You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book traces how four early Renaissance masters represented the Creation of Eve, which showed woman rising weightlessly from Adam's side at God's command.
In this study, Jack M. Greenstein draws on Early Renaissance art theory, modern narratology, translation studies, critical theory, the philosophy of history, and biblical hermeneutics to explicate the sense and significance of one of Andrea Mantegna's most enigmatic and influential works, the Uffizi Circumcision of Christ. Faced with a work that resists established methods of iconographical analysis, Greenstein reassesses the nature and goals of high humanist narrative painting. The result is a new, historically grounded theory of iconography that calls into question many widely held assumptions about the social and intellectual value of Early Renaissance art. Greenstein's theory rests on a ...
Depicting the Creation of Woman presented a special problem for Renaissance artists. The medieval iconography of Eve rising half-formed from Adam's side was hardly compatible with their commitment to the naturalistic representation of the human figure. At the same time, the story of God constructing the first woman from a rib did not offer the kind of dignified, affective pictorial narrative that artists, patrons, and the public prized. Jack M. Greenstein takes this artistic problem as the point of departure for an iconographic study of this central theme of Christian culture. His book shows how the meaning changed along with the form when Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano, and other Italian sculptors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries revised the traditional composition to accommodate a naturalistically depicted Eve. At stake, Greenstein argues, is the role of the artist and the power of image-making in reshaping Renaissance culture and religious thought.
Analyzing the literature on art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, The Spiritual Language of Art explores the complex relationship between visual art and spiritual experiences during the Italian Renaissance. Though scholarly research on these writings has predominantly focused on the influence of classical literature, this study reveals that Renaissance authors consistently discussed art using terms, concepts and metaphors derived from spiritual literature. By examining these texts in the light of medieval sources, greater insight is gained on the spiritual nature of the artist’s process and the reception of art. Offering a close re-readings of many important writers (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, etc.), this study deepens our understanding of attitudes toward art and spirituality in the Italian Renaissance.
Twice-Told Tales presents the life and writings of Dante Alighieri's maestro, the Florentine notary and diplomat, Brunetto Latino. The book first discusses archival documents found in Florence, the Vatican Secret Archives, Genoa, England and elsewhere, which were written by or which name Brunetto Latino. The documents concern, among other topics, the Vallombrosan Abbot Tesauro, the Sicilian Vespers' plotting, and the death by starvation of Ugolino. The book then discusses Brunetto's translations of Aristotle's Ethics and Cicero's De inventione, as texts presented to Charles of Anjou and others, as well as the influence of these texts on Dante. Appendices present the archival documents discussed in the book and list manuscripts containing Latino's writings.
Inverting rules with obvious relish, Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) is known today—as he was in his own time—for his highly personal visual language, one capable of generating images of the most mesmerizing oddity. In this book, Dennis Geronimus overcomes the scarcity of information about the artist’s life and works—only one of the nearly sixty known works by Piero is actually signed and dated—and pieces together from extensive archival research the most complete and accurate account of Piero’s life and career ever written. Unfettered imagination was the sign under which Piero exercised his pictorial invention, and yet the complicated artist was also a product of his culture. The book fills gaps in the artist’s biography and provides intensive analysis of Piero’s protean imagery, discusses his various patrons and commissions, and lists his extant, lost, and uncertainly attributed works.
The Arma Christi, the cluster of objects associated with Christ’s Passion, was one of the most familiar iconographic devices of European medieval and early modern culture. From the weapons used to torment and sacrifice the body of Christ sprang a reliquary tradition that produced active and contemplative devotional practices, complex literary narratives, intense lyric poems, striking visual images, and innovative architectural ornament. This collection displays the fascinating range of intellectual possibilities generated by representations of these medieval ’objects,’ and through the interdisciplinary collaboration of its contributors produces a fresh view of the multiple intersection...
This book recovers the lives of four men masked behind one legend. Reinterpreting recently rediscovered documents shows a Tuscan artist Leonardo da Vinci was banished from Florence around 1477, when at the same moment another Leonardo arrived from the East, an Ottoman agent from Genoese Caffa in the Black Sea. This Leonardo was a military engineer, who began writing technical notes backward in a flourishing Italian script. In Florence, around 1500, he met the alchemist and polymath Zoroastro, who collaborated in producing the scientific Notebooks. However, by the mid-sixteenth century, all memory of Zoroastro had been erased, and the two Leonardos had been conflated into one identity. Crucially, an archived document, rediscovered around 2021, proved that the Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci died in 1499. This information leads to the recovery of the artist who really painted the Mona Lisa, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio.
The motet was unquestionably one of the most important vocal genres from its inception in late twelfth-century Paris through the Counter-Reformation and beyond. Heard in both sacred and secular contexts, the motet of the Middle Ages and Renaissance incorporated a striking wealth of meaning, its verbal textures dense with literary, social, philosophic, and religious reference. In Hearing the Motet, top scholars in the field provide the fullest picture yet of the motet's "music-poetic" nature, investigating the virtuosic interplay of music and text that distinguished some of the genre's finest work and reading individual motets and motet repertories in ways that illuminate their historical and...
Publisher Description