In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.

The decades following the 1973 publication of Alessandro Conti’s Storia del Restauro have seen considerable scholarly interest in the development of restoration in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. A number of technical treatises and biographies of restorers have offered insight into restoration practice. The Restoration of Paintings in Paris, 1750–1815, however, is the first book to situate this work within the broader historical and philosophical contexts of the time. Drawing on previously unpublished primary material from archives in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Venice, Noémie Étienne combines art history with anthropology and sociology to survey the waning decades of the Ancien Régime and early post– Revolution France. Initial chapters present the diversity of restoration practice, encompassing not only royal institutions and the Louvre museum but also private art dealers, artists, and craftsmen, and examine questions of trade secrecy and the changing role of the restorer. Following chapters address the influence of restoration and exhibition on the aesthetic understanding of paintings as material objects. The book closes with a discussion of the institutional and political uses of restoration, along with an art historical consideration of such key concepts as authenticity, originality, and stability of artworks, emphasizing the multilayered dimension of paintings by such important artists as Titian and Raphael. There is also a useful dictionary of the main restorers active in France between 1750 and 1815.

In Literature and Artistic Practice in the Sixteenth Century Angela Cerasuolo, art historian and restorer, tracks the technical processes of painting through the cross-analysis of literary texts and works of art. Having traced the critical fortunes of the texts of the authors—Leonardo, Vasari, Armenini, Borghini, Lomazzo—she compares the information on drawing and painting, analysing the specific terminology, and identifying the materials and methods. Central themes of the theoretical debate—‘disegno’, ‘invenzione’, the contrast between ‘prestezza’ and ‘diligenza’, the ‘paragone’—are examined in the light of their relationship with the techniques. On the basis of scientific studies on the technical execution of paintings, works from the Capodimonte Museum, Naples are analysed as case studies.

Using the Braudelian concept of the Mediterranean this volume focuses on the condition of “coastal exchanges” involving the Dalmatian littoral and its Adriatic and more distant maritime network. Spalato and Ragusa intersect with Constantinople, Cairo and Spanish Naples just as Sinan, Palladio and Robert Adam cross paths in this liquid expanse. Concentrating on materiality and on the arts, architecture in particular, the authors identify portability and hybridity as characteristic of these exchanges, and tease out expected and unexpected serendipitous moments when they occurred. Focusing on translation and its instruments these essays expand the traditional concept of influence by thrusting mobility and the "hardware" of cultural transmission, its mechanisms, rather than its effects, into the foreground. Contributors include: Doris Behrens-Abouseif, SOAS, University of London; Joško Belamarić, Institute of Art History, Split; Marzia Faietti, Uffizi, Florence; Jasenka Gudelj, University of Zagreb; Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University; Ioli Kalavrezou, Harvard University; Suzanne Marchand, State University of Louisiana; Erika Naginski, Harvard University; Gülru Necipoğlu, Harvard University; Goran Nikšić, City of Split, Split; Alina Payne, Harvard University; Avinoam Shalem, Columbia University and David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania