Space Image And Reform In Early Modern Art

The essays in Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall’s seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece’s facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall’s investigations of Renaissance art to new fields, Space, Image, and Reform expands the ideas at the center of her work further back in time, further afield, and deeper into familiar topics, thus achieving a cohesion not usually seen in edited volumes honoring a single scholar.

Drawing on recent research by established and emerging scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, this volume reconsiders the art and architecture produced after 1563 across the conventional geographic borders. Rather than considering this period a degraded afterword to Renaissance classicism or an inchoate proto-Baroque, the book seeks to understand the art on its own terms. By considering artists such as Federico Barocci and Stefano Maderno in Italy, Hendrick Goltzius in the Netherlands, Antoine Caron in France, Francisco Ribalta in Spain, and Bartolomeo Bitti in Peru, the contributors highlight lesser known "reforms" of art from outside the conventional centers. As the first text to cover this formative period from an international perspective, this volume casts new light on the aftermath of the Renaissance and the beginnings of "Baroque."

The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The essays presented in this volume investigate the ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious images, drawing on examples from across Europe and beyond. Eight essays by leading scholars in the field Brings art historians and historians into productive dialogue Broad chronology, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century Broad geographical coverage Richly illustrated

The early modern period saw the proliferation of religious, public and charitable institutions and the emergence of new educational structures. By bringing together two areas of inquiry that have so far been seen as distinct, the study of institutions and that of the house and domesticity, this collection provides new insights into the domestic experience of men, women and children who lived in non-family arrangements, while also expanding and problematizing the notion of 'domestic interior'. Through specific case studies, contributors reassess the validity of the categories 'domestic' and 'institutional' and of the oppositions private public, communal individual, religious profane applied to institutional spaces and objects. They consider how rituals, interior decorations, furnishings and images were transferred from the domestic to the institutional interior and vice versa, but also the creative ways in which the residents participated in the formation of their living settings. A variety of secular and religious institutions are considered: hospitals, asylums and orphanages, convents, colleges, public palaces of the ducal and papal court. The interest and novelty of this collection resides in both its subject matter and its interdisciplinary and Europe-wide dimension. The theme is addressed from the perspective of art history, architectural history, and social, gender and cultural history. Chapters deal with Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Flanders and Portugal and with both Protestant and Catholic settings. The wide range of evidence employed by contributors includes sources - such as graffiti, lottery tickets or garland pictures - that have rarely if ever been considered by historians.

This study explores the phenomenon of the cults of Raphael and Michelangelo in relation to their death, burial, and posthumous fame—or second life—from their own times through the nineteenth century. These two artists inspired fervent followings like no other artists before them. The affective response of those touched by the potency of the physical presence of their art- works, personal effects, and remains—or even touched by the power of their creative legacy—opened up new avenues for artistic fame, divination, and commemoration. Within this cultural framework, this study charts the elevation of the status of dozens of other artists in Italy through funerals and tomb memorialization, many of which were held and made in response to those of Raphael and Michelangelo. By bringing together disparate sources and engaging material as well as a variety of types of artworks and objects, this book will be of great interest to anyone who studies early modern Italy, art history, cultural history, and Italian studies.

In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical investigations, this book challenges basic assumptions about the way early modern artists and theorists represented their relationship to the visible world and how they understood these representations. By analyzing technical feats such as anamorphosis (the perspectival distortion of an object to make it viewable only from a certain angle), drawing machines, and printed diagrams, each chapter highlights the moments when perspective theorists failed to unite a singular, ideal viewpoint with the artist&’s or viewer&’s viewpoint or were unsuccessful at conjoining fictive and lived space.Showing how these &“failures&” were subsequently incorporated rather than rejected by perspective theorists, the book presents an important reassessment of the standard view of Renaissance perspective. While many scholars have maintained that perspective rationalized the relationships among optics, space, and painting, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies asserts instead that Renaissance and early modern theorists often revealed a disjunction between geometrical ideals and practical applications. In some cases, they not only identified but also exploited these discrepancies. This discussion of perspective shows that the painter&’s geometry did not always conform to the explicitly rational, Cartesian formula that so many have assumed, nor did it historically unfold according to a standard account of scientific development.

Throughout history, the research of space has always been an issue of great interest. Since classical Antiquity, the physical space itself and its imperfect double, the illusionary space used in the visual arts, have been one of the perpetual obsessions of man. However, there are very few studies that question the reality of represented space, and deal with those liminal phenomena that exist on the blurred boundary between reality and imagination. Such spaces were never defined by carefully drawn borders; they were usually outlined by the ephemeral and ever changing barriers. For that very reason, liminal spaces describe those curious worlds confined in gardens and collections, they underpin all those dreams of ideal societies, and construct visions of unobtainable and distant shores. Liminal spaces are the territories not usually found on maps and in atlases, they are not subjected to laws of perspective and elude the usual representations. They are always beyond and behind the established depiction of space. Often, they possess yet another layer of signification, that transforms a mere image of nature into a political manifesto, the lines on precious stones into the shapes of vanished cities, and private art collections into a dream of absolute power. This book explores different representations and forms of liminal spaces, that on the one hand, deeply influenced the history of the early modern imagination, and, on the other, established the models for our own understanding of liminal spatial phenomena.

Though portraits of old women mediate cultural preoccupations just as effectively as those of younger women, the scant published research on images of older women belies their significance within early modern Italy. This study examines the remarkable flowering, largely overlooked in portraiture scholarship to date, of portraits of old women in Northern Italy and especially Bologna during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious reform, the lives of women and the family came under increasing scrutiny. Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior draws on a wide range of primary visual sources, including portraits, religious images, architectural views, prints and drawings, as well as extant palazzi and case, furnishings, and domestic objects created by the leading artists in Bologna, including Lavinia Fontana, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Denys Calvaert, and the Carracci. The study also draws on an array of historical sources - including sixteenth-century theories of portraiture, prescriptive writings on women and the family, philosophical and practical treatises on the home economy, sumptuary legislation, books of secrets, prescriptive writings on old age, and household inventories - to provide new historical perspectives on the domestic life of the propertied classes in Bologna during the period. Author Erin Campbell contends that these images of unidentified women are not only crucial to our understanding of the cultural operations of art within the early modern world, but also, by working from the margins to revise the center, provide an opportunity to present new conceptual frameworks and question our assumptions about old age, portraiture, and the domestic interior.