The National Gallery of Art houses the single most important collection of portrait medals in the United States. This two-volume catalogue examines in depth these holdings, comprising more than nine hundred medals. Providing detailed technical information--including the alloy composition of each medal--drawn from careful research, observation, and analysis, Renaissance Medals breaks new ground in the scholarly literature. Volume 2 documents the Gallery's collection of German medals of the sixteenth century, French baroque medals, and smaller, though no less significant, groups of Netherlandish and English medals.
The papers published in this book were delivered at two conferences held in conjunction with the exhibition, " The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance"
A study of the portrait medals as manifesto for the humanist cult of personal fame and as a vehicle for the finest artists of the age. This is a huge book, with nearly 500 illustrations.
In this re-assessment of Renaissance art, Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton examine the ways in which European civilization defined itself between 1450 and 1550.
A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance, examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance images and artifacts. In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood examine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists—a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals discussed were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be Early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoieton (or “image made without hands”), the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. Although a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Bode-Museum, Berlin, Aug. 25-Nov. 20, 2011, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 21, 2011-Mar. 18, 2012.
The papers published in this book were delivered at two conferences held in conjunction with the exhibition, " The Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of the Renaissance"
