In this Volume, published in1998, Fifteen scholars reveal the ways of preserving, conceiving and creating beauty were as diverse as the cultural influenced at work at the time, deriving from antique, medieval and more recent literature and philosophy, and from contemporary notions of morality and courtly behaviour. Approaches include discussion of contemporary critical terms and how these determined writers’ appreciation of paintings, sculpture, architecture and costume; studies of the quest to create beauty in the work of artists such as Botticeli, Leonardo, Raphael, Parmigianino and Vasari; and the investigation of changes functioning of the eye and brain, or to technical innovations like those found in Venetian glass.

This is the first book which gives a general overview of women as subject-matter in Italian Renaissance painting. It presents a view of the interaction between artist and patron, and also of the function of these paintings in Italian society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Using letters, poems, and treatises, it examines through the eyes of the contemporary viewer the way women were represented in paintings.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Bode-Museum, Berlin, Aug. 25-Nov. 20, 2011, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Dec. 21, 2011-Mar. 18, 2012.

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.

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.

What do we mean when we call a work of art `beautiful`? How have artists responded to changing notions of the beautiful? Which works of art have been called beautiful, and why? Fundamental and intriguing questions to artists and art lovers, but ones that are all too often ignored in discussions of art today. Prettejohn argues that we simply cannot afford to ignore these questions. Charting over two hundred years of western art, she illuminates the vital relationship between our changing notions of beauty and specific works of art, from the works of Kauffman to Whistler, Ingres to Rossetti, Cézanne to Jackson Pollock, and concludes with a challenging question for the future: why should we care about beauty in the twenty-first century?

What makes something beautiful? In this engaging, elegant study, David Konstan turns to ancient Greece to address the nature of beauty.