Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

A collection of essays by the art historian Aby Warburg, these essays look beyond iconography to more psychological aspects of artistic creation: the conditions under which art was practised; its social and cultural contexts; and its conceivable historical meaning.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the most common method of photography was the daguerreotype—Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre’s miraculous invention that captured in a camera visual images on a highly polished silver surface through exposure to light. In this book are presented nearly eighty masterpieces—many never previously published—from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive daguerreotype collection.

ALTHOUGH tradition has not informed us whether our first parents made any marked change in their scanty garments on the death of their near relatives, it is certain that the fashion of wearing mourning and the institution of funereal ceremonies and rites are of the most remote antiquity. Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians over 3,000 years ago selected yellow as the colour which denoted that a kinsman was lately deceased. They, moreover, shaved their eyebrows when a relative died; but the death of a dog or a cat, regarded as divinities by this curious people, was a matter of much greater importance to them, for then they not only shaved their eyebrows, but every hair on their bodies was plucked out; and doubtless this explains the reason why so many elaborate wigs are to be seen in the various museums devoted to Egyptian antiquities. It would require a volume to give an idea of the singular funereal ceremonials of this people, with whom death was regarded, so to speak, as a "speciality;" for their religion was mainly devoted to the cultus of the departed, and consequently innumerable monumental tombs still exist all over Egypt, the majority of which are full of mummies, whose painted cases are most artistic. The cat was worshipped as a divinity by the Egyptians. Magnificent tombs were erected in its honour, sacrifices and devotions were offered to it; and, as has already been said, it was customary for the people of the house to shave their heads and eyebrows whenever Pussy departed the family circle. Possibly it was their exalted position in Egypt which eventually led to cats being considered the "familiars" of witches in the Middle Ages, and even in our own time, for belief in witchcraft is not extinct. The kindly Egyptians made mummies of their cats and dogs, and it is presumable that, since Egypt is a corn growing, and hence a rat and mouse producing country, both dogs and cats, as killers of these vermin, were regarded with extreme veneration on account of their exterminating qualities. Their mummies are often both curious and comical, for the poor beast's quaint figure and face are frequently preserved with an indescribably grim realism, after the lapse of many ages.