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Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy offers a critical overview of the literature on the visual arts produced during the High and Late Renaissance. Analyzing and interpreting texts by such writers as Vasari, Lomazzo, Zuccaro, and Tasso, Robert Williams demonstrates how these works offer insight into the experience of contemporary viewers, thus permitting a clearer view of the relationship between abstract thought and lived experience. By focusing on a heretofore neglected, but important body of literature, Williams shows how an understanding of it can transform our knowledge and appreciation of the Renaissance.
In Literature and Artistic Practice in the Sixteenth Century Angela Cerasuolo, art historian and restorer, tracks the technical processes of painting through the cross-analysis of literary texts and works of art. Having traced the critical fortunes of the texts of the authors—Leonardo, Vasari, Armenini, Borghini, Lomazzo—she compares the information on drawing and painting, analysing the specific terminology, and identifying the materials and methods. Central themes of the theoretical debate—‘disegno’, ‘invenzione’, the contrast between ‘prestezza’ and ‘diligenza’, the ‘paragone’—are examined in the light of their relationship with the techniques. On the basis of scientific studies on the technical execution of paintings, works from the Capodimonte Museum, Naples are analysed as case studies.
Few tales of artistic triumph can rival the story of Zeuxis. As first reported by Cicero and Pliny, the painter Zeuxis set out to portray Helen of Troy, but when he realized that a single model could not match Helen’s beauty, he combined the best features of five different models. A primer on mimesis in art making, the Zeuxis myth also illustrates ambivalence about the ability to rely on nature as a model for ideal form. In Too Beautiful to Picture, Elizabeth C. Mansfield engages the visual arts, literature, and performance to examine the desire to make the ideal visible. She finds in the Zeuxis myth evidence of a cultural primal scene that manifests itself in gendered terms. Mansfield considers the many depictions of the legend during the Renaissance and questions its absence during the eighteenth century. Offering interpretations of Angelica Kauffman’s paintings, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Mansfield also considers Orlan’s carnal art as a profound retelling of the myth. Throughout, Mansfield asserts that the Zeuxis legend encodes an unconscious record of the West’s reliance on mimetic representation as a vehicle for metaphysical solace. Elizabeth C. Mansfield is associate professor of art history at the University of the South.
The development of art theory over the course of the Renaissance and Baroque eras is reflected in major stylistic shifts. In order to elucidate the relationship between theory and practice, we must consider the wider connections between art theory, poetic theory, natural philosophy, and related epistemological matrices. Investigating the interdisciplinary reality of framing art-making and interpretation, this treatment rejects the dominant synchronic approach to history and historiography and seeks to present anew a narrative that ties together various formal approaches, focusing on stylistic transformation in particular artist’s oeuvres – Michelangelo, Annibale Carracci, Guercino, Guido Reni, Poussin, and others – and the contemporary environments that facilitated them. Through the dual understanding of the art-theoretical concept of the Idea, an evolution will be revealed that illustrates the embittered battles over style and the overarching intellectual shifts in the period between art production and conceptualization based on Aristotelian and Platonic notions of creativity, beauty and the goal of art as an exercise in encapsulating the “divine” truth of nature.
Did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) influence the art of his time? This book starts with an exploration of Ficino’s views on the imagination and discusses whether, how and why these ideas may have been received in Italian Renaissance works of art.
Pliny's Natural History (A.D. 77-79) served as an indispensable guide to and exemplar of the ideals of art for Renaissance artists, patrons, and theorists. Bearing the imprimatur of antiquity, the Natural History gave permission to do art on a grand scale, to value it, and to see it as an incomparable source of prestige and pleasure. In Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, Sarah Blake McHam surveys Pliny's influence, from Petrarch, the first figure to recognize Pliny's relevance to understanding the history of Greek art and its reception by the Romans, to Vasari and late 16th-century theorists. McHam charts the historiography of Latin and Italian manuscripts and early printed copies of the Natural History to trace the dissemination of its contents to artists from Donatello and Ghiberti to Michelangelo and Titian. Meanwhile, benefactors commissioned works intended to emulate the prototypes Pliny described, aligning themselves with the great patrons of antiquity. This is a richly illustrated, comprehensive reference work of social history, myth making, iconography, theory, and criticism.
"The authors look closely at a variety of types of painting - including large altarpieces, small domestic, devotional images, diplomatic gifts, furniture, decorations and both intimate and full-length portraits - as well as frescoes, drawings and prints. They provide insights into the meanings of individual pictures and into the purposes they were originally intended to serve, and they explore the social position of the artist in the 1500s.
To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.
Exploring the intersection between art and political ideology, this innovative study of art in Henrician England sheds new light on the ways in which Henry VIII and his advisers exploited visual images in order to communicate ideas to his subjects. The works analyzed include water triumphs, coronation pageants and funeral processions, printed title pages of vernacular Bibles, coins, portrait miniatures, and murals, as well as panel paintings. With her analysis of these categories of objects, and using communication theory as a starting point, String presents a new model of communication based on the concepts of magnificence, topicality, persuasiveness, and propaganda. Through this model she shows how medium, location, display, and viewership were all considered in the transmission of royal messages. Using the art of Henry VIII's reign as a case study, String enriches our understanding of the fundamental contribution of imagery to communication, and also provides a model for the study of the dissemination of ideas and the patron-artist relationship in other royal courts and historical periods.