Böcker i Visual Culture in Early Modernity-serien

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 new uses of visual images. Artists, writers, preachers, musicians, and performers, among others, often employed visual images or conjured mental images to connect with their audiences. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection creatively explore how the exponential growth in images, especially prints, impacted the intellectual horizons and the visual awareness of viewers in early modern Germany. Each of the chapters serves as a case study for one or more of the volumeΓÇÖs sub-themes: art, visual literacy, and strategies of presentation; audience and the art of persuasion; the art of envisioning; the ephemeral arts and theatricality; the built environment and spatial settings; and the history of the visual.

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. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects and painted ceramic jars. In this way, the volume presents an entirely new picture of Renaissance sexuality, stripping away layers of misconceptions and manipulations to reveal an often-misunderstood world. ''Sex acts'' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one''s (or another''s) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.

Demonstrates that Bellini's and Titian's famous series of mytho-poetical paintings for the camerino of Duke Alfonso d'Este of Ferrara, and Francesco Colonna's "Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" - were conceived as mnemonic or pedagogical devices aimed at educating the reader in the medical science of reproductive physiology.

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.

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'.

Argues that Diego Velazquez painted two of his most famous works, "The Spinners" and "Las Meninas", as theoretically informed manifestos of painterly brushwork. This book also argues that the two paintings form a learned retort to the prevailing critical disdain for the painterly.

Chen Hongshou (1599-1652) was as an artist and scholar of the Ming period. Considering Chen's paintings and prints alongside Chen's romance drama commentaries and prefaces and his collected writings (particularly poetry), this title focuses not only on Chen, but also on an important cultural moment in the first half of the seventeenth century.

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.

Through an examination of such diverse visual images as prints, drawings, panels, sculptures, minor arts, and frescoes, this book, a significant contribution to research in art history, sermon studies, gender studies, and theology.

Ann Marie Borys presents northern Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548-1616) as a traveler and an observer, the first Western architect to respond to the changing shape of the world in the Age of Discovery. Pointing out his familiarity with the expansion of knowledge in both natural history and geography.

The first monograph to appear in English on the Last Supper frescoes in Quattrocento Florence, this study examines the effect of gender on the contextualized perceptions of the male and female religious who viewed the Florentine Last Supper images. Using archival, literary and cultural sources, and by examining a wide range of contexts.

Focusing on artists and architectural complexes which until now have eluded scholarly attention, this study examines three different confraternal organizations in sixteenth-century Florence. Douglas Dow explores how, through the emphasis on the apostles within their art programs.

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.

Claudia Goldstein mines a rich, interdisciplinary mix of sources to shed new light on the cultural history of sixteenth-century Antwerp. Recontextualizing some of Bruegel's work within the cultural nexus of the dining room.

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.

Focusing on eight works showing religious scenes and scenes taken from Roman history, this volume bridges the gap between social and cultural history and the history of art, untangling the threads of art, politics, and religion during the time of the Thirty Years' War.

Structured around the interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers.

Emphasizing on the 'middle ranks' of society in Renaissance Italy - artisans, merchants, and professionals such as bankers and lawyers, this book focuses on social subjects, documents and unusual objects. It demonstrates how a burgeoning market for erotica, along with a cultural tradition of allusion and innuendo.

Focusing on the ways his art and persona were valued and criticized by writers, collectors, and artists subsequent to his death, this book examines the reception of the works of Albrecht Durer. The author traces carefully how Durer's paintings, prints, drawings and theoretical writings traveled widely.

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.

Examining their production practices in various genres including manuscript illustration, glass painting and staining, tapestry manufacture, portrait painting, and engraving, this book explores how Netherlandish artists migrating to England in the early modern period overcame difficulties raised by their outsider status.

Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters - Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz de Heem, this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form.

Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, the author nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings: "Crowning with Thorns", the "Crucifixion", "Doubting Thomas" and the "Calling of Matthew".

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.

Examines Giorgio Vasari's interest, as an art historian and as an artist, in engravings and woodblock prints, focusing not only on aspects of Vasari's career, but also on aspects of sixteenth-century artistic culture and artistic practice.

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.