Renaissance painting
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Painter to the Queen
Michel Sittow, Courtier to Isabella of Castile and the Habsburg Dynasty
Michel Sittow was born in Reval c. 1469 today the Estonian capital city of Tallinn. Possibly trained in the workshop of Hans Memling in Bruges he subsequently moved to work in the Iberian Peninsula where he first held the position of court painter. This monograph undertakes research on this phase of his career. In the Kingdom of Castille Michel Sittow was appointed painter to Queen Isabella and became a member of her household with an impressive annual salary. Thanks to the analysis of archival documents and formal and iconographical studies on Sittow’s paintings it is possible to explain the court painter’s life circumstances and describe the benefits he enjoyed and the difficulties he faced. The Castilian period was crucial for Michel Sittow’s career since over the course of his professional life he also resided at the courts of Philip the Fair Margaret of Austria Christian II of Denmark and Charles V all relatives of his first royal patron. While serving European monarchs he transferred Memling’s techniques and visual language beyond the Low Countries and developed his artistic practice and style. The analysis of the various contexts Michel Sittow worked in sheds light on his oeuvre and his possible privileged status as a courtier which provided opportunities to establish a flourishing and ambitious career in northern and southern Europe.
The Image of the City in Early Netherlandish Painting (1400-1550)
Painted cityscapes have always captivated the viewers of medieval works of art. To this day scholars are mesmerised by their capacity to mirror the urban context from which they sprang combined with their ability to symbolize a more abstract world view religious idea or social ideal. Especially oil painting which thrived in the fifteenth-century Low Countries among a heterogeneous elite and the well-off urban middling groups succeeded as no other medium in capturing the urban landscape in its finest details. In order to gain an insight into how late medieval citizens clerics and noblemen conceived of urban society and space this book combines a serial analysis of a large corpus of painted city views with a critical discussion of some well-documented and revealing works of art. Throughout the book a variety of questions are addressed ranging from the religious conception of the city the theatrical dimension of urban space the extent to which Early Netherlandish painting depicted the city as an economic space how images of city and countryside functioned as identity markers of the donor and how technical advances in the field of cartography impacted the portrayal of towns in the sixteenth century. In doing so this study explores the duality of some of the major interpretive schemes that have determined the last few decades of historiography on late medieval Netherlandish culture oscillating between bourgeois and courtly realistic and symbolic profane and religious and innovative versus traditional.
Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F.W. Kent
This volume honours F. W. (Bill) Kent (1942–2010) internationally renowned scholar of Renaissance Florence and founding editor of the Europa Sacra series. Kent belonged to an energetic generation of Australians who in the late 1960s tackled the Florentine archives and engaged key issues confronting historians of that ever-fascinating city.
With his meticulous archival findings and contextual interpretations spanning a scholarly career of more than forty years Kent engaged with indeed drove the scholarly response to many of the issues that have shaped not just our current and emerging understanding of Florence and other urban centres of Italy but along with that a more nuanced view of the role of frontier towns and the countryside.
Interdisciplinary in scope and grounded in visual literary and archival materials the essays presented here explore a variety of facets of the society of Renaissance Italy confronting and extending themes that have been emerging in recent decades and exemplified by Kent’s work. These themes include the role of kinship and networks power and agency in Laurentian Florence gender ritual representation patronage spirituality and the generation and consumption of material culture.
Visual Liturgy: Altarpiece Painting and Valencian Culture (1442-1519)
In the introduction to his Early Netherlandish Painting Erwin Panofsky characterised 15th-century European painting with an opposition between the art of Italy and that of Flanders and significantly he recalled that in the eyes of a Luther or of a Michelangelo no other School deserved attention. Six centuries later Spanish art of this period remains little known outside the Iberian Peninsula. The fact that a large number of the works of art are still kept in their original location surely plays a part in this but there is also a lasting prejudice that this art is aesthetically and intellectually little exciting. Retables were then the utmost artistic expression. At first sight they mostly look the same. Because this art seems changeless its exegesis has been routine and vague.
