Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance

Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance

Author: Sarah Blake McHam

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9780300186031

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Pliny's Natural History (A.D. 77-79) served as an indispensable guide to and exemplar of the ideals of art for Renaissance artists, patrons, and theorists. Bearing the imprimatur of antiquity, the Natural History gave permission to do art on a grand scale, to value it, and to see it as an incomparable source of prestige and pleasure. In Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, Sarah Blake McHam surveys Pliny's influence, from Petrarch, the first figure to recognize Pliny's relevance to understanding the history of Greek art and its reception by the Romans, to Vasari and late 16th-century theorists. McHam charts the historiography of Latin and Italian manuscripts and early printed copies of the Natural History to trace the dissemination of its contents to artists from Donatello and Ghiberti to Michelangelo and Titian. Meanwhile, benefactors commissioned works intended to emulate the prototypes Pliny described, aligning themselves with the great patrons of antiquity. This is a richly illustrated, comprehensive reference work of social history, myth making, iconography, theory, and criticism.


The Intellectual Education of the Italian Renaissance Artist

The Intellectual Education of the Italian Renaissance Artist

Author: Angela Dressen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-02

Total Pages: 731

ISBN-13: 1108918328

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Scholars have traditionally viewed the Italian Renaissance artist as a gifted, but poorly educated craftsman whose complex and demanding works were created with the assistance of a more educated advisor. These assumptions are, in part, based on research that has focused primarily on the artist's social rank and workshop training. In this volume, Angela Dressen explores the range of educational opportunities that were available to the Italian Renaissance artist. Considering artistic formation within the history of education, Dressen focuses on the training of highly skilled, average artists, revealing a general level of learning that was much more substantial than has been assumed. She emphasizes the role of mediators who had a particular interest in augmenting artists' knowledge, and highlights how artists used Latin and vernacular texts to gain additional knowledge that they avidly sought. Dressen's volume brings new insights into a topic at the intersection of early modern intellectual, educational, and art history.


Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Author: Denise Allen

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Published: 2022-06-15

Total Pages: 571

ISBN-13: 1588397106

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he revival of the bronze statuette popular in classical antiquity stands out as an enduring achievement of the Italian Renaissance. These small sculptures attest to early modern artists' technical prowess, ingenuity, and desire to emulate—or even surpass—the ancients. From the studioli, or private studies, of humanist scholars in fifteenth-century Padua to the Fifth Avenue apartments of Gilded Age collectors, viewers have delighted in the mysteries of these objects: how they were made, what they depicted, who made them, and when. This catalogue is the first systematic study of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collection of Italian bronzes. The collection includes statuettes of single mythological or religious figures, complex figural groups, portrait busts, reliefs, utilitarian objects like lamps and inkwells, and more. Stunning new photography of celebrated masterpieces by leading artists such as Antico, Riccio, and Giambologna; enigmatic bronzes that continue to perplex; quotidian objects; later casts; replicas; and even forgeries show the importance of each work in this complex field. International scholars provide in-depth discussions of 200 objects included in this volume, revealing new attributions and dating for many bronzes. An Appendix presents some 100 more complete with provenance and references. An essay by Jeffrey Fraiman provides further insight into Italian bronze statuettes in America with a focus on the history of The Met's collection, and Richard E. Stone, who pioneered the technical study of bronzes, contributes an indispensable text on how artists created these works and what their process conveys about the object's maker. A personal reminiscence by James David Draper, who oversaw the Italian sculpture collection for decades, rounds out this landmark catalogue that synthesizes decades of research on these beloved and complex works of art.


Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture

Pliny the Elder and the Emergence of Renaissance Architecture

Author: Peter Fane-Saunders

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-07-12

Total Pages: 525

ISBN-13: 1316419096

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The Naturalis historia by Pliny the Elder provided Renaissance scholars, artists and architects with details of ancient architectural practice and long-lost architectural wonders - material that was often unavailable elsewhere in classical literature. Pliny's descriptions frequently included the dimensions of these buildings, as well as details of their unusual construction materials and ornament. This book describes, for the first time, how the passages were interpreted from around 1430 to 1580, that is, from Alberti to Palladio. Chapters are arranged chronologically within three interrelated sections - antiquarianism; architectural writings; drawings and built monuments - thereby making it possible for the reader to follow the changing attitudes to Pliny over the period. The resulting study establishes the Naturalis historia as the single most important literary source after Vitruvius's De architectura.


"Faith, Gender and the Senses in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art "

Author: ErinE. Benay

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1351567276

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Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ?s post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.


