Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Renaissance

Cardinals occupied a unique place in the world of early modern Europe, their distinctive red hats the visible signs not only of impressive careers at the highest rank the pope could bestow, but also of their high social status and political influence on an international scale. Appointed for life, these princes of the Church played a key role in the dramatic events of a period in which both the power and the authority of the papacy were challenged.

Cardinals crossed the ambiguous boundaries then existing between religious and secular power. Granted unparalleled access to Church and...

When works of art created for religious purposes outlive their original function, they often take on new meanings as they move from sacred spaces to secular collections. Religious art embodies a complicated amalgam of the aesthetic and the numinous, and the fourteen essays in this volume explore how the admixture changes--often
radically--with changes of function, setting, audience, and the passage of time.

Focusing on the centuries in which the phenomenon of collecting came powerfully into its own, these essays analyze the radical recontextualization of celebrated paintings by...

Hans Holbein the Younger is best known for his work in Henry VIII's England, where he painted portraits and designed decorative objects for courtly circles. England, however, only accounts for half of Holbein's working life. He developed his artistic identity on the Continent, creating a diverse range of artworks for urban elites, scholars, and publishers. Translating Nature into Art argues that by the time Holbein reached England, he had developed two roughly alternative styles of representation: a highly descriptive and objective mode, which he used for most of his portraiture,...

Why do the paintings and poetry of the Italian Renaissance--a celebration of classical antiquity--also depict the Florentine countryside populated with figures dressed in contemporary silk robes and fleur-de-lys crowns? Upending conventional interpretations of this well-studied period, Charles Dempsey argues that a fusion of classical form with contemporary content, once seen as the paradox of the Renaissance, can be better understood as its defining characteristic.

Dempsey describes how Renaissance artists deftly incorporated secular and popular culture into their creations,...

Timeless Renaissance features 74 recently rediscovered drawings from the 16th through the early 18th centuries. The book offers a fascinating glimpse of Count Allessandro Maggiori (1764-1834) as an art collector and reveals the cultural and historical importance of the collection he assembled in his villa near Monte San Giusto.

All of the works were clearly influenced by Raphael's 16th-century Renaissance ideals of beauty, which were further developed throughout the 17th century by Bolognese masters such as Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, and Domenichino. The Maggiori...

Frederick MacMonnies is best known today as one of the leading figurative sculptors of the American Renaissance. Residing in France for much of his professional career, MacMonnies, along with his first wife, the painter Mary Fairchild MacMonnies, often visited Giverny, home to the reclusive Claude Monet and numerous American Impressionists in the final decade of the nineteenth century. By 1894 the town was the MacMonnies's favorite summer retreat, and in 1898 they moved permanently into an old priory in Giverny, dubbed the "MacMonastery" by friends.

It was at this time, just as the...