of “artist.” This book explores how early Renaissance artists gained recognition for the intellectual foundations of their activities and achieved artistic autonomy from enlightened patrons. A leading authority on Renaissance art, Francis Ames-Lewis traces the ways in which the social and intellectual concerns of painters and sculptors brought about the acceptance of their work as a liberal art, alongside other arts like poetry. He charts the development of the idea of the artist as a creative genius with a distinct identity and individuality.

Ames-Lewis examines the various ways that Renaissance artists like Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Dürer, as well as many other less well known painters and sculptors, pressed for intellectual independence. By writing treatises, biographies, poetry, and other literary works, by seeking contacts with humanists and literary men, and by investigating the arts of the classical past, Renaissance artists honed their social graces and broadened their intellectual horizons. They also experienced a growing creative confidence and self-awareness that was expressed in novel self-portraits, works created solely to demonstrate pictorial skills, and monuments to commemorate themselves after death.

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Print publication date April 2000 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300083040
EISBN 9780300220476
Illustrations 153
Print Status in print
Description: The Invention of the Italian Renaissance Printmaker
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00148
Before the age of multimedia, how did the invention of a new technology affect the careers of Renaissance artists? In this groundbreaking book Evelyn Lincoln examines the formation of the new career of printmaker during the late fifteenth century and throughout the sixteenth century in Italy. She focuses particularly on the practical relationship between the ancient skill of drawing and the more modern techniques of artisans who made prints by engraving images into copper or wood. Looking closely at the widely diverse prints issuing from early Italian presses, Lincoln shows how Italian social, religious, and educational practices are revealed in these printed images, demonstrating how the printmaker’s training and experience affected the look of the finished work.

Lincoln builds her discussion around the work of three printmakers practicing at different times and under varying economic opportunities and restraints: Andrea Mantegna in Mantua, Domenico Beccafumi in Siena, and Diana Mantuana (Diana Scultori) in Rome. She shows how the occupational origins of early printmakers and publishers affected how they thought about the functions of multiple images. This account of their work—at powerful courts, in a small republic, and in a cosmopolitan city—sets the prints in the context of related paintings, sculpture, and architecture, describing a period when printmaking opened up new ways to make a living and transformed the mechanisms of Renaissance visual culture.
Print publication date August 2000 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300080414
EISBN 9780300243130
Illustrations 132
Print Status out of print
Description: The Italian Renaissance Nude
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00310
The first scholarly monograph to focus on the inception of the Italian Renaissance nude, this insightful study subverts the idea that the nude in this period was a triumph of classical revival. Looking again at familiar (even overly familiar) images by artists such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian, this book investigates the nude as a tool of colonialism and conquest, as a means of asserting the superiority of men to women, and of naturalizing power differentials by entrenching them in a fixed set of ideas about the body and its representation. Jill Burke uses new research on Renaissance sexual practices, material culture, and the history of medicine to contextualize the era’s fascination with nakedness and the body in both art and life. The Italian Renaissance Nude invites readers to consider these celebrated nudes from beyond an aesthetic perspective—to consider why they were painted, whose gaze the images were created for, and how these artworks were used.

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Print publication date June 2018 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300201567
EISBN 9780300269727
Illustrations 120
Print Status out of print
Description: The Marvel of Maps: Art, Cartography and Politics in Renaissance Italy
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00316
Among the most beautiful and compelling works of Renaissance art, painted maps adorned the halls and galleries of princely palaces. This book is the first to discuss in detail the three-dimensional display of these painted map cycles and their full meaning in Renaissance culture.

Art historian Francesca Fiorani focuses on two of the most significant and marvelous surviving Italian map murals—the Guardaroba Nuova of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, commissioned by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII. Both cycles were not only pioneering cartographic enterprises but also powerful political and religious images. Presenting an original interpretation of the interaction between art, science, politics, and religion in Renaissance culture, the book also offers fresh insights into the Medici and papal courts.

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Print publication date June 2005 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300107272
EISBN 9780300270464
Illustrations 162
Print Status out of print
Description: Michelangelo, Drawing, and the Invention of Architecture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00233
Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award
Winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award


In this engaging book, Cammy Brothers takes an unusual approach to Michelangelo's architectural designs, arguing that they are best understood in terms of his experience as a painter and sculptor. Unlike previous studies, which have focused on the built projects and considered the drawings only insofar as they illuminate those buildings, this book analyses his designs as an independent source of insight into the mechanisms of Michelangelo's imagination. Brothers gives equal weight to the unbuilt designs, and suggests that some of Michelangelo's most radical ideas remained on paper.

Brothers explores the idea of drawing as a mode of thinking, using its evidence to reconstruct the process by which Michelangelo arrived at new ideas. By turning the flexibility and fluidity of his figurative drawing methods to the subject of architecture, Michelangelo demonstrated how it could match the expressive possibilities of painting and sculpture.

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Print publication date September 2008 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300124897
EISBN 9780300260151
Illustrations 281
Print Status out of print
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283
A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone

Apollo Magazine's Book of the Year 2021
 
Joint-winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2021

Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

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Print publication date October 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300248166
EISBN 9780300267099
Illustrations 329
Print Status in print
Description: Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00311
We are taught to believe in originals. In art and architecture in particular, original objects vouch for authenticity, value, and truth, and require our protection and preservation. The nineteenth century, however, saw this issue differently. In a culture of reproduction, plaster casts of building fragments and architectural features were sold throughout Europe and America and proudly displayed in leading museums. The first comprehensive history of these full-scale replicas, Plaster Monuments examines how they were produced, marketed, sold, and displayed, and how their significance can be understood today.

