"This book explores the cultural exchange between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, examining Spanish collectors' predilection for Italian painting and Spanish painters' Italian influences. Focused on collecting and using a novel methodology, this volume studies how the painters of the Sevillian school, including Francisco Pacheco, Diego Velázquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, perceived and were influenced by Italian painting. Through many examples, it is shown how the presence in Andalusia of various works and copies of artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Guido Reni inspired famous compositions by these Spanish artists. In addition, the book delves into the historical, political and social context of this period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, Italian history, and Spanish history"--

This book explores the cultural exchange between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, examining Spanish collectors’ predilection for Italian painting and its influence on Spanish painters. Focused on collecting and using a novel methodology, this volume studies how the painters of the Sevillian school, including Francisco Pacheco, Diego Velázquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, perceived and were influenced by Italian painting. Through many examples, it is shown how the presence in Andalusia of various works and copies of works by artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Guido Reni inspired famous compositions by these Spanish artists. In addition, the book delves into the historical, political and social context of this period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and Italian and Spanish history.

This exciting and wide-ranging volume examines the construction and dissemination of the image of female power during the Renaissance. Chapters examine the creation, promotion, and display of the image of women in power, and how the artistic and cultural patronage they developed helped them craft a self-image that greatly contributed to strengthening their power, consolidating their political legitimacy, and promoting their authority. Contributors cover diverse models of sixteenth-century female power: from ruling queens, regents, and governors, to consorts of sovereigns and noblewomen outside the court. The women selected were key political figures and patrons of art in England, France, Castile, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and Italian city states. The volume engages with crucial and controversial debates regarding the nature and use of portraiture as well as the changing patterns of how portraits were displayed, building a picture of the principal iconographic solutions and representational strategies that artists used. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, women’s studies, and Renaissance studies.

This book tells the story of the Del Riccio family in Florence in the early modern period, investigating the cultural mediations fostered by the family between Florence, Rome, and Naples, as well as shedding light on the intellectual and social exchanges between different regions of Italy and on the creation of foreign nations within the main Italian cities. These social and cultural dimensions are further explored through the study of the obsessive persistence of the family’s relationship with Michelangelo Buonarroti, exhibited both publicly, in the Florentine and Neapolitan family chapels, and privately in their homes. The main achievement of this study is to move the focus from the ruling power, the Medici family and the immediate members of their court, to a Florentine middle-class family and its social mobility: this shift from the conventional narrative to a distributed microhistory is fundamental to better assess the use of images and artworks in early modern Florence and abroad. The aesthetic and stylistic choices in the use of art and art display made by the Del Riccio reveal a deep awareness of the substantial differences in taste and meaning between different cities of the Italian peninsula. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and Renaissance studies.

This book focuses on the techniques and materials of polychromy used in early modern Europe and the Americas from 1200 to 1800. Taking a trans-cultural approach, the book studies the production of polychrome sculptures, panels, and altarpieces, as well as colored terracotta. The book includes chapters on treatises and contracts that reveal specific use of pigments, distribution of workshops, collaborations between specialized artists, and artistic programs centered on the use of color as an agent. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, art conservation, early modern history, sculpture, colonialism, material culture, and European studies.

Drawing on rich archival research and focusing on works by leading artists including Guido Reni and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Karen J. Lloyd demonstrates that cardinal nephews in seventeenth-century Rome – those nephews who were raised to the cardinalate as princes of the Church – used the arts to cultivate more than splendid social status. Through politically savvy frescos and emotionally evocative displays of paintings, sculptures, and curiosities, cardinal nephews aimed to define nepotism as good Catholic rule. Their commissions took advantage of their unique position close to the pope, embedding the defense of their role into the physical fabric of authority, from the storied vaults of the Vatican Palace to the sensuous garden villas that fused business and pleasure in the Eternal City. This book uncovers how cardinal nephews crafted a seductively potent dialogue on the nature of power, fuelling the development of innovative visual forms that championed themselves as the indispensable heart of papal politics. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, early modern studies, religious history, and political history.

The original research in this book analyzes the artistic activity of Santi Gucci (1533– c.1600), a Florentine sculptor active in Poland in the second half of the sixteenth century, and his workshop. Chapters examine the organization of the artistic workshop (sculpting and masonry) and the model of the artist’s functioning as an entrepreneur in Renaissance Poland, using Santi Gucci’s activity as an example. Gucci shaped the image of Polish sculpture in the sixteenth century for more than 50 years, even though his work has not yet been fully examined. The author sets Gucci’s emigration within the context of the cultural exchanges between Italy and Poland that contributed to the development of the Polish Renaissance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, architectural history and economic history.