Frans Floris 1519 20 1570 Imagining A Northern Renaissance

Frans Floris de Vriendt radically transformed Netherlandish art. His monumental mythologies introduced a new appreciation for the heroic nude to the Low Countries and his religious art challenged standards of decorum. Born into a family of sculptors and architects, Floris refashioned his art through travel, first studying with the humanist painter Lambert Lombard in Liège and then continuing on to Italy. These experiences defined the hybridizing novelty of his art, forged by juxtaposing antique and modern, Italian and northern sources. This book maps Floris’s hybrid style onto shifting conceptions of cultural, religious, and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt. It explores his collaborations and rivalries, engagement with artistic theory, hierarchical workshop, and revolutionary use of print.

"A crucial aim of the present study is to consider how Floris, an artist of international renown in his own day, could see his fortunes reversed and end up marginalized by a history he had helped to craft."--Introduction, p. 32.

In this first in-depth study dedicated to the intriguing history of the translation of statues and reliefs into print, the essays in this volume reflect the printmakers’ various approaches and challenges of translating antique or contemporary artworks, underlining their highly creative handling.

Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation. Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher. This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, complemented by a new translation of the inscriptions Lampsonius composed to accompany the Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572), a cycle of twenty-three engraved portraits of Netherlandish artists developed in collaboration with the print publisher Hieronymus Cock. Together, The Life of Lambert Lombard and the Effigies established frameworks for a distinctly Netherlandish history of art. Responding to a growing sense of Netherlandish cultural and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, these texts proposed a critical alternative to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and its Italian model of art historical development, celebrating local ingenuity and skill. They remain the starting point for any history of the northern Renaissance.

In Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Religious Art for the Urban Community Barbara Kaminska offers the first book-length study of Bruegel’s biblical paintings, and argues that they were inherently linked to Antwerp’s religious, socio-economic, and cultural transformation.

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 mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.

Did the Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) influence the art of his time? This book starts with an exploration of Ficino’s views on the imagination and discusses whether, how and why these ideas may have been received in Italian Renaissance works of art.

The authors of this volume examine various fields of cultural discourse in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century: the political, commercial, religious, artistic, and sensory domains, and less obviously metaphysical properties like time and space. What defined the Low Countries were not its borders and its territories but its cities, and their economies dominated political relations. A dense network of large cities and small towns developed hand in hand with a broad range of textile and luxury industries. In Antwerp, culture was commerce: its art and printing industries catered to much of the Western world and, at the same time, carved a confident self-image celebrating the liberal arts as a means of social and self-improvement. Antwerp is omnipresent in this book, with essays on its painting, printing, politics, and public festivals. But other cities such as Bruges, Leuven, and Leiden also figure prominently. It was precisely the interconnectedness of urban centers, large, middle and small, rather than their autonomous character, that defined civic culture in the Low Countries. Among the topics treated are differing notions of urban topography, the dialogue between city and court, issues of censorship, and the sensory and psychological response to texts and images.

Ryan E. Gregg relates how the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Duke Cosimo I of Tuscany both employed city view artists such as Anton van den Wyngaerde and Giovanni Stradano to aid in constructing authority.

The title of this volume of the NKJ takes cognisance of the cross-disciplinary field of animal studies, which challenges taxonomies that set human beings apart from, and often above or at the centre of, all other living creatures and the broader environment.