Plaster Monuments unsettles conventional thinking about copies and originals. As Mari Lending shows, the casts were used to restore wholeness to buildings that in reality lay in ruin, or to isolate specific features of monuments to illustrate what was typical of a particular building, style, or era. Arranged in galleries and published in exhibition catalogues, these often enormous objects were staged to suggest the sweep of history, synthesizing structures from vastly different regions and time periods into coherent narratives. While architectural plaster casts fell out of fashion after World War I, Lending brings the story into the twentieth century, showing how Paul Rudolph incorporated historical casts into the design for the Yale Art and Architecture building, completed in 1963.

Drawing from a broad archive of models, exhibitions, catalogues, and writings from architects, explorers, archaeologists, curators, novelists, and artists, Plaster Monuments tells the fascinating story of a premodernist aesthetic and presents a new way of thinking about history’s artifacts.
Print publication date December 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691177144
EISBN 9780300268188
Illustrations 122
Print Status in print
Description: The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time...
Widely acknowledged as a prime manifestation of Florentine humanist culture under Lorenzo de'Medici, Botticelli's Primavera cannot be fully interpreted without considering the poetics that expressed the Laurentian cultural program and, in turn, the Renaissance itself. In this analysis Charles Dempsey examines the poetry written by Lorenzo and his literary clients in order to give definition to the cultural context in which the Primavera was created. A celebration of Love, the painting is shown to incorporate both public and private imaginative realms while embracing the ideal and the actual experiences of the present. The Primavera, depicting Venus as the spirit of Love and springtime, is simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, rooted in International-Style vernacular conventions and evincing a nascent classical vocabulary. After describing the profoundly humanist classical foundation to the invention of the Primavera, Dempsey identifies its genre with rustic song, then relates the painting to the conventions of vernacular love poetry. A close reading of the painting in relation to works by Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, and other poets working to elevate vernacular expression by infusing native Tuscan with Latin forms suggests how the idea of Love portrayed by Botticelli in the figure of Venus incorporates not only the ancient springtime renovatio mundi but also the actual cultural renovation—the Renaissance—imagined and sponsored by Lorenzo the Magnificent.

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Print publication date November 1992 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691032078
EISBN 9780300275643
Illustrations 46
Print Status out of print
Description: The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00228
"This book would make an excellent addition to art history curricula, especially those built to expand students’ interest and knowledge into materials and process. . . . The extensive notes and bibliography will provide specialists with avenues for additional and deeper research."—L. L. Kriner, Berea College

This expansive study of color illuminates the substance, context, and meaning of five centuries of European painting. Between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the materials of painting remained remarkably unchanged, but innovations in their use flourished. Technical discoveries facilitated new visual effects, political conditions prompted innovations, and economic changes shaped artists’ strategies, especially as trade became global.

Marcia Hall explores how Michelangelo radically broke with his contemporaries’ harmonizing use of color in favor of a highly saturated approach; how the robust art market and demand for affordable pictures in seventeenth-century Netherlands helped popularize subtly colored landscape paintings; how politics and color became entangled during the French Revolution; and how modern artists liberated color from representation as their own role transformed from manipulators of pigments to visionaries celebrated for their individual expression. Using insights from recent conservation studies, Hall captivates readers with fascinating details and developments in magnificent examples—from Botticelli and Titian to Van Gogh and Kandinsky—to weave an engaging analysis. Her insistence on the importance of examining technique and material to understand artistic meaning gives readers the tools to look at these paintings with fresh eyes.

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Print publication date May 2019 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300237191
EISBN 9780300259728
Illustrations 212
Print Status in print
Description: Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00231
In early sixteenth-century Italy, works of art came to be understood as unique objects made by individuals of genius, giving rise to a new sense of the artist as the author of his images. At the same time, the practice of engraving, a medium that produced multiple printed images via collaborative processes, rapidly developed. In this book, Lisa Pon examines how images passed between artists and considers how printing techniques affected the authorship of images.

Pon focuses on the encounters between the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi and three key artists: Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, and Giorgio Vasari. She reevaluates their work in light of the tensions between possessive authorship and practical collaboration in the visual arts.

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Author
Print publication date February 2004 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300096801
EISBN 9780300260137
Illustrations 93
Print Status out of print
Description: The Renaissance Print: 1470–1550
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00154
Printmaking matured in western Europe between 1470 and 1550, when the great generation of artists and printmakers brought international recognition to print as an art form. This book examines the technical and aesthetic experimentation that went into printmaking, workshop practices, and the material and social contexts of print production, and it gives the fullest account ever written of the ways in which Renaissance prints were produced, distributed, and acquired.

David Landau and Peter W. Parshall pose a range of practical questions about the production of prints. They investigate, for example, what materials were used, how they were acquired, and how a Renaissance printmaker's workshop operated. They explore the evidence that individual prints were beginning to be esteemed as works of art rather than as inexpensive substitutes for them, and the relationship between prints made to be collected and those of a more ephemeral nature intended for a wider audience. They discuss how prints were valued during the period, including the relative value of woodcuts to engravings, and engravings to etchings. And they investigate how prints evolved in relation to the pictorial arts of the Renaissance generally. Examining documentary evidence and many individual prints, Landau and Parshall provide an integrated view of the Renaissance print as a social and artistic enterprise and reevaluate the achievements of the most influential phase in the history of European printmaking.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1996 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300068832
EISBN 9780300222050
Illustrations 383
Print Status in print