Imaginative Realism


Book Description

A examination of time-tested methods used by artists since the Renaissance to make realistic pictures of imagined things.




Luxury Arts of the Renaissance


Book Description

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.




Renaissance Art


Book Description

The creative impulse is an ancient and enduring feature of human expression. Art serves many purposes: to beautify, record, reflect, enlighten, and celebrate our existence. Eye on Art examines the rich and varied world of art. Major art movements, the artists who fueled them, and the works they created are all discussed in this series. Also covered are the essential tools of artists as well as efforts to preserve and restore artwork for future generations. All volumes in this series are beautifully illustrated with full-color photographs and diagrams. Riveting narrative, informative sidebars, fully documented quotations, a bibliography, and thorough index all provide excellent starting points for research and discussion. Book jacket.




Making Renaissance Art


Book Description

This book explores key themes in the making of Renaissance painting, sculpture, architecture, and prints: the use of specific techniques and materials, theory and practice, change and continuity in artistic procedures, conventions and values. It also reconsiders the importance of mathematical perspective, the assimilation of the antique revival, and the illusion of life. Embracing the full significance of Renaissance art requires understanding how it was made. As manifestations of technical expertise and tradition as much as innovation, artworks of this period reveal highly complex creative processes--allowing us an inside view on the vexed issue of the notion of a renaissance.




Art and Love in Renaissance Italy


Book Description

"Many famous artworks of the Italian Renaissance were made to celebrate love, marriage, and family. They were the pinnacles of a tradition, dating from early in the era, of commemorating betrothals, marriages, and the birth of children by commissioning extraordinary objects - maiolica, glassware, jewels, textiles, paintings - that were often also exchanged as gifts. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of artworks arising from Renaissance rituals of love and marriage and makes a major contribution to our understanding of Renaissance art in its broader cultural context. The impressive range of works gathered in these pages extends from birth trays painted in the early fifteenth century to large canvases on mythological themes that Titian painted in the mid-1500s. Each work of art would have been recognized by contemporary viewers for its prescribed function within the private, domestic domain."--BOOK JACKET.




Renaissance Art: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Botticelli, Holbein, Leonardo, Dürer, Michelangelo: the names are familiar, as are the works, such as the Last Supper fresco, or the monumental marble statue of David. But who were these artists, why did they produce such memorable images, and how would their original beholders have viewed these objects? Was the Renaissance only about great masters and masterpieces, or were "mistresses" also involved, such as women artists and patrons? And what about the 'minor'-pieces that Renaissance men and women would have encountered in homes, churches and civic spaces? This exciting and stimulating volume will answer such questions by considering both famous and lesser-known artists, patrons and works of art within the cultural and historical context of Renaissance Europe. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.




Medieval and Renaissance Art


Book Description

This important and beautiful book accompanies the opening of the Victoria and Albert Museum's spectacular new Medieval and Renaissance galleries. Among the textiles, paintings, sculpture, glass, metalwork, prints, manuscripts, furniture, ceramics and jewelry featured here are such renowned treasures as the Devonshire tapestries, the Leonardo Notebooks, Donatellos Ascension relief, the reliquary casket of St. Thomas Becket, and many more astonishing works. Organized thematically, the book explores the social contexts responsible for these captivating objects, both commonplace and precious, recovering the attitudes of makers and owners of the time toward artistic practice. Rather than adopting the traditional sharp distinction between the Medieval and Renaissance, the authors explore aspects of the whole of this long period in European design and manufacture: an approach that emphasizes the continuities and gradual developments that were often as significant as sudden upheaval. A general historical introduction to the social and political background is followed by chapters that explore concepts of art, workshops, and sales, the classical past, ornament, religious art, health and body, and the ways in which objects themselves express the attitudes of their owners.




Art in Renaissance Italy, 1350-1500


Book Description

"Focuses primarliy on the social and historical context in which art was made and used"--Bibliographic essay (p. 326).




Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy


Book Description

Known as the "century of anatomy," the 16th century in Italy saw an explosion of studies and treatises on the discipline. Medical science advanced at an unprecedented rate, and physicians published on anatomy as never before. Simultaneously, many of the period's most prominent artists--including Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, and Rubens working in Italy--turned to the study of anatomy to inform their own drawings and sculptures, some by working directly with anatomists and helping to illustrate their discoveries. The result was a rich corpus of art objects detailing the workings of the human body with an accuracy never before attained. "Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy "examines this crossroads between art and science, showing how the attempt to depict bone structure, musculature, and our inner workings--both in drawings and in three dimensions--constituted an important step forward in how the body was represented in art. While already remarkable at the time of their original publication, the anatomical drawings by 16th-century masters have even foreshadowed developments in anatomic studies in modern times.




Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy


Book Description

"Painting as a Modern Art in Early Renaissance Italy" reconstructs a historical concept of modern art on the basis of sources written between the 1390s and 1440s. The central point of reference in these sources was Giotto, the early fourteenth-century painter who, as one writer put it in 1442, "first modernized (modernizavit) ancient and mosaic figures." The word "modern" was used in a wide variety of ways throughout this period, some quite polemical, others rather prosaic. To call art (ars) modern, however, was to invoke a stable, well-defined concept whose roots ran deep in late-medieval intellectual life. According to this concept, to make an art modern was to set it on a new foundation in science (scientia) and rationalize it accordingly. As familiar as this formulation may sound in principle, each and every one of its key terms--art, modernity, science, rationality--meant something strikingly different in this period than it does in our time. The hallmark of modern art was not verisimilitude or expression or virtually any of the achievements that art historians associate with Giotto today, but rather the invention of techniques that aimed to imitate nature in its very manner of operation, aligning the concrete, step-by-step process of painting with the inner workings of nature itself. By reclaiming this concept and tracking its complex relation to early Renaissance concerns such as linear perspective and the canon of proportion, the book not only establishes a novel framework for the visual analysis of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italian painting, but also unravels a fundamental master narrative of Western art history from within, clearing the way for renewed discussions of alternative modernities, including those that precede the story of modernism as we know it. --Publisher's website.