Artistic Circulation between Early Modern Spain and Italy


Book Description

This collection of essays by major scholars in the field explores how the rich intersections between Italy and Spain during the early modern period resulted in a confluence of cultural ideals. Various means of exchange and convergence are explored through two main catalysts: humans—their trips or resettlements—and objects—such as books, paintings, sculptures, and prints. The visual and textual evidence of the transmission of ideas, iconographies and styles are examined, such as triumphal ephemera, treatises on painting, the social status of the artist, collections and their display, church decoration, and funerary monuments, providing a more nuanced understanding of the exchanges of styles, forms and ideals across southern Europe.




The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture


Book Description

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.




Hybridity in Early Modern Art


Book Description

This collection of essays explores hybridity in early modern art through two primary lenses: hybrid media and hybrid time. The varied approaches in the volume to theories of hybridity reflect the increased presence in art historical scholarship of interdisciplinary frameworks that extend art historical inquiry beyond the single time or material. The essays engage with what happens when an object is considered beyond the point of origin or as a legend of information, the implications of the juxtaposition of disparate media, how the meaning of an object alters over time, and what the conspicuous use of out-of-date styles means for the patron, artist, and/or viewer. Essays examine both canonical and lesser-known works produced by European artists in Italy, northern Europe, and colonial Peru, ca. 1400–1600. The book will be of interest to art historians, visual culture historians, and early modern historians.




The Making of Juana of Austria


Book Description

Edited by art historian Noelia García Pérez, this first-ever collection of essays on Juana of Austria, the younger daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and sister to Philip II of Spain, offers an interdisciplinary study of the Habsburg princess that addresses her political, religious, and artistic dimensions. The volume’s contextual framework shows her sharing agency with other women of her dynastic family who governed in the sixteenth century and developed an outstanding reputation for promoting artists and works of art. The Making of Juana of Austria demonstrates how Juana’s role as a leading patron of the arts offered her a means of creating her own image, which she then promulgated through the objects she collected and her crowning architectural endeavor, the Monastery-Palace of the Descalzas Reales. Drawing on early modern literature, archival documents, and artworks, the essays in this volume delineate a new portrait of Juana of Austria. Contributors not only highlight her multiple facets—princess of Portugal, regent of Castile, and the only female Jesuit in history—but also show her as a discerning art patron and collector who pursued an active role of patronage, through which she constructed her own art collection and used it to articulate a visual statement of her lineage, power, and religious convictions. Her role as an art promoter culminated with the foundation of the Descalzas Reales and the works of art she collected and displayed within its walls. The Making of Juana of Austria offers a new perspective on female rule and patronage, exploring the achievements of a crucial figure in the history of art, court, and gender in early modern Europe.




The Procaccini and the Business of Painting in Early Modern Milan


Book Description

The book investigates the lives and careers of the Procaccini brothers: Camillo (1561–1629), Carlo Antonio (1571–1631) and Giulio Cesare (1574–1625), the most important family of painters working in northern Italy at the start of the seventeenth century. The Procaccinis' work is here analysed by interconnecting their individual stories and understanding their success as the combination of mutual artistic choices, a high level of specialization and precise business organization. The book looks at this family of painters as entrepreneurs, emphasizing their conscious response to the requests of public and private patrons, as well as their ability to balance instances of originality and imitation in an era characterized by a wide range of artistic opportunities, including religious commissions, national and international patronage and multifaceted markets. This book will be of interest to scholars studying art history, early modern studies, the art market, Italian studies and Italian history.




Women’s Patronage and Gendered Cultural Networks in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

This book examines the sociocultural networks between the courts of early modern Italy and Europe, focusing on the Florentine Medici court, and the cultural patronage and international gendered networks developed by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere. Adelina Modesti uses Grand Duchess Vittoria as an exemplar of pan-European 'matronage' and proposes a new matrilineal model of patronage in the early modern period, one in which women become not only the mediators but also the architects of public taste and the transmitters of cultural capital. The book will be the first comprehensive monographic study of this important cultural figure. This study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, Renaissance studies and seventeenth-century Italy.




A Patron Family Between Renaissance Florence, Rome, and Naples


Book Description

This book tells the story of the Del Riccio family in Florence in the early modern period, investigating the cultural mediations fostered by the family between Florence, Rome, and Naples, as well as shedding light on the intellectual and social exchanges between different regions of Italy and on the creation of foreign nations within the main Italian cities. These social and cultural dimensions are further explored through the study of the obsessive persistence of the family’s relationship with Michelangelo Buonarroti, exhibited both publicly, in the Florentine and Neapolitan family chapels, and privately in their homes. The main achievement of this study is to move the focus from the ruling power, the Medici family and the immediate members of their court, to a Florentine middle-class family and its social mobility: this shift from the conventional narrative to a distributed microhistory is fundamental to better assess the use of images and artworks in early modern Florence and abroad. The aesthetic and stylistic choices in the use of art and art display made by the Del Riccio reveal a deep awareness of the substantial differences in taste and meaning between different cities of the Italian peninsula. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and Renaissance studies.




Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico


Book Description

This book investigates the Casa de Montejo and considers the role of the building’s Plateresque façade as a form of visual rhetoric that conveyed ideas about the individual and communal cultural identities in sixteenth-century Yucatán. C. Cody Barteet analyzes the façade within the complex colonial world in which it belongs, including in multicultural Yucatán and the transatlantic world. This contextualization allows for an examination of the architectural rhetoric of the façade, the design of which visualizes the contestations of autonomy and authority occurring among the colonial peoples.




Mannerism, Spirituality and Cognition


Book Description

This book employs a new approach to the art of sixteenth-century Europe by incorporating rhetoric and theory to enable a reinterpretation of elements of Mannerism as being grounded in sixteenth-century spirituality. Lynette M. F. Bosch examines the conceptual vocabulary found in sixteenth-century treatises on art from Giorgio Vasari to Federico Zuccari, which analyses how language and spirituality complement the visual styles of Mannerism. By exploring the way in which writers from Leone Ebreo to Gabriele Paleotti describe the interaction between art and spirituality, Bosch establishes a religious base for the language of art in sixteenth-century Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, religious studies, and religious history.




The Influence of Italian Culture on the Sevillian Golden Age of Painting


Book Description

This book explores the cultural exchange between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, examining Spanish collectors’ predilection for Italian painting and its influence on Spanish painters. Focused on collecting and using a novel methodology, this volume studies how the painters of the Sevillian school, including Francisco Pacheco, Diego Velázquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, perceived and were influenced by Italian painting. Through many examples, it is shown how the presence in Andalusia of various works and copies of works by artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Guido Reni inspired famous compositions by these Spanish artists. In addition, the book delves into the historical, political and social context of this period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and Italian and Spanish history.