This ... publication is an in-depth presentation of the Gubbio studiolo, the masterpiece of Italian Renaissance woodwork that was reinstalled in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1996. This small private study, about sixteen by twelve feet, is valued not only for the beauty of its perspectival inlay—a tour de force of illusionism—but also for its profound historical associations.
The studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio, Italy, demonstrate architecture's capacity to transact between the mental and physical realms of human experience. Constructed between 1474 and 1483 for the military captain Federico da Montefeltro and his young motherless son, the studioli may be described as treasuries of emblems: they contain not things but images of things, rendered with remarkable perspectival exactitude. These small, image-filled chambers reflect how architecture and its ornament equipped a quattrocento mind with metaphors for wisdom and methods for statecraft and intellectual activity. Drawing on the densely layered imagery in the studioli and text sources readily available to the Urbino court, Robert Kirkbride examines the position of the studioli in the Western tradition of the memory arts, considering how architecture bridged the mathematical arts, which lent themselves to mechanical pursuits, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline central to memory and eloquence. As subtle ramifications of material and mental craft, the studioli provided ideal methods for education and prudent governance, extending an ancient legacy of open-ended models that were conceived to activate the imagination and exercise the memory. At the time of their construction, the studioli represented the leading edge of technologies of visual representation and offer a case study of how contemporary advances in interactive technologies reactivate and transform ancient metaphors for thought and learning.
The present volume, Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1964-2005, is a successor to a volume published by the Museum in 1965 entitled Publications of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1870-1964. These two bibliographic volumes endeavor to list all the known books, pamphlets, and serial publications bearing the Museum's imprint, and issued by the institution during the first 135 years of its existence (through June 2005). The first volume was compiled by Albert TenEyck Gardner, at the time an Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, and the present volume has been compiled from the Annual Reports issued by the Museum during the relevant years. Together the two volumes testify to the tremendous contributions made to knowledge by the curators and conservators of the Metropolitan and by the many other experts who have contributed to the Museum's exhibition catalogues. Various issues of the Bulletin emphasize the great sweep of the Museum's acquisitions during these years, and the exhibition catalogues--a number of them Alfred H. Barr Jr., Award or the George Wittenborn Award--testify to the continuity of the institution's dedicated program to enrich people's lives through knowledge of art. (This title was originally published in 2006.)
