Five essays that Manca (Rice U.) hopes will encourage readers to see Italian art of the 16th century through the prism of classical ethics, which contrasts not good and evil, but well-being and unhappiness. They fall somewhere between art criticism, art history, historiography, and philosophy and draw on themes from 18th-century art criticism and 19th-century philosophy. There are 119 monochrome reproductions. c. Book News Inc.
Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.
"A study based on the text, the Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari. Discusses how the visual arts in the Renaissance were an occasion for delight or pleasure. Argues that such an attention was encouraged by certain social and intellectual practices"--Provided by publisher.
The perception that the early sixteenth century saw a culmination of the Renaissance classical revival - only to degrade into mannerism shortly after Raphael's death in 1520 - has been extremely tenacious; but many scholars agree that this tidy narrative is deeply problematic. Exploring how we can reconceptualize the High Renaissance in a way that reflects how we research and teach today, this volume complicates and deepens our understanding of artistic change. Focusing on Rome, the paradigmatic centre of the High Renaissance narrative, each essay presents a case study of a particular aspect of the culture of the city in the early sixteenth century, including new analyses of Raphael's stanze, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and the architectural designs of Bramante. The contributors question notions of periodization, reconsider the Renaissance relationship with classical antiquity, and ultimately reconfigure our understanding of 'high Renaissance style'.
To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.
The fourteen essays in this collection explore the dominance of patronage in Renaissance politics, religion, theatre, and artistic life. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Pater's first major work, a study of kindred spirits in love of beauty. Criticized as a "demoralizing moralizer".--Jim Kepner ; Oscar Wilde's favorite book by Pater (Greif, p. 157) ; Includes essays on Pico della Mirandola, Michelangelo, da Vinci and Winckelmann.
This important and beautiful book accompanies the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum's spectacular new Medieval and Renaissance galleries. Among the textiles, paintings, sculpture, glass, metalwork, prints, manuscripts, furniture, ceramics and jewelry featured here are such renowned treasures as the Devonshire tapestries, the Leonardo Notebooks, Donatellos Ascension relief, the reliquary casket of St. Thomas Becket, and many more astonishing works. Organized thematically, the book explores the social contexts responsible for these captivating objects, both commonplace and precious, recovering the attitudes of makers and owners of the time toward artistic practice. Rather than adopting the traditional sharp distinction between the Medieval and Renaissance, the authors explore aspects of the whole of this long period in European design and manufacture: an approach that emphasizes the continuities and gradual developments that were often as significant as sudden upheaval. A general historical introduction to the social and political background is followed by chapters that explore concepts of art, workshops, and sales, the classical past, ornament, religious art, health and body, and the ways in which objects themselves express the attitudes of their owners.
'their excellence and their value consisted in being the observations of a strong mind operating upon life; and in consequence you find what you seldom find in other books.' Samuel Johnson Celebrated today as a writer and scientist, Francis Bacon was for the most part of his life occupied with the law and public affairs at a high level. Although personally devastating, his fall from public office in 1621 nonetheless served to liberate him for his own work and the last five years ofhis life saw an enormous output in the most varied fields. It is to this period that we owe the last and most popular work published in his lifetime, the Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral (1625) Focusing on the ethical, political and historical constraints and influences on human behaviour andfollowing principles laid down by rhetorical theory, Bacon sought to systematize his observations on such diverse topics as beauty, deformity, fortune, adversity, ambition, friendship, truth, marriage, atheism and superstition. Persuasive and diagnostic, his Essays are valued for many reasons, notleast their combination of a dispassionate observation of human life with powerfully expressed moral judgements. This edition is based on the Oxford Authors series complete with notes on Bacon's rich vocabulary and substantial annotation.
