Books in the Visual Culture in Early Modernity series

A new interest in the study of early modern ritual, ceremony, formations of personal and collective identities, social roles, and the production of meaning inside and outside the arts have made it possible to talk today about a performative turn in the humanities. In Performativity and Performance in Baroque Rome, scholars from different fields of research explore performative aspects of Baroque culture. With examples from the politics of diplomacy and everyday life, from theatre, music and ritual as well as from architecture, painting and sculpture the contributors demonstrate how broadly the concept of performativity has been adopted within different disciplines.

Exploring how we can reconceptualise the High Renaissance in a way that reflects how we research and teach today, this volume proposes new approaches to the art of the period. Contributors focus on Rome, the paradigmatic centre of the High Renaissance narrative, as they question notions of periodisation, reconsider the Renaissance relationship with classical antiquity, and ultimately reconfigure our understanding of 'high Renaissance style'.

Concentrating largely on the ''middle ranks'' of society in Renaissance Italy - artisans, merchants, and professionals such as bankers and lawyers - this book focuses on new social subjects, new documents and unusual objects. Using innovative methods of inquiry and interdisciplinary analytical tools, contributors explore a little-known but pervasive erotic culture in which sexually explicit artefacts, games and gestures were considered essential to a number of rituals and social occasions. At the same time, they demonstrate how a burgeoning market for erotica, along with a cultural tradition of allusion and innuendo, played an increasingly important role in the Italian peninsula between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This volume fills some pervasive lacunae in both Renaissance studies and the history of sexuality through a series of critical engagements with material culture and social custom. It reflects recent scholarly interest in interdisciplinary areas such as the material Renaissance, visual communications, urban sociability in the domestic context, and court records regarding marital disputes.

This book encourages the rethinking of collecting not as an elite, often aristocratic pursuit, but rather as a vital activity that has engaged many different groups within society.

Reviewers of a recent exhibition termed Federico Barocci (ca. 1533-1612), 'the greatest artist you've never heard of'. The central purpose of this volume is to accord this artist, the dates of whose career fall between the traditional Renaissance and Baroque periods, the critical attention he deserves. Employing a range of methodologies, the essays offer new insights into Barocci's work.

This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective, but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind.

As this collection makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of Caravaggio's art are multiple and variable. Offering new or recently updated interpretations of the works of Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti, this book deals with all the major aspects of Caravaggio's paintings: technique, creative process, religious context.

Adopting a broad chronological framework and expanding the regional scope beyond Florence and Venice to include domestic interiors from less studied centers such as Urbino, Ferrara, and Bologna, this collection offers new perspectives on the home in early modern Italy.

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'.

Addresses the impact of religious tensions on art, design, and architecture in the early modern world. This title examines famous works of art such as Kraft's "Eucharistic Tabernacle", the less-studied objects, including church plate and vestments, stained glass, graffiti, and Mexican images of St Anne.

Investigating the complex interactions between devotional imagery and Church doctrine in the Low Countries during the fifteenth century, this book demonstrates how the pictorial arts intersected with popular religious practice. It features the conceptual frameworks underlying the use and production of religious art in this 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.