Low And High Style In Italian Renaissance Art

During the later 15th and in the 16th centuries pictures began to be made without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory. In part, Renaissance art adjusted to the social and economic pressures with an art we may be hard pressed to recognize under that same rubric-an art not so much of perfected nature as simply artless. Granted, the heroic and epic mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and proudly. Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from the Vitruvian ideal. The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice, of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of the present, of attitudes toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of sight Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as signs of quite personal emotions rather than as subscriptions to publicly vaunted ideologies. Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of them-not even Giorgione's La tempesta -is a classic pastoral idyll. The rosso stile is to be understood as more comprehensive than that. The issue is not only who is represented, but whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically affirmative art.

Sansovino successively dismantled and reconstituted the categories of art-making. Hardly capable of sustaining a program of reform, the experimental art of this period was succeeded by a new era of cultural codification in the second half of the sixteenth century. --

This book is the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a largely neglected group of porticoes decorated with painted pergolas that appeared in Rome and environs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it tells the story of how an element of the garden—the pergola—became a pictorial topos in portico decoration, and evolved, hand in hand with its real cousin in the garden, into an object for cultural emulation among the educated patrons of early modern Rome. The liminality of both the portico and the pergola at the interface of architecture and garden is key to the interpretation of these architectural and painted forms, which rests on the intersecting frameworks of the classical tradition, natural history, and the cultural identity of the aristocracy. In the mediating space of the Renaissance portico, the illusionism pergola created an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a virtual garden where one could engage in leisurely strolls, learned conversations, appreciation of art, and scientific investigation, as well as extensive travel across time and space. The book proposes the interpretation that the illusionistic pergola was an artistic formula for the early modern perception of nature.

The Oxford History of Western Art is an innovative and challenging reappraisal of how the history of art can be presented and understood. Through a carefully devised modular structure, readers are given insights not only into how and why works of art were created, but also how works in different media relate to each other across time. Here--uniquely--is not the simple, linear "story" of art, but a rich series of stories, told from varying viewpoints. Carefully selected groupings of pictures give readers a sense of the visual "texture" of the various periods and episodes covered. The 167 illustration groups, supported by explanatory text and picture captions, create a sequence of "visual tours"--not merely a procession of individually "great" works viewed in isolation, but juxtapositions of significant images that powerfully convey a sense of the visual environments in which works of art need to be viewed in order to be understood and appreciated. The aim throughout is to make the shape and nature of these visual presentations a stimulating and rewarding experience, allowing readers to become active participants in the process of interpretation and synthesis. Another key feature of the narrative is the re-definition of traditional period boundaries. Rather than relying on conventional labels such as Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque, the book establishes five major phases of significant historical change that unlock longer and more meaningful continuities. This new framework shows how the major religious and secular functions of art have been forged, sustained, transformed, revived, and revolutionized over the ages; how the institutions of Church and State have consistently aspired to make art in their own image; and how the rise of art history itself has come to provide the dominant conceptual framework within which artists create, patrons patronize, collectors collect, galleries exhibit, dealers deal, and art historians write. Though the coverage of topics focuses on European notions of art and their transplantation and transformation in North America, space is also given to cross-fertilizations with other traditions---including the art of Latin America, the Soviet Union, India, Africa (and Afro-Caribbean), Australia, and Canada. Written by a team of 50 specialist authors working under the direction of renowned art historian Martin Kemp, The Oxford History of Western Art is a vibrant, vigorous, and revolutionary account of Western art serving both as an inspirational introduction for the general reader and an authoritative source of reference and guidance for students.

Concerned about sanitation during a severe bout of plague in Milan, Leonardo da Vinci designed an ideal, clean city. Leonardo was far from alone among his contemporaries in thinking about personal and public hygiene, as Douglas Biow shows in The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy. A concern for cleanliness, he argues, was everywhere in the Renaissance.Anxieties about cleanliness were expressed in literature from humanist panegyrics to bawdy carnival songs, as well as in the visual arts. Biow surveys them all to explain why the topic so permeated Renaissance culture. At one level, cleanliness, he documents, was a matter of real concern in the Renaissance. At another, he finds, issues such as human dignity, self-respect, self-discipline, social distinction, and originality were rethought as a matter of artistic concern.The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy moves from the clean to the unclean, from the lofty to the base. Biow first examines the socially elevated, who defined and distinguished themselves as clean, pure, and polite. He then turns to soap, an increasingly common commodity in this period, and the figure of the washerwoman. Finally he focuses on latrines, which were universally scorned yet functioned artistically as figures of baseness, creativity, and fun in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. Paralleling this social stratification is a hierarchy of literary and visual artifacts, from the discourse of high humanism to filthy curses and scatological songs. Deftly bringing together high and low-as well as literary and visual-cultures, this book provides a fresh perspective on the Italian Renaissance and its artistic legacy.

Presented in one compact volume, more than 1,200 Renaissance painters are listed with their respective schools, mentors, influences, and other essential information.

Why did Renaissance art come to matter so much, so widely, and for so long? Patricia Emison's answer depends on a recalibrated view of the long Renaissance - from 1300 to 1600 - synthesizing the considerable evolution in our understanding of the epoch since the foundational 19th-century studies of Burckhardt and Wölfflin. Demonstrating that the imitation of nature and of antiquity must no longer define its limits, she exposes Renaissance style's self-consciously modern aspect. She sets the art against the literary and political interests of the time, and analyzes works both of very familiar artists - Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael - and of lesser-known figures, including Cima and Barocci. An understanding emerges of both the period's long-standing fame and its various historical debts. Moving beyond the Renaissance, Emison unfolds the varying and layered significance it has held from the Old Master era through Impressionism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism.