Books in the Visual Culture in Early Modernity series

Exploring the rich variety of pictorial rhetoric in early modern northern European genre images, this volume deepens our understanding of genre''s place in early modern visual culture. From 1500 to 1700, artists in northern Europe pioneered the category of pictures now known as genre, portrayals of people in ostensibly quotidian situations. Critical approaches to genre images have moved past the antiquated notion that they portray uncomplicated ''slices of life,'' describing them instead as heavily encoded pictorial essays, laden with symbols that only the most erudite contemporary viewers and modern iconographers could fully comprehend. These essays challenge that limiting binary, revealing a more expansive array of accessible meanings in genre''s deft grafting of everyday scenarios with a rich complex of experiential, cultural, political, and religious references. Authors deploy a variety of approaches to detail genre''s multivalent relations to older, more established pictorial and literary categories, the interplay between the meaning of the everyday and its translation into images, and the multifaceted concerns genre addressed for its rapidly expanding, unprecedentedly diverse audience.

Argues that Diego Velazquez painted two of his most famous works, "The Spinners" and "Las Meninas", as theoretically informed manifestos of painterly brushwork. This book also argues that the two paintings form a learned retort to the prevailing critical disdain for the painterly.

The early modern period saw the proliferation of religious, public and charitable institutions and the emergence of new educational structures. This collection provides fresh insights into the domestic experience of men, women and children who lived in non-family arrangements, expanding and problematizing the notion of 'domestic interior'.

Demonstrates that Bellini's and Titian's famous series of mytho-poetical paintings for the camerino of Duke Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, and Francesco Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" - were conceived as mnemonic or pedagogical devices aimed at educating the reader in the medical science of reproductive physiology.

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects and painted ceramic jars. In this way, the volume presents an entirely new picture of Renaissance sexuality, stripping away layers of misconceptions and manipulations to reveal an often-misunderstood world. ''Sex acts'' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one''s (or another''s) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.

During the early modern period, visual imagery was put to ever new uses as many disciplines adopted visual criteria for testing truth claims, representing knowledge, or conveying information. Religious propagandists, political writers, satirists, cartographers, the scientific community, and others experimented with new uses of visual images. Artists, writers, preachers, musicians, and performers, among others, often employed visual images or conjured mental images to connect with their audiences. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection creatively explore how the exponential growth in images, especially prints, impacted the intellectual horizons and the visual awareness of viewers in early modern Germany. Each of the chapters serves as a case study for one or more of the volumeΓÇÖs sub-themes: art, visual literacy, and strategies of presentation; audience and the art of persuasion; the art of envisioning; the ephemeral arts and theatricality; the built environment and spatial settings; and the history of the visual.

Interdisciplinary in scope, this book constitutes the first overview of the development of early modern papal funeral apparati, the temporary decorations used during the funeral masses in St Peter's. Drawing from a range of unpublished sources.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that Pieter Bruegel the Elder eschewed Italianate influences, this title demonstrates how the artist's later peasant paintings reveal a complicated artistic dialogue in which visual concepts and pictorial motifs from Italian and classical ideas are employed for a specifically Northern phenomenon.

Shedding light on the relatively unknown art of the Wittelsbach dukes' sixteenth-century court, this is a monograph to focus on this Italian-trained Netherlandish artist. It incorporates original archival material, including letters and payment records into the analysis of Sustris' many projects that ranged from large fresco cycles.

Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine, and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. It foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities.

The Spectacle of Clouds examines the different ways Heaven has been conceived and represented from the 15th to the 17th century, crossing over into the fields of history, religion and philosophy. By examining visual sources such as paintings, frescos and stage designs, together with letters, guild-ledgers.

Reveals Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici's impact on the visual world of her time. This is a full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman's contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. It maps out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi's painting was originally embedded.

Structured around the interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers.

During the early modern period, visual imagery was put to ever new uses as many disciplines adopted visual criteria for testing truth claims, representing knowledge, or conveying information. Religious propagandists, political writers, satirists, cartographers, the scientific community, and others experimented with uses of visual images. Artists.

The late Renaissance sculptor Leone Leoni (1509-1590) came from modest beginnings, but died as a nobleman and knight with a house and art collection envied by the nobility. This book focuses on Leoni's background and character, and on unknown aspects of his career, his social position in Milan, and the contents of his impressive art collection.

Focuses on sacred art and Catholicism in Rome during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This study addresses the responses of members of all social classes - not just elites - to art created for the public. It also provides a view of the range of religious ideas that circulated in early modern Rome.

Explores performative aspects of Baroque culture, giving examples from the politics of diplomacy and everyday life, from theatre, music and ritual as well as from architecture, painting and sculpture. This title demonstrates how broadly the concept of performativity has been adopted among scholars of different disciplines.

Tracing the history of St Antoninus' cult and burial from the time of his death in 1459 until his remains were moved to their final resting place in 1589, this study demonstrates that the saint's relic cult was a key element of Florence's sacred cityscape.

Focusing on Rome, the paradigmatic centre of the High Renaissance narrative, this title features essays that present 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.

Examines Giorgio Vasari's interest, as an art historian and as an artist, in engravings and woodblock prints, focusing not only on aspects of Vasari's career, but also on aspects of sixteenth-century artistic culture and artistic practice.

Includes essays that address issues surrounding the use, dissemination, and reception of copies and even deliberate forgeries within the history of art, focusing on paintings, prints and sculptures created and sold from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century.

Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, the author nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings: "Crowning with Thorns", the "Crucifixion", "Doubting Thomas" and the "Calling of Matthew".

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters - Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz de Heem, this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form.

Examining their production practices in various genres including manuscript illustration, glass painting and staining, tapestry manufacture, portrait painting, and engraving, this book explores how Netherlandish artists migrating to England in the early modern period overcame difficulties raised by their outsider status.

Interested in the ways in which medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers, and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, this collection includes essays that explore the concept of beholding and the experiences of individual and collective beholders of violence during the period.

Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, this volume explores the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual.