Portrait Of A Medieval Patron

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

Cologne in the later Middle Ages was an elegant and wealthy mercantile city much favoured by popes and emperors. The largest town in Northern Europe, the site of an important university and seat of a major archbishopric, it had a cosmopolitan population of painters, illuminators, sculptors and goldsmiths and a patrician class who were sophisticated collectors and knowledgeable patrons of art. This book - the first such study in English - traces the development of the Cologne school of painting over two centuries. It begins with the period before 1400, when the adaption of French ideas to the indige- nous tradition produced an elegant, genteel art, characterized by elongated figures and graceful gestures. A change was heralded by the Veronica Master's introduction of the International Courtly Style around 1400, with its sophisticated iconography, costly pigments, exquisite punchwork, gesso jewels and precious brocade fabrics, and by the Dombild Master's introduction around 1440 of Eyckian proportions and realism. In the final phase of this development, the Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece opened the door to the Renaissance with his highly distinctive style and innovative iconography. The book is fully illustrated and accompanied by a translation of the guild regulations; a biographical index of archbishops and lay patrons; and a hand- list of cited panels grouped according to location.

These papers investigate the revival of painting and mosaic in Rome in the second half of the 13th century and the contribution of Rome to the birth of modern painting. Their concern is with the interrelationships between pictures and their social, political and religious context. In this way, the early work of Giotto and the development of the Italian altarpiece are reconsidered, with particular attention being paid to questions of structure, setting and patronage. The work of Simone Martini for the Angevin Court at Naples and the promotion of the cult of new saints by visual means is examined within the context of the European politics of canonisation. Finally, Professor Gardner considers the artistic role of the Mendicant orders, in particular the Franciscans and the Dominicans, and their self-promotion by visual images.

The essays in this volume, from those that look at patronage from a theoretical perspective as it relates to issues such as gender, social and economic history, to individual case studies, highlight our need to look at the subject anew.

Faces of Power and Piety is the second in the Medieval Imagination series of small, affordable books that draw on manuscript illuminations in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Library. Each volume focuses on a particular theme to provide an accessible and delightful introduction to the imagination of the medieval world. The vivid and charming faces featured in this volume include portraits of both illustrious historical figures and celebrated contemporaries. They reveal that medieval artists often disregarded physical appearance in favor of emphasizing qualities such as power and piety, capturing how their subjects wished to be remembered for the ages. Faces of Power and Piety also looks at the development of portraiture in the modern sense during the Renaissance, when likeness became an important component of portrait painting. An exhibition of the same name will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from August 12 through October 26, 2008.

Discusses the techniques, uses, and aesthetics of medieval drawings; and reproduces work from more than fifty manuscripts produced between the ninth and early fourteenth century.

The fourteen essays in this collection explore the dominance of patronage in Renaissance politics, religion, theatre, and artistic life. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson's "The likeness of the king" challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as "the first modern portraits". Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways.