Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, on which construction began in 1560, houses such masterpieces as Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, as well as works by Bronzino, Caravaggio, Titian, and Rubens. Connected to the Pitti Palace by a corridor designed by Vasari that crosses the Arno River, the Uffizi Gallery is a one-of-a-kind museum. This gorgeous oversize book showcases the extraordinary collection, and Alexandra Bonfante-Warren provides fascinating context by relating the story of the museum’s construction and complex history.
This magnificent gathering of more than 800 exemplary paintings from one of the world's greatest collections of European art has been lovingly reproduced in lavish full color. Over 800 color plates. Boxed.
La Galleria degli Uffizi è uno dei musei più importanti del mondo. Il nucleo principale delle sue ricchissime collezioni comprende opere che vanno dal Duecento al Settecento; in particolare è lo specchio fedele di uno dei momenti più alti dell'arte di tutti i tempi: il Rinascimento. Tra i principali artisti rappresentati ci sono Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raffaello, Pontormo, Tiziano, Caravaggio. Le sezioni del volume: Le origini; Genealogia della famiglia Medici; Le Collezioni Medicee; Il Duecento e il Trecento; Il Quattrocento; Il Rinascimento nel Nord Europa; Il Cinquecento; Il Seicento e il Settecento; Biografie; Artisti e opere. Catalogo completo; Indice dei nomi citati.
Arguably the quintessential work of the High Renaissance in Venice, Titian's Venus of Urbino also represents one of the major themes of western art: the female nude. But how did Titian intend this work to be received? Is she Venus, as the popular title - a modern invention - implies; or is she merely a courtesan? This book tackles this and other questions in six essays by European and American art historians. Examining the work within the context of Renaissance art theory, as well as the psychology and society of sixteenth-century Italy, and even in relation to Manet's nineteenth-century 'translation' of the work, their observations begin and end with the painting itself, and with appreciation of Titian's great achievement in creating this archetypal image of feminine beauty.
Giorgio Vasari, Florentine painter and architect, friend of Michelangelo and intimate of the Medici, is best known for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1550 and in an enlarged edition in 1568. With more than two hundred biographies, it has for centuries been recognized as a seminal text in art history and one of the most important sources on the Italian Renaissance. It is to Vasari that we owe much of our knowledge of Raphael (1483–1520), who in his day was considered perhaps the greatest painter of all time. Rich in colorful anecdotes, The Life of Raphael is important for its sustained attention to the range of Raphael’s art, whose chronology and development Vasari describes in detail, together with the painter’s ample love life and spectacular social career. It also pays attention, unprecedented for its time, to theoretical issues. This edition, introduced by the scholar Jill Burke, includes thirty pages of color illustrations covering the entire span of Raphael’s oeuvre.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the first modern, public museums of art—civic, state, or national—appeared throughout Europe, setting a standard for the nature of such institutions that has made its influence felt to the present day. Although the emergence of these museums was an international development, their shared history has not been systematically explored until now. Taking up that project, this volume includes chapters on fifteen of the earliest and still major examples, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome, opened in 1734, to the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, opened in 1836. These essays consider a number of issues, such as the nature, display, and growth of the museums’ collections and the role of the institutions in educating the public. The introductory chapters by art historian Carole Paul, the volume’s editor, lay out the relationship among the various museums and discuss their evolution from private noble and royal collections to public institutions. In concert, the accounts of the individual museums give a comprehensive overview, providing a basis for understanding how the collective emergence of public art museums is indicative of the cultural, social, and political shifts that mark the transformation from the early-modern to the modern world. The fourteen distinguished contributors to the book include Robert G. W. Anderson, former director of the British Museum in London; Paula Findlen, Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University; Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute; and Andrew McClellan, dean of academic affairs and professor of art history at Tufts University. Show more Show less
This is the first monograph in English published on the successful Bolognese seventeenth-century artist Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665). Modesti presents Sirani as a 'subject of her own genre', underlining the painter's innovative qualities, not only in artistic terms, but also from a socio-political and historical perspective. The author's discussion of the material context of women's artistic production and of the Bolognese seventeenth-century cultural world evidences how Sirani epitomized a new model of 'femininity' and a new rising social genre: the single professional woman. Having been rightly admitted to an artistic, social, and cultural world historically dominated by men, Sirani was an unmarried woman who chose a productive and rewarding career over the traditional role of wife and mother. An 'ultramodern artist', deemed by her contemporaries to be extremely talented and inventive, Sirani affirmed her professional status within a mostly male world thanks to her extraordinary cultural learning and virtuoso artistic skills, as well as the clever management of her public image and success. Being a woman was not a hindrance to Sirani, but rather a positive element: by projecting her own image and identity onto the femme fortes of ancient history, and by inviting important guests to her studio so as to observe her painting, she organized her own 'public exhibition', thus becoming both the subject and the object of her own art. Modesti underscores Sirani's momentous role in the professionalization of Italian women's cultural production and artistic practice at the beginning of the modern era and highlights Sirani's role as an example for successive generations of professional women artists.
