The Renaissance studiolo was a space devoted in theory to private reading. The most famous studiolo of all was that of Isabella d'Este, marchioness of Mantua. This work explores the function of the mythological image within a Renaissance culture of collectors.
Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1435–1516), widely considered the greatest Venetian artist of his time, was born into the most influential artistic family in Venice. He received his training in the studio of his father, Jacopo, along with his brother, Gentile, and through a long and fruitful career played a leading role in defining the Renaissance style in Venice. His workshop, one of the most important of the period, counted Giorgione and Titian among its pupils. The first account of his life, by Giorgio Vasari, also portrays the family artistic enterprise; it appeared in Vasari’s seminal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in 1550 and revised and expanded in 1568. A century later Carlo Ridolfi, who sought to rectify Vasari’s emphasis on Florentine painters, provides a fuller portrayal of Bellini in his 1648 work The Marvels of Art, or the Lives of the Famous Painters of Venice and Its State. These two narratives are complemented in this book by Marco Boschini’s poetic homage to the artist and by correspondence between the renowned Renaissance patron of the arts Isabella d'Este, Bellini, and others regarding the commission of a painting for her celebrated studiolo in Mantua. Ridolfi’s biography, Boschini’s poem, and the Isabella d’Este correspondence appear here in English for the first time. Full-page color illustrations throughout the book represent the full sweep of Bellini’s career.
Isabella d’Este (Ferrara 1474 – Mantua 1539) was already defined in her lifetime as “The first lady of the world”, and emains today one of the most brilliant characters of the Italian Renaissance. The first-born daughter of Duke Ercole of Ferrara and Eleonora of Aragon, at only six years of age was betrothed to Francesco II Gonzaga, heir of the Lords of Mantua. At sixteen, when she arrived in Mantua, she created one of the most culturally refined courts of the Renaissance. Driven by her insatiable desire for all things of antiquity, she collected in her Studiolo a precious assortment of classical artifacts. Fully aware of her extraordinary virtues, both physical and intellectual, she trusted the most illustrious artist of her time to represent her, and was portrayed by both Leonardo da Vinci and Titian – a privilege ot bestowed upon any king, Pope, or Emperor. A demanding and discerning patron, she entrusted Andrea Mantegna, Lorenzo Costa, Pietro Perugino and Correggio to create a cycle of paintings forher Studiolo. As a refined trend-setter, she formed the fashion of her time according to her own tastes, and became a point of reference not only for all of the Italian courts, but also for aristocrats throughout Europe. From her astrological chart and emblems to her portraits and the canvases created specifically for her Studiolo, this book contains several clear and original perspectives that highlight and better define the profile of Isabella. Here we have a new view of a Renaissance woman.
Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Andrea Odoni is one of the most famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Son of an immigrant and a member of the non-noble citizen class, Odoni understood how the power of art could make a name for himself and his family in his adopted homeland. Far from emulating Venetian patricians, however, he set himself apart through the works he collected and the way he displayed them. In this book, Monika Schmitter imaginatively reconstructs Odoni's house – essentially a 'portrait' of Odoni through his surroundings and possessions. Schmitter's detailed analysis of Odoni's life and portrait reveals how sixteenth-century individuals drew on contemporary ideas about spirituality, history, and science to forge their own theories about the power of things and the agency of object. She shows how Lotto's painting served as a meta-commentary on the practice of collecting and on the ability of material things to transform the self.
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 gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.
This highly original book opens up the almost entirely neglected area of the black African presence in Western Europe during the Renaissance. Covering history, literature, art history and anthropology, it investigates a whole range of black African experience and representation across Renaissance Europe, from various types of slavery to black musicians and dancers, from real and symbolic Africans at court to the views of the Catholic Church, and from writers of African descent to Black African criminality. Their findings demonstrate the variety and complexity of black African life in fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe, and how it was affected by firmly held preconceptions relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, reinforced by Renaissance ideas and conditions. Of enormous importance both for European and American history, this book mixes empirical material and theoretical approaches, and addresses such issues as stereotypes, changing black African identity, and cultural representation in art and literature.
"Although most of Mantua's artistic treasures were sold or claimed as war spoils upon the decline of the Gonzaga family, the rich cultural legacy of this fascinating city lives on in the city's many surviving frescoes and in the collections of some of the world's premier museums These priceless works of art are reunited in the pages of this beautifully illustrated volume."--BOOK JACKET.