Rembrandt's Passion Series is the name given to five paintings of similar size and format executed over a six year time-frame, 1633-39. The works were commissioned by Frederick Hendrick, Prince of Orange and Stadholder of the United Provinces, and initially hung in his gallery in the Binnenhof complex at The Hague. Although each of the paintings depicts a traditional scene from the Passion of Christ, they do not form anything like a complete Passion Cycle. Seven years later Hendrick ordered a further two works of the same size and format of subjects from the Nativity of Christ. Unsurprisingly given their fragmented history, scholars have struggled to identify factors, save for subject matter and format, which would unify the Passion Series as a coherent series. This thesis seeks to address this quandary by positing an identifiable, consistent and unifying concetto for the works. The concetto this thesis suggests is analogous with the spirit of seventeenth-century devotional poetry. Recently several scholars, ranging from Gary Schwartz in 1985 through to Mariët Westermann in 2000, have noted a similarity between the subjective persona of the poet/narrator in devotional poetry and the artist/participant/spectator role that Rembrandt adopts in the paintings. Louis Martz has shown how the form and imaginative strategy of such poetry was derived from religious meditation. Following Martz's lead, this thesis argues that the concetto for the paintings, like the poetry, is initially derived from the method of meditation as detailed by Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises. During the meditational process, Ignatius invokes his famous 'composition of place', where one inserts oneself imaginatively into the event in one of three ways. As Rembrandt was undoubtedly familiar with both the poetry and devotional literature of his age, this thesis argues that in his concetto for the five Passion Series works he invokes a similar model. Additionally, I show how such a concetto was both reflective of contemporary theological exegesis and embedded in theoretical artistic debates of the age. Although scholars have noted thematic similarities between contemporary poetry and Rembrandt's later graphic work, none have hitherto connected the Passion Series with the Spiritual Exercises, via the poetry of the Stadholder's secretary, Constantijn Huygens, and the Englishman John Donne, as this thesis does.

This sumptuously illustrated volume examines the impact of Indian art and culture on Rembrandt (1606–1669) in the late 1650s. By pairing Rembrandt’s twenty-two extant drawings of Shah Jahan, Jahangir, Dara Shikoh, and other Mughal courtiers with Mughal paintings of similar compositions, the book critiques the prevailing notion that Rembrandt “brought life” to the static Mughal art. Written by scholars of both Dutch and Indian art, the essays in this volume instead demonstrate how Rembrandt’s contact with Mughal painting inspired him to draw in an entirely new, refined style on Asian paper—an approach that was shaped by the Dutch trade in Asia and prompted by the curiosity of a foreign culture. Seen in this light, Rembrandt’s engagement with India enriches our understanding of collecting in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, the Dutch global economy, and Rembrandt’s artistic self-fashioning. A close examination of the Mughal imperial workshop provides new insights into how Indian paintings came to Europe as well as how Dutch prints were incorporated into Mughal compositions.

"Rembrandt: Studies in his Varied Approaches to Italian Art explores his engagement with imagery by Italian masters. His references fall into three categories: pragmatic adaptations, critical commentary, and conceptual rivalry. These are not mutually exclusive but provide a strategy for discussion. This study also discusses Dutch artists' attitudes toward traveling south, surveys contemporary literature praising and/or criticizing Rembrandt, and examines his art collection and how he used it. It includes an examination of the vocabulary used by Italians to describe Rembrandt's art, with a focus on the patron Don Antonio Ruffo, and closes by considering the reception of his works by Italian artists"--

This insightful volumes the use of imitation and the modern cult of originality through a consideration of the disparate fates of two Venetian painters - the canonised master Titian and his artistic heir, the little-known Padovanino.

Beyond Vision is the first English-language collection of essays on art by Pavel Florensky (1882–1937), Russian philosopher, priest, linguist, scientist, mathematician – and art historian. In addition to seven essays by Florensky, the book includes a biographical introduction and an examination of Florensky’s contribution as an art historian by Nicoletta Misler. Beyond Vision reveals Florensky’s fundamental attitudes to the vital questions of construction, composition, chronology, function and destination in the fields of painting, sculpture and design. His reputation as a theologian and philosopher is already established in the English-speaking world, but this first collection in English of his art essays (translated by Wendy Salmond) will be a revelation to those in the field. Pavel Florensky was a true polymath: trained in mathematics and philosophy at Moscow University, he rejected a scholarship in advanced mathematics in order to study theology at the Moscow Theological Academy. He was also an expert linguist, scientist and art historian. A victim of the Soviet government’s animosity towards religion, he was condemned to a Siberian labor camp in 1933 where he continued his work under increasingly difficult circumstances. He was executed in 1937.

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.

Originally published in 1983, Leo Steinberg's classic work has changed the viewing habits of a generation. After centuries of repression and censorship, the sexual component in thousands of revered icons of Christ is restored to visibility. Steinberg's evidence resides in the imagery of the overtly sexed Christ, in Infancy and again after death. Steinberg argues that the artists regarded the deliberate exposure of Christ's genitalia as an affirmation of kinship with the human condition. Christ's lifelong virginity, understood as potency under check, and the first offer of blood in the circumcision, both required acknowledgment of the genital organ. More than exercises in realism, these unabashed images underscore the crucial theological import of the Incarnation. This revised and greatly expanded edition not only adduces new visual evidence, but deepens the theological argument and engages the controversy aroused by the book's first publication.