This well-illustrated study investigates the symbolic dimensions of painted maps as products of ambitious early modern European courts.

This book focuses on how inexpensive maps, produced for the masses, accrued cultural value for everyday consumers in Renaissance Italy, who wanted to own and display maps in their homes as works of artnot for practical use, but for their cultural capital as commodities. Genevieve Carlton considers how and why maps took on this new identity, as coveted and revered material objects and symbols of status and power, which in turn elevated or reinforced the public personae of their owners. She reconstructs the market for maps by examining household inventories as well as the ways in which maps were displayed in the interiors of Renaissance homes. Her survey shows that consumers from every level of society owned and displayed maps and used them for personal gain, to reinforce a particular identity."

Among the most beautiful and compelling works of Renaissance art, painted maps adorned the halls and galleries of princely palaces. This book is the first to discuss in detail the three-dimensional display of these painted map cycles and their full meaning in Renaissance culture. Art historian Francesca Fiorani focuses on two of the most significant and marvelous surviving Italian map murals--the Guardaroba Nuova of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, commissioned by Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, and the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican, commissioned by Pope Gregory XIII. Both cycles were not only pioneering cartographic enterprises but also powerful political and religious images. Presenting an original interpretation of the interaction between art, science, politics, and religion in Renaissance culture, the book also offers fresh insights into the Medici and papal courts.

This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood. David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Artists, in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.

Giants, cannibals and other monsters were a regular feature of Renaissance illustrated maps, inhabiting the Americas alongside other indigenous peoples. In a new approach to views of distant peoples, Surekha Davies analyzes this archive alongside prints, costume books and geographical writing. Using sources from Iberia, France, the German lands, the Low Countries, Italy and England, Davies argues that mapmakers and viewers saw these maps as careful syntheses that enabled viewers to compare different peoples. In an age when scholars, missionaries, native peoples and colonial officials debated whether New World inhabitants could – or should – be converted or enslaved, maps were uniquely suited for assessing the impact of environment on bodies and temperaments. Through innovative interdisciplinary methods connecting the European Renaissance to the Atlantic world, Davies uses new sources and questions to explore science as a visual pursuit, revealing how debates about the relationship between humans and monstrous peoples challenged colonial expansion.

Demonstrates how Venetian newsmongers played a crucial yet heretofore unrecognized role in the invention of America.