Renaissance Papers 2016

Renaissance Papers 2016

Author: Jim Pearce

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2017-01-11

Total Pages: 142

ISBN-13: 1571139796

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Annual volume of the best essays submitted to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, this year with an emphasis on Shakespeare, reading practices, and the visual arts. Renaissance Papers collects the best scholarly essays submitted each year to the Southeastern Renaissance Conference. The 2016 volume features essays from the conference held at Wake Forest University, as well as essays submitted directly to the journal. The first essay looks at early modern reading practices in the Durham Folio and the prayer book of Lady Jane Grey. The interest in reading practices resurfaces in the next essay on the importance ofreading in the artistic life of Velasquez. The majority of the contributions address the plays of Shakespeare: one essay reflects on the way in which collaboration between audience and actors creates the theatrical experience ofA Midsummer Night's Dream; another proposes a new chronology in Measure for Measure; next is an essay on space and globalism in Antony and Cleopatra; and the last offering in this section looks at rhetoric andits subversions in King Lear. These are followed by an essay on class antagonism and murderous antifeminism in The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duchess of Malfi. The volume concludes with an essay that examinesthe contrasting prologues of parts one and two of Don Quixote. Contributors: Bernadine Barnes, Harry Berger Jr., Geraldo U. de Sousa, Nathan Dixon, Emily Donahoe, Lisandra Estevez, Deneen M. Sensai, Emily Stockard, and John Wall. The journal is edited by Jim Pearce of North Carolina Central University and Ward Risvold of the University of Georgia.


Material World

Material World

Author: Guy Hedreen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-05-31

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 900446137X

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Scholars from ancient and early modern studies, art history, literary criticism, philosophy, and the history of science explore the interplay between nature, science, and art in influential ancient texts and their reception in the Renaissance.


Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy

Making and Moving Sculpture in Early Modern Italy

Author: KelleyHelmstutler DiDio

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1351559516

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In recent years, art historians have begun to delve into the patronage, production and reception of sculptures-sculptors' workshop practices; practical, aesthetic, and esoteric considerations of material and materiality; and the meanings associated with materials and the makers of sculptures. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors in early modern Italy confronted such challenges as procurement of materials, their costs, shipping and transportation issues, and technical problems of materials, along with the meanings of the usage, hierarchies of materials, and processes of material acquisition and production. Contributors also explore the implications of these facets in terms of the intended and perceived meaning(s) for the viewer, patron, and/or artist. A highlight of the collection is the epilogue, an interview with a contemporary artist of large-scale stone sculpture, which reveals the similar challenges sculptors still encounter today as they procure, manufacture and transport their works.


Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction

Handbook of Autobiography / Autofiction

Author: Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 2198

ISBN-13: 3110279819

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Autobiographical writings have been a major cultural genre from antiquity to the present time. General questions of the literary as, e.g., the relation between literature and reality, truth and fiction, the dependency of author, narrator, and figure, or issues of individual and cultural styles etc., can be studied preeminently in the autobiographical genre. Yet, the tradition of life-writing has, in the course of literary history, developed manifold types and forms. Especially in the globalized age, where the media and other technological / cultural factors contribute to a rapid transformation of lifestyles, autobiographical writing has maintained, even enhanced, its popularity and importance. By conceiving autobiography in a wide sense that includes memoirs, diaries, self-portraits and autofiction as well as media transformations of the genre, this three-volume handbook offers a comprehensive survey of theoretical approaches, systematic aspects, and historical developments in an international and interdisciplinary perspective. While autobiography is usually considered to be a European tradition, special emphasis is placed on the modes of self-representation in non-Western cultures and on inter- and transcultural perspectives of the genre. The individual contributions are closely interconnected by a system of cross-references. The handbook addresses scholars of cultural and literary studies, students as well as non-academic readers.


Handbook of Greek Sculpture

Handbook of Greek Sculpture

Author: Olga Palagia

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-07-22

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 1614513538

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The Handbook of Greek Sculpture aims to provide a detailed examination of current research and directions in the field. Bringing together an international cast of contributors from Greece, Italy, France, Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, the volume incorporates new areas of research, such as the sculptures of Messene and Macedonia, sculpture in Roman Greece, and the contribution of Greek sculptors in Rome, as well as important aspects of Greek sculpture like techniques and patronage. The written sources (literary and epigraphical) are explored in dedicated chapters, as are function and iconography and the reception of Greek sculpture in modern Europe. Inspired by recent exhibitions on Lysippos and Praxiteles, the book also revisits the style and the personal contributions of the great masters.