Perhaps more than any other collector of his generation in the United States, Robert Lehman was interested in acquiring early drawings. He made a great effort to add drawings to the collection of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, glass, and other objects that his father, Philip Lehman, had begun assembling. The 116 Italian drawings analyzed and discussed in this volume are among the more than 2,000 works of art from the collection now housed in the Robert Lehman Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Robert Lehman's collection demonstrates the variety of drawings produced in Italy from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, a period when the purposes and techniques of drawings, as well as the aims and abilities of the artist who made them, became increasingly sophisticated. The volume includes an elaborate design for an equestrian monument by Antonio Pollaiuolo, a magnificent study of a bear by Leonardo da Vinci, a cartoon by Luca Signorelli, a study for a vault fresco by Taddeo Zuccaro, and many other drawings that are among the best Italian examples to have survived from that era. Most types of drawings, in a wide variety of techniques, are represented—figure studies, grand compositions, landscapes, cartoons, modelli, and even sculptors' studies. -- Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

This groundbreaking book spans the fields of art history, material culture, and gender studies in its examination of a range of objects from Italian Renaissance society. Addressing painted and sculpted portraits, marriage and betrothal gifts, and paxes, Adrian W. B. Randolph uses themes such as family and individual memory, windows, perspectival space, and touch to investigate how these items were experienced at the time, particularly by women. Rather than focusing on the social contexts of the objects, this original study deals with the objects themselves, asking how individuals lived with, looked at, and responded to complex things that at the time hovered between the nascent category of art and the everyday. Accompanied by beautiful and engaging accounts and illustrations of late-14th- and 15th-century Italian art, this compelling and thought-provoking argument makes the case for an alternate account of art and experience that challenges many conceptions about Renaissance art.

An introduction to 15th century Italian painting and the social history behind it, arguing that the two are interlinked and that the conditions of the time helped fashion distinctive elements in the painter's style.

Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed sweeping innovations in the art of sculpture. Sculptors rediscovered new types of images from classical antiquity and invented new ones, devised novel ways to finish surfaces, and pushed the limits of their materials to new expressive extremes. The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy surveys the sculptural production created by a range of artists throughout the peninsula. It offers a comprehensive overview of Italian sculpture during a century of intense creativity and development. Here, nineteen historians of Quattrocento Italian sculpture chart the many competing forces that led makers, patrons, and viewers to invest sculpture with such heightened importance in this time and place. Methodologically wide-ranging, the essays, specially commissioned for this volume, explore the vast range of techniques and media (stone, metal, wood, terracotta, and stucco) used to fashion works of sculpture. They also examine how viewers encountered those objects, discuss varying approaches to narrative, and ponder the increasing contemporary interest in the relationship between sculpture and history.

Known as the "century of anatomy," the 16th century in Italy saw an explosion of studies and treatises on the discipline. Medical science advanced at an unprecedented rate, and physicians published on anatomy as never before. Simultaneously, many of the period's most prominent artists--including Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, and Rubens working in Italy--turned to the study of anatomy to inform their own drawings and sculptures, some by working directly with anatomists and helping to illustrate their discoveries. The result was a rich corpus of art objects detailing the workings of the human body with an accuracy never before attained. "Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy "examines this crossroads between art and science, showing how the attempt to depict bone structure, musculature, and our inner workings--both in drawings and in three dimensions--constituted an important step forward in how the body was represented in art. While already remarkable at the time of their original publication, the anatomical drawings by 16th-century masters have even foreshadowed developments in anatomic studies in modern times.

These ground-breaking essays, all based on original archival research, consider the evolving interest in Bolognese art in seventeenth-century Italy, particularly focusing on the period after the death of Guido Reni in 1642. Edited by Bolognese specialists Raffaella Morselli and Babette Bohn, the studies collected here focus on the taste for Bolognese art within Bologna itself and in other parts of the Italian peninsula, including Mantua, Ferrara, Rome, and Florence. Essays examine the roles of gender, class, and the social status of the artist in early modern Bologna; approaches to exhibiting artworks in noble Bolognese collections; the reputations of local women artists; the popularity of Bolognese quadratura painting; and the relative success of both contemporary and earlier Bolognese artists with Italian collectors.