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How does the artist’s self-conception change in old age? How does old age affect artistic practice? In this intriguing study, art historian Philip Sohm considers some of the greatest artists of Renaissance and Baroque Italy and their experiences of aging. Sohm investigates how art critics, collectors, biographers, and fellow artists dealt with old painters, what mental landscapes preconditioned responses to art by the elderly, and how biology and psychology were co-opted to explain the imprint that artists left on their art. He also looks carefully at the impact of prejudices, stereotypes, and other imaginary truths about old age. For some artists, the problems of old age were related to physical decline—Poussin’s hands became shaky, Titian’s eyesight dimmed. For others, psychological symptoms emerged. The book’s cast of characters includes Michelangelo, the hypochondriac young fogy; Titian, the shrewd marketer of old age; the multiphobic Pontormo; and others. With sensitivity and insight, Sohm uncovers what it meant to be an old artist and how successive generations have looked at the art of an old master.
Rome: setting the stage / Richard E. Spear -- Naples / Christopher R. Marshall -- Bologna / Raffaella Morselli -- Florence / Elena Fumagalli -- Venice / Philip Sohm -- Five industrious cities / Renata Ago -- The painting industry in early modern Italy / Richard A. Goldthwaite.
Integrating musical and poetic analysis, this book sheds new light on the experience of listening to Monteverdi's path-breaking madrigals. The music of this pivotal figure reveals how composers and performers at the turn of the seventeenth century not only responded to but themselves influenced experiments in language.
A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.
As this collection of essays makes clear, the paths to grasping the complexity of Caravaggio?s art are multiple and variable. Art historians from the UK and North America offer new or recently updated interpretations of the works of seventeenth-century Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and of his many followers known as the Caravaggisti. The volume deals with all the major aspects of Caravaggio?s paintings: technique, creative process, religious context, innovations in pictorial genre and narrative, market strategies, biography, patronage, reception, and new hermeneutical trends. The concluding section tackles the essential question of Caravaggio?s legacy and the production of his followers-not only in terms of style but from some highly innovative strategies: concettismo; art marketing and the price of pictures; self-fashioning and biography; and the concept of emulation.
"John Varriano's book is not only a delightful read but draws fascinating parallels between two hitherto disparate fields: art history and the history of food in the Renaissance. Outstanding scholarship that opens whole new venues of inquiry."--Ken Albala, author of Eating Right in the Renaissance and Beans: A History "Art history and food history have traditionally been separate disciplines, parallel universes. In this book John Varriano makes a cosmic leap and lures the two into a stimulating, provocative, and always entertaining study--a tasting menu of gastronomic and visual delights."--Gillian Riley, author of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food "With wit and erudition, John Varriano s...
Arguing for the necessity of taking art's contribution to contemporary realism seriously, this edited collection intervenes on contemporary debates about realism by demonstrating that the arts do not simply illustrate philosophical theories. The significance of art's realism in times characterised by the normalisation of fake, manipulated and distorted representations of reality can only be fully understood by attending to the ways that the arts mediate, visualise and even shape reality. Each chapter features a different approach to realism and its aesthetic dimensions not only in the visual arts, but also in sound art, film, scientific imaging and literature.
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.
A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of ...
How are processes of vision, perception, and sensation conceived in the Renaissance? How are those conceptions made manifest in the arts? The essays in this volume address these and similar questions to establish important theoretical and philosophical bases for artistic production in the Renaissance and beyond. The essays also attend to the views of historically significant writers from the ancient classical period to the eighteenth century, including Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Ibn Sahl, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Gregorio Comanini, John Davies, Rene Descartes, Samuel van Hoogstr...