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.

A study on the technique of painting through cross-analysis of literary texts by Leonardo, Vasari, Armenini, Borghini, Lomazzo and works of art, examining some significant paintings in the Capodimonte Museum, Naples.

Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy offers a critical overview of the literature on the visual arts produced during the High and Late Renaissance. Analyzing and interpreting texts by such writers as Vasari, Lomazzo, Zuccaro, and Tasso, Robert Williams demonstrates how these works offer insight into the experience of contemporary viewers, thus permitting a clearer view of the relationship between abstract thought and lived experience. By focusing on a heretofore neglected, but important body of literature, Williams shows how an understanding of it can transform our knowledge and appreciation of the Renaissance.

In drawing or painting from live models and real landscapes, more was at stake for artists in early modern Italy than achieving greater naturalism. To work with the model in front of your eyes, and to retain their identity in the finished work of art, had an impact on concepts of artistry and authorship, the authority of the image as a source of knowledge, the boundaries between repetition and invention, and even the relation of images to words. This book focuses on artists who worked in Italy, both native Italians and migrants from northern Europe. The practice of depicting from life became a self-conscious departure from the norms of Italian arts. In the context of court culture in Rome and Florence, works by artists ranging from Caravaggio to Claude Lorrain, Pieter van Laer to Jacques Callot, reveal new aspects of their artistic practice and its critical implications.

Relevant. Challenging. A paradigm shift. Little considered by insiders who control Leonardo’s modern biography, the now barely considered Zoroastro Masino was an Italian man with a Persian name ( زَرَادُشْت ). He was an actual historical person – recorded as a magician, a metallurgist, a discoverer, an alchemist, and a prophet, in contemporary record. Marginalized by xenophobic forces even before he passed away, Zoroastro was mocked for a name common people in Italy could not pronounce. Zoroastro's epitaph called him a man of probity, a natural philosopher who was outstandingly generous. He was known to have been friends with high ranking Italians, his bones preserved in a tomb in Rome wedged between a well-known Italian poet and a Greek scholar. Then his sepulcher was destroyed in the 17th century and his entire literary legacy appears to have been stolen. This book brings to light proposed lost Zoroastro writings, including a missing treatise on anatomy, undoubtedly plagiarised by a Swiss physician in the sixteenth century, a book on games and magic, wrongly ascribed to Luca Pacioli and published under a pretentious Latin title De viribus quantitatis, and a book of personal philosophy, which the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche misappropriated and published as his own work, Thus Spake Zarathustra. A further anonymously published poem, Antiquarie prospettiche romane is also reinterpreted. There are the Notebooks, long attributed to the Tuscan painter Leonardo da Vinci, yet discovered in the late-nineteenth century to be full of Eastern wonders and tales of exotic travels in the Middle East. Were some of these also Zoroastro's? The lost papers of Zoroastro follows two previous titles by the same author, Leonardo: the making and breaking of a myth and The Stolen Notebooks: Leonardo da Vinci and the man from the East.

The second volume of Leonardo Studies explores a dual theme of nature and architecture, offering a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship on these two abundant subjects. While Leonardo worked on his Treatise on Painting, he noted that understanding the physical properties of nature must precede individual projects of painting or designing buildings. The volume begins with the Trattato, and follows with physics, geology, painting that imitates architectural structure and vice-versa, and proceeds to architectural projects, questions of attribution, urban planning, and and the dissemination of Leonardo’s writings in the Trattato and its historiography. This impressive group of articles constitutes not only new research, but also a departure point for future studies on these topics. Contributors are: Janis Bell, Andrea Bernardoni, Marco Carpiceci, Paolo Cavagnero, Fabio Colonnese, Kay Etheridge, Diane Ghirardo, Claudio Giorgione, Domenico Laurenza, Catherine Lucheck, Silvio Mara, Jill Pederson, Richard Schofield, Sara Taglialagamba, Cristiano Tessari, Marco Versiero, and Raffaella Zama.

Scholarly traditions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have led us to assume that national traditions were defining in a way that they may not have been during the Renaissance, when Latin remained an international language. This collection interrogates the historical importance of national traditions, many of which depend upon geographical boundaries that took their shape only after the emergence of the nation state in the modern period. Each of the essays in this collection makes a distinctive contribution to a particular discipline and national culture. Taken together, they interrogate divisions between historiography and the fine arts, literature and the history of ideas as well as the boundaries between national traditions. The essays in this volume offer a compelling and persuasivejustification for an interdisdiplinary and international approach to the study of Renaissance culture.