The first book to be dedicated to the topic, Patronage and Italian Renaissance Sculpture reappraises the creative and intellectual roles of sculptor and patron. The volume surveys artistic production from the Trecento to the Cinquecento in Rome, Pisa, Florence, Bologna, and Venice. Using a broad range of approaches, the essayists question the traditional concept of authorship in Italian Renaissance sculpture, setting each work of art firmly into a complex socio-historical context. Emphasizing the role of the patron, the collection re-assesses the artistic production of such luminaries as Michelangelo, Donatello, and Giambologna, as well as lesser-known sculptors. Contributors shed new light on the collaborations that shaped Renaissance sculpture and its reception.
'In a subject of this magnitude, the author's coverage is impeccable ... Patronage in Renaissance Italy is an absolute must.' - The Art Book A perfect read for art historians and their students and for lovers of Renaissance art and civilization. In this first comprehensive study of patrons in the Italian quattrocento, Mary Hollingsworth shows how the patron - rather than the artist - carefully controlled both subject and medium in artistic creation. In a competitive and violent age, she explains, image and ostentation were essential statements of the patron's power. As a result, perceived cost became more important than artistic quality (and buildings, bronze, or tapestry were considered more eloquent statements than cheaper marble or fresco). Since Christian teaching frowned on wealth and power, money also had to be spent on religious endowments made in expiation. But here too the patron was in control, and used the arts and other means to express religious belief, not aesthetic sensibility. Artists in the early Renaissance were employed as craftsmen, Hollingsworth concludes, and only late in the century did their relations with patrons start to adopt a pattern we might recognize today. Praise for Mary Hollingsworth: 'Many readers, specialists and non-specialists alike, will welcome this book as a reliable and straightforward introduction to an important and interesting subject' - Literary Review 'She writes authoritatively, drawing on a vast store of knowledge' - Frances Spalding, The Sunday Times 'A thorough, readable and skilfully crafted survey' - Burlington Magazine 'This book will be of interest to anyone who looks at art in fifteenth-century Italy [and] will be particularly salutary for anyone who teaches or studies art history.' - Apollo Mary Hollingsworth is an academic and an expert in Renaissance art and architecture. Her published works include The Medici, The Borgias, and The Cardinal's Hat.
An analysis of Italian Renaissance art from the perspective of the patrons who made 'conspicuous commissions', this text builds on three concepts from the economics of information - signaling, signposting, and stretching - to develop a systematic methodology for assessing the meaning of patronage.
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.
To demonstrate that Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua (1474-1539) was not the only woman patron of art during the period, and to balance the recent focus on religious women's patronage, US art historians and medievalists consider women patron's relationships with other women and men, including kinsmen and the artists and architects whose work they commissioned; what social classes they belong to; how they were able to finance the undertakings they sponsored; and other matters. The many photographs and reproductions are in black and white. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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.
Shrewd and ruthless, the Pucci were Medici loyalists whose political and cultural alignment with the most powerful family in Renaissance Florence was rewarded with wealth and influence. The Pucci family's martial support for the Medici in the ugly business of ruling Tuscany drove their transformation from a clan of minor guildsmen to a noble dynasty with three cardinals to its name. Over the next centuries, they showcased their exalted status with art and architecture that mirrored Medici tastes and reflected the values of civic humanism. The political and religious turmoil of the High Renaissance is writ large in this vivid portrait of the Pucci cardinals and their artistic patronage, a cultural biography inflected by the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, the Sack of Rome, the Reformation, and the occupation of Italy by Emperor Charles V. New archival evidence documents the chapels, palaces, and villas that were built, expanded, and decorated by the Pucci family in Rome, Tuscany, and Umbria. These celebrated projects were carried out by luminaries of Renaissance art and architecture: Michelozzo, the Pollaiuolo brothers, the Sangallo family, Baccio d'Agnolo, the Montelupo workshop, and others. A remarkable body of inventories reveals how the family's trials and tribulations shaped the fate of their estates and illustrates the role luxury goods played in the social ambitions of this newly-arrived family. Finally, a previously unknown catalogue of Palazzo Pucci tells the tale of the nineteenth-century dispersal of the family's priceless Renaissance artworks, a collection that once paralleled the splendor of the Medici court.
Vasari's celebration of the art of the central Italian cities of Florence, Rome and Venice, has long left in shadow the art of northern Italy. The economic and historical decline of the region compounded this effect with the dispersal of the treasures of the Farnese to Naples, the Este to Dresden and the Gonzaga to Madrid and Paris. Each chapter in this volume celebrates a stunning work from the region, among them Correggio's famed Camera di San Paolo in Parma, Parmigianino's Camerino in the Rocca Sanvitale near Parma, the studiolo of Alberto Pio at Carpi, and the Tomb of the Ancestors in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. The volume as a whole offers fascinating insights into the tussle between the maniera moderna and the maniera devota in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the unity between the elegance and beauty of art and its religious significance came under debate. Around the year 1550, when Michelangelo's Last Judgement came under attack for impiety and lasciviousness and the reformists called for an art that would invoke in the viewer a devotional response that identified manifestations of the divine with human feelings and emotions. In northern Italy, it was on the foundation laid by Correggio, with his tenderness and ability to evoke the softness of living flesh, that the Carracci brothers built their reform of painting.