The Visual Liturgy challenges this situation. Focusing on the Aragonese city of Valencia then at the height of its pride and glory it examines a school of painters which reflects a wider scene namely the civic and religious preoccupations of a whole culture. Not only does it provide a comprehensive view of current research on Valencian painting it connects it to the wider context of Valencian piety and tackles the dialectics at work in civic culture: how the monarchy took hold of the municipality; how foreign influences challenged local tradition; how sophisticated altarpieces emerged from the standard stock of artistic production; how finally the liturgy prevented ruptures between the religion of the learned and more popular even at times slightly unorthodox expressions of the faith.
The Visual Liturgy thus provides a better understanding of 15th-century Spanish art. It sheds important new light on the birth of an artistic school in a context of competing foreign influences and on the reception of such influences into a radically different culture; finally it is the first attempt to explore the meaning of Valencian altarpieces with reference to their cultural spiritual and liturgical context of creation.
Invention
Northern Renaissance Studies in Honor of Molly Faries
Elucidating the steps that led to a finished work of art has been one of Molly Faries’ principal concerns in nearly forty years of research and teaching. A pioneer in infrared reflectography she has demonstrated like no other scholar the importance of technical studies to art history in the way that they provide insight into an artist’s technique and development into collaboration within a workshop and into master-pupil relationships. Molly Faries has taught generations of students and colleagues to view paintings not as static objects but as the results of successive choices.
The volume’s title Invention: Northern Renaissance Studies in Honor of Molly Faries evokes Molly’s passion for understanding an artist’s creative process. The term “invention” is here understood in the widest possible sense: How did a work of art come into being? How did an artist react to new stimuli or adapt to a new culture? Was innovation valued above adherence to a local tradition? To what degree could artists shape their patrons’ taste? How did artists transform their own inventions over time and adopt those of others? Was there a concept of invention specific to the Northern Renaissance and how did it differ from ours?
The authors who tackle these and other questions include university professors curators conservators and conservation scientists all recognized specialists in northern European art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The artists they discuss are among the greatest painters manuscript illuminators printmakers and sculptors: Johan Maelwael the Limbourg brothers Jan van Eyck Rogier van der Weyden Hans Memling Lieven van Lathem Juan de Flandes Jean Hey Albrecht Dürer Hieronymus Bosch Master H.L. Jacques Du Broeucq and Jan Brueghel the Elder.
This book one of the few devoted specifically to the concept of invention in Northern Renaissance art is richly illustrated with 32 color plates and 179 black-and-white reproductions; it includes an index.
Painting for the Market : Commercialisation of Art in Antwerp's Golden Age
This study examines the process of commercialization of art which took place in Antwerp during the long sixteenth century an era of rapid expansion of both the city’s economy and its art market. Indeed Antwerp carved altarpieces paintings tapestries books and other luxury items were exported to an area stretching from the Baltic region to the Mediterranean Basin during this time period. The key development that explains the success of Antwerp as an export center for the arts the author argues lies not only in the strength of the Antwerp economy and the artistic tradition of the Southern Netherlands but specifically in the shift from ordering artwork on commission to the production for the open market. In other words Antwerp artists were much more inclined to produce art on spec and consequently art was commercialized at an early stage and became the subject of intense trading.
Focusing on painting and to some degree on other art forms such as sculpture and tapestry the author surveys the various factors that contributed to this phenomenon: proto-industrial workshops engaged in standardized production of popular images and the sophisticated commercial infrastructure that the city could boast allowed art to be sold wholesale to an international clientele at the panden (specialized sales halls). However the flourishing of the art market was ultimately a direct result of the increased demand for luxury goods both foreign and domestic and Antwerp was essentially the locale where supply and demand for art converged.
The booming art market led to increased commodization of works of art; art dealers entered on the scene and further professionalized the art trade during the second half of the sixteenth century. In painting commercialization led to a diversification of the genres a form of product innovation that generated new demand. Clearly Antwerp’s pivotal position in the European trade network and its pioneering role in introducing capitalist commercial techniques had transformed the way art was marketed and produced.
The outbreak of the Dutch Revolt during the last third of the sixteenth century severely disrupted the economy of the Southern Netherlands and as a result the Antwerp art market collapsed in the mid-1580s. However in the difficult closing years of the sixteenth century a transformation process began to take shape in which the foundations were laid for yet a new era of cultural eminence for the city of Antwerp.