In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna, wrote a remarkable treatise on art during a time when the Church feared rampant abuse in the arts. Paleotti's 'Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images' argues that art should address a broad audience and explains the painter's responsibility to his spectators.
Art and the cultured public - Documents on art and artists - Mid-century Venetian art criticism - Vasari - Art theory in the second half of the century - The Counter-Reformation - Artists, amateurs and collectors - On beauty.
Encompassing the socio-political, cultural background of the period, this title takes a look at the careers of the Old Masters and many lesser-known artists. The book covers artistic developments across six countries and examines in detail many of the artworks on display.
By exploring manifestations of normative and non-normative thinking in the geopolitical and cultural contexts of Early Modern Italy, Spain, and the American colonies, this volume hopes to encourage interdisciplinary discussions on the early modern notions of reason and unreason, good and evil, justice and injustice, center and periphery, freedom and containment, self and other.
Why does a wine glass break when you drop it, whereas a steel goblet does not? The answer may seem obvious: glass, unlike steel, is fragile. This is an explanation in terms of a power or disposition: the glass breaks because it possesses a particular power, namely fragility. Seemingly simple, such intrinsic dispositions or powers have fascinated philosophers for centuries. A power's central task is explaining why a thing changes in the ways that it does, rather than in other ways: powers should explain why an acorn turns into an oak tree, not a sunflower, or why fire burns wood, and wood can catch fire. This volume examines the twists and turns of the fascinating history of a difficult philosophical concept, focusing on the metaphysical sense of "powers"--that is, the powers that are invoked in the explanation of natural changes and activities. Scholars probe the views of thinkers from antiquity to the present day: Anaxagoras, Plato, the Stoics, Abelard, Anselm, Henry of Ghent, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Shepherd, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and numerous others. In addition, the volume contains four short reflection essays that examine the concept of powers from the perspective of disciplines other than philosophy, namely history of music, West African religions, history of chemistry, and history of art. The history of philosophy brims with controversies surrounding the concept of power, and these controversies have not diminished--particularly as potentialities or powers see a revival in contemporary analytic metaphysics. Hence, telling the history of philosophical theories of powers means exploring the trajectory of a concept whose importance to the past and present of philosophy can hardly be overstated.
Jusepe Martínez’s Practical Discourses on the Most Noble Art of Painting (ca. 1673–75), though little known today, was highly influential on art, artists, and artistic practice and theory in Spain long after its publication. This volume is the first English translation of the Discourses, which, while circulated in manuscript copies, was not even published until the mid-nineteenth century. Martínez wrote the Discourses toward the end of his life as a well-traveled professional artist who had studied and worked in Italy and the major artistic and literary centers of Spain; his ideas were especially enriched by his participation in the elevated cultural life of his native Aragonese school. His discussions on art offer anecdotal knowledge from his friendships with many of the principal artists of Spain’s Golden Age, including Diego Velázquez and Alonso Cano, as well as writers and intellectuals of the period. Martínez’s text stands out for a nuanced humanism that is rare in practical treatises. Along with his original ideas on handling, pictorial aesthetics, and the vocation of painting, his work has even more affinities with philosophical discourses than with artists’ practical instructional books. Zahira Véliz’s introduction and notes provide historical context and situate Martínez’s ideas in his rich cultural milieu.
Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits ‘canonical’ forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one image—either actual or thematic—and examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.
Drawing on recent research by established and emerging scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, this volume reconsiders the art and architecture produced after 1563 across the conventional geographic borders. Rather than considering this period a degraded afterword to Renaissance classicism or an inchoate proto-Baroque, the book seeks to understand the art on its own terms. By considering artists such as Federico Barocci and Stefano Maderno in Italy, Hendrick Goltzius in the Netherlands, Antoine Caron in France, Francisco Ribalta in Spain, and Bartolomeo Bitti in Peru, the contributors highlight lesser known "reforms" of art from outside the conventional centers. 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."
Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters (1564) is one of the first treatises on art published in the post-Tridentine period. It remains a key primary source for the discussion of the reform of art as it unfolded at the time of the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation. Relatively little is known about Gilio himself, a cleric from Fabriano, Italy. He was evidently familiar with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese’s lively court circle in Rome and dedicated his book to the cardinal. His text—available here in English in full for the first time—takes the form of a spirited dialogue among six protagonists, using the voices of each to present different points of view. Through their dialogue Gilio grapples with a host of issues, from the relationship between poetry and painting, to the function of religious images, to the effects such images have on viewers. The primary focus is the proper representation of history, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel is the exemplary case. Indeed, Michelangelo’s painting is both praised and condemned as an example of the possibilities and limits of art. Although Gilio’s dialogue is often quoted by art historians to point out the more controlling view of art and artists by the Roman Catholic Church, the unabridged text reveals the nuanced and provisional debates happening during this critical era.
This book gives you the historical sensation of coming face to face with the bodily expression and regulation of children's emotions over time. The study does this by encouraging you to look through the eyes of well-known artists, like Albrecht Dürer, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Jan Steen, Antony van Dyck, Rembrandt, and Titian in early modern Europe, and Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Thomas Lawrence,Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Philipp Otto Runge, Willem Bartel van der Kooi, Paul Gauguin, Auguste Renoir, and Jozef Israëls in the late 18th and 19th centuries. These sources are supplemented by works from less-famous artists, as well as popular emblem books, child-advice manuals, observations from the emerging child sciences, and personal documents. Jeroen Dekker observes children's emotions mainly in the child's world and in the domestic emotional space, and connects them with history's ongoing, underlying discourse on education and the emotions. This discourse was developed by theologians, philosophers, and moralists like Augustine, Aquinas, Erasmus, Descartes, Jacob Cats, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, by Romantic educationalists like Friedrich Fröbel and Ellen Key, and by scientists like Charles Darwin and William James who emphasized the biological instead of the moral fundament of children's emotions. The story of children's emotions is told in the context of cultural movements like the Renaissance, Humanism, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the starting Age of Child Science. Children's Emotions in Europe, 1500 1900 crucially highlights the continuous co-existence of regulation-oriented and child-oriented educational views on children's emotions.
