The figure of the putto (often portrayed as a mischievous baby) made frequent appearances in the art and literature of Renaissance Italy. Commonly called spiritelli, or sprites, putti embodied a minor species of demon, in their nature neither good

Most people would be hard pressed to name a famous artist from Renaissance France. Yet sixteenth-century French kings believed they were the heirs of imperial Rome and commissioned a magnificent array of visual arts to secure their hopes of political ascendancy with images of overflowing abundance. With a wide-ranging yet richly detailed interdisciplinary approach, Rebecca Zorach examines the visual culture of the French Renaissance, where depictions of sacrifice, luxury, fertility, violence, metamorphosis, and sexual excess are central. Zorach looks at the cultural, political, and individual roles that played out in these artistic themes and how, eventually, these aesthetics of exuberant abundance disintegrated amidst perceptions of decadent excess. Throughout the book, abundance and excess flow in liquids-blood, milk, ink, and gold-that highlight the materiality of objects and the human body, and explore the value (and values) accorded to them. The arts of the lavish royal court at Fontainebleau and in urban centers are here explored in a vibrant tableau that illuminates our own contemporary relationship to excess and desire. From marvelous works by Francois Clouet to oversexed ornamental prints to Benvenuto Cellini's golden saltcellar fashioned for Francis I, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold covers an astounding range of subjects with precision and panache, producing the most lucid, well-rounded portrait of the cultural politics of the French Renaissance to date.

In this beautifully illustrated study of intellectual and art history, Dorothy Johnson explores the representation of classical myths by renowned French artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, demonstrating the extraordinary influence of the natural sciences and psychology on artistic depiction of myth. Highlighting the work of major painters such as David, Girodet, Gerard, Ingres, and Delacroix and sculptors such as Houdon and Pajou, David to Delacroix reveals how these artists offered innovative reinterpretations of myth while incorporating contemporaneous and revolutionary discoveries in the disciplines of anatomy, biology, physiology, psychology, and medicine. The interplay among these disciplines, Johnson argues, led to a reexamination by visual artists of the historical and intellectual structures of myth, its social and psychological dimensions, and its construction as a vital means of understanding the self and the individual's role in society. This confluence is studied in depth for the first time here, and each chapter includes rich examples chosen from the vast number of mythological representations of the period. While focused on mythical subjects, French Romantic artists, Johnson argues, were creating increasingly modern modes of interpreting and meditating on culture and the human condition.

Works in the Museum's collection that embody the Renaissance interest in classical learning, fame, and beautiful objects are illustrated and discussed in this resource and will help educators introduce the richness and diversity of Renaissance art to their students. Primary source texts explore the great cities and powerful personalities of the age. By studying gesture and narrative, students can work as Renaissance artists did when they created paintings and drawings. Learning about perspective, students explore the era's interest in science and mathematics. Through projects based on poetic forms of the time, students write about their responses to art. The activities and lesson plans are designed for a variety of classroom needs and can be adapted to a specific curriculum as well as used for independent study. The resource also includes a bibliography and glossary.

An interpretation of Botticelli's painting which relates it closely to works of poetry by Lorenzo, Politian and Pulci. The author suggests how the idea of love as portrayed by Botticelli incorporates the actual cultural renovation imagined and sponsored by

Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.

In Giovanni Aurelio Augurello (1441–1524) and Renaissance Alchemy, Matteo Soranzo offers the first in-depth study of the life and works of Augurello, Italian alchemist, poet and art connoisseur from the time of Giorgione. Analysed, annotated and translated into English for the first time, Augurello’s poetry reveals a unique blend of late medieval alchemical doctrines, Northern Italian antiquarianism and Marsilio Ficino’s Platonism, enriching conventional narratives of Renaissance humanism.