This book investigates the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of fifteenth-century female portraiture on panel. Portraits of women increased substantially during this century. They formed part ...of a material and a visual culture borne out of the rapid rise of an oligarchy from entrepreneurial activities that was especially advanced in the urbanised territories of Italy and Flanders. For this reason, the portraits in this book are by Netherlandish and Italian painters. They are simultaneously illustrative of the emancipation of the genre from its medieval idiom, and of the responses to the matrix of patriarchy, under which society was organised. Patriarchy is an androcentric structure that places women in a paradoxical situation of legal and social disenfranchisement on the account of purported psychophysical inadequacy, whilst making them the catalysts, through arranged marriages, for the success of the spheres of power, which are controlled by men. Thus, these portraits are also a window into women’s lives in this structure. This book is the first systematic study of their sign-system and of the feminine experience of seeing and being seen, at the intersection of disciplines that include art history, anthropology, legal history, philosophy. The surprising results suggest new interpretations of form and function in female portraiture, women’s active role in the imaging process and the early instances of a pro-women ideology.
This article highlights the artistic and conceptual relevance of the iconographic type of the Coronation of Mary in Italy during the Late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. We have analyzed 14 Italian ...Renaissance paintings, aiming to discover the possible doctrinal sources that inspire them. From a conceptual perspective, we have specified that the iconography of The Coronation of the Virgin in Italy is directly inspired by the comments of some Church Fathers and medieval theologians and hymnographers. From the formal perspective, we discover that three different iconographyc types complement each other as progressively more complex variants of a similar basic structure.
Although Americans have shown interest in Italian Baroque art since the eighteenth century—Thomas Jefferson bought copies of works by Salvator Rosa and Guido Reni for his art gallery at ...Monticello, and the seventeenth-century Bolognese school was admired by painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley—a widespread appetite for it only took hold in the early to mid-twentieth century. Buying Baroque tells this history through the personalities involved and the culture of collecting in the United States.
The distinguished contributors to this volume examine the dealers, auction houses, and commercial galleries that provided access to Baroque paintings, as well as the collectors, curators, and museum directors who acquired and shaped American perceptions about these works, including Charles Eliot Norton, John W. Ringling, A. Everett Austin Jr., and Samuel H. Kress. These essays explore aesthetic trends and influences to show why Americans developed an increasingly sophisticated taste for Baroque art between the late eighteenth century and the 1920s, and they trace the fervent peak of interest during the 1950s and 1960s.
A wide-ranging, in-depth look at the collecting of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings in America, this volume sheds new light on the cultural conditions that led collectors to value Baroque art and the significant effects of their efforts on America’s greatest museums and galleries.
In addition to the editor, contributors include Andrea Bayer, Virginia Brilliant, Andria Derstine, Marco Grassi, Ian Kennedy, J. Patrice Marandel, Pablo Pérez d’Ors, Richard E. Spear, and Eric M. Zafran.
The Guide to the Italian Pictures at Hampton Court is the first book published in 1894 by Mary Berenson under the pseudonym of Mary Logan. In the same year Bernard Berenson published The Venetian ...Painters of the Renaissance, his first important contribution to connoisseurship. This article aims to demonstrate that the two works, as well as other writings of the same period, were the result of a collaboration between the two art historians, testified by letters, diaries, and annotations kept in the Berenson Papers held at I Tatti, Florence.
The size, shape, and application techniques of gold leaf in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century gold ground panel paintings attributed to artists working in Florence, Siena, and Fabriano was directly ...visualized using in situ scanning macro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (MA-XRF). The resulting gold (Au) Lα (9.712 keV) element distribution maps are of sufficient spatial resolution to enable an accurate and reproducible measurement of the shape and size of individual gold leaves. The resulting leaf measurements are discussed in the context of historical guild regulations, in particular, the 1403 reforms to the statutes of the Florentine Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries (
Arte dei medici e speziale
), which standardized the dimensions of gold leaf produced in Florence. The dimensions of the gold leaf from Florentine paintings created before and after the 1403 reforms were compared to each other as well as to gold ground paintings created in Siena and Fabriano. The results revealed the gold leaf squares in fourteenth-century Florentine and Sienese panels had side lengths averaging about 8 cm. In contrast, the gold leaf squares used in the fifteenth-century Florentine and Sienese paintings were smaller, with side lengths measuring about 7 cm. In addition, the degree of overlap between adjacent gold leaves was also measured. The amount of overlap was found to vary between artists, and the degree of overlap was consistent within the oeuvre of a specific artist. Taken together, these results suggest that the dimensions of the gold leaves found in panel paintings relate to the place of production on the Italian peninsula and the period in which they were created, while the degree of overlap relates to the individual hand of a gilder or artist/workshop.
En esta contribución pretendemos un doble propósito: contextualizar el proceso de dotación artística de la capilla mayor del convento Madre de Dios por parte de la V duquesa de Sessa; y, dar a ...conocer un lienzo que la documentación señala es obra de Juan de Jáuregui y Aguilar (Sevilla, 1583 — Madrid, 1641).
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.
This book focuses on the unique nature of early modern Bolognese painting that found its expression in stylistic diversity. The flourishing of different stylistic approaches in the Mannerist ...paintings of the previous generation evolved, at the turn the seventeenth century, in the work of the Bolognese painters into an approach best described as eclecticism, characterized by the combination of two or more styles in a single work of art. Eclectism was a major innovation and major contribution to the history of art. But it then also became a critical term that suffered much negative press. The book therefore also traces the role of ecclecticism as a concept in the evolution of criticism and scholarship about the Bolognese school of painting over 250 years, showing how the dramatically vascilatting attitudes towards this concept shaped the historical view of the Bolognese painters, ultimately having a tremendous dampening impact on our understanding of seventeenth-century art.
The green mantle of the earth! This metaphor conceives of the vegetation of the earth as a green cloth that drapes the barren earth. Long popular in patristic literature Il mantello verde della terra ...is a poetical image that ponders the providential greening of the earth on the third day of the Creation. Borrowing from the vocabulary of weaving it epitomizes the Renaissance interest in "fashioning green worlds" in art and poetry. Rachel Carson invoked the phrase to draw attention to environmental damage done to earth's "brilliant robe." Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made "living nature" an object of renewed interest. The essays gathered in this volume explore the expanding technologies and cultural dimensions of verzure and verdancy in the Italian Renaissance, and the role of painting in shaping the poetics and expression of greenery in the visual arts of the 16th-century and after.
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