This highly original study explores how still-life paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge.

Though portraits of old women mediate cultural preoccupations just as effectively as those of younger women, the scant published research on images of older women belies their significance within early modern Italy. This study examines the remarkable flowering, largely overlooked in portraiture scholarship to date, of portraits of old women in Northern Italy and especially Bologna during the second half of the sixteenth century, when, as a result of religious reform, the lives of women and the family came under increasing scrutiny. Old Women and Art in the Early Modern Italian Domestic Interior draws on a wide range of primary visual sources, including portraits, religious images, architectural views, prints and drawings, as well as extant palazzi and case, furnishings, and domestic objects created by the leading artists in Bologna, including Lavinia Fontana, Bartolomeo Passerotti, Denys Calvaert, and the Carracci. The study also draws on an array of historical sources - including sixteenth-century theories of portraiture, prescriptive writings on women and the family, philosophical and practical treatises on the home economy, sumptuary legislation, books of secrets, prescriptive writings on old age, and household inventories - to provide new historical perspectives on the domestic life of the propertied classes in Bologna during the period. Author Erin Campbell contends that these images of unidentified women are not only crucial to our understanding of the cultural operations of art within the early modern world, but also, by working from the margins to revise the center, provide an opportunity to present new conceptual frameworks and question our assumptions about old age, portraiture, and the domestic interior.

How do the objects in a still life reflect the customs, ideas and aspirations of the time? This is one of the questions which Schneider asks in this book. Still lifes chart the history of scientific discoveries and their acceptance as well as the gradual replacement of the mediaeval concept of the world.

How portraits of artists during the Renaissance helped create the first art stars in modern history Michelangelo was one of the biggest international art stars of his time, but being Michelangelo was no easy thing: he was stalked by fans, lauded and lambasted by critics, and depicted in unauthorized portraits. Still Lives traces the process by which artists such as Michelangelo, Dürer, and Titian became early modern celebrities. Artists had been subjects of biographies since antiquity, but Renaissance artists were the first whose faces were sometimes as recognizable as their art. Maria Loh shows how this transformation was aided by the rapid expansion of portraiture and self-portraiture as independent genres in painting and sculpture. She examines the challenges confronting artists in this new image economy: What did it mean to be an image maker haunted by one's own image? How did these changes affect the everyday realities of artists and their workshops? And how did images of artists contribute to the way they envisioned themselves as figures in a history that would outlive them? Richly illustrated, Still Lives is an original exploration of the invention of the artist portrait and a new form of secular stardom.

Early modern Italian portraiture is so well known that it might seem that nothing new could be written about it. After all, many of the period’s most celebrated portraits, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, are endlessly reproduced and known to nearly everyone. Yet, this dissertation contends that there is much more to these images than meets our contemporary eyes. I argue that early modern artists intended to do more than simply render a naturalistic image of a particular person in materials like painting, bronze, or stone. Rather, the goal of early modern portraiture was to perpetuate a sitter’s memory in time. This dissertation aims to explain precisely how fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian portraitists managed this complex task, creating specific compositions that purposefully recalled the ways that they understood our memories to function. Early modern artists ingeniously created portraits paired with symbolic and allegorical devices, which addressed not only the sitter’s appearance but also aspects of his/her character—what period persons called “the movements of the mind.” The artist’s ultimate goal was to better communicate these things to the mind of the viewer, instilling the whole of the sitter’s persona therein. As such, this dissertation explores an unexamined feature that figures prominently in this strategy, namely, the way that period portraits paired with devices were composed to mirror or imitate understandings of the workings of memory itself, often analogized as the impress of a seal in wax or as a group of images stored within a memory house. Other formats aimed to better perpetuate memory by directly communicating with the viewer, based on guidelines set forth by period authors such as Leon Battista Alberti, or by recalling period studies of the interior and exterior of human bodies. Thus, from portrait medallions, whose three-dimensional forms appear ready to “impress” themselves in the mind, to painted panel portraits accessed by way of decorated covers, thereby imitating the effect of a memory house, this dissertation sees the very structure of early modern portraits as reflecting beliefs about vision, communication, and the perpetuation of ideas in the mind.

In Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s most famous paintings, grapes, fish, and even the beaks of birds form human hair. A pear stands in for a man’s chin. Citrus fruits sprout from a tree trunk that doubles as a neck. All sorts of natural phenomena come together on canvas and panel to assemble the strange heads and faces that constitute one of Renaissance art’s most striking oeuvres. The first major study in a generation of the artist behind these remarkable paintings, Arcimboldo tells the singular story of their creation. Drawing on his thirty-five-year engagement with the artist, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann begins with an overview of Arcimboldo’s life and work, exploring the artist’s early years in sixteenth-century Lombardy, his grounding in Leonardesque traditions, and his tenure as a Habsburg court portraitist in Vienna and Prague. Arcimboldo then trains its focus on the celebrated composite heads, approaching them as visual jokes with serious underpinnings—images that poetically display pictorial wit while conveying an allegorical message. In addition to probing the humanistic, literary, and philosophical dimensions of these pieces, Kaufmann explains that they embody their creator’s continuous engagement with nature painting and natural history. He reveals, in fact, that Arcimboldo painted many more nature studies than scholars have realized—a finding that significantly deepens current interpretations of the composite heads. Demonstrating the previously overlooked importance of these works to natural history and still-life painting, Arcimboldo finally restores the artist’s fantastic visual jokes to their rightful place in the history of both science and art.

The visual legacy of early modern cardinals constitutes a vast and extremely rich body of artworks, many of superb quality, in a variety of media, often by well-known artists and skilled craftsmen. Yet cardinal portraits have primarily been analysed within biographical studies of the represented individual, in relation to the artists who created them, or within the broader genre of portraiture. No more profound investigation of these as a specific category of object has ever been attempted. This volume addresses questions surrounding the production, collection, and status of the cardinal portrait, covering diverse geographies and varied media. Examining the development of cardinals' imagery in terms of their multi-layered identities, this volume considers portraits of 'princes of the Church' as a specific cultural phenomenon reflecting cardinals' unique social and political position.