As a result of Napoleon’s campaigns in Italy, Old Master art flooded into Britain and its acquisition became an index of national prestige. Maureen McCue argues that their responses to these works informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities. Dr McCue examines poetry, plays, novels, travel writing, exhibition catalogues, early guidebooks and private experiences recorded in letters and diaries by canonical and noncanonical authors, including Felicia Hemans, William Buchanan, Henry Sass, Pierce Egan, William Hazlitt, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Anna Jameson, Maria Graham Callcott and Samuel Rogers. Her exploration of the idea of connoisseurship shows the ways in which a knowledge of Italian art became a key marker of cultural standing that was no longer limited to artists and aristocrats, while her chapter on the literary production of post-Waterloo Britain traces the development of a critical vocabulary equally applicable to the visual arts and literature. In offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian art by early nineteenth-century writers, Dr McCue illuminates the important role they played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism.

This volume comprises sixteen essays on the reception of Titian by British painters, collectors and critics in the long nineteenth century. The main focus falls on the first three decades of the century, in the aftermath of the exhibition of the celebrated Orleans collection in London in 1798-99. But the chronology extends from Reynolds and his contemporaries, around the time of the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, to the more diverse and complicated reactions of the Victorian age, and even into the twentieth century. This book was nominated on the long list for the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2014. This award was established in 2001 by the Berger Collection Educational Trust and The British Art Journal and is awarded annually to a book or exhibition catalogue that has made an outstanding contribution to the history of British art.

This innovative study analyses the presence of Ovid in contemporary women's writing through a series of insightful case studies of prominent female authors, from Ali Smith, Marina Warner, and Marie Darrieussecq, to Alice Oswald, Saviana Stãnescu, and Yoko Tawada. Using Ovid in their engagements with a wide range of issues besetting our twenty-first century world - homelessness, refugees, the financial crisis, internet porn, anorexia, body image - these writers echo the poet's preoccupation in his own work with fleeting fame, shape-shifting, and the dangers of immediate gratification, and make evident that these concerns are not only quintessentially modern, but also peculiarly Ovidian. Moving beyond the concern of second-wave feminism with recovering silenced female voices and establishing a female perspective within canonical works, the volume places particular emphasis on the intersections between Ovid's imaginative universe and the political and aesthetic agenda of third-wave feminism. Focusing on its subjects' socially and politically charged re-shapings, re-imaginings, and receptions of Ovid, it not only demonstrates the extraordinary plasticity of his writing, but also of its myriad re-castings and re-contextualizations within contemporary culture (in terms of genre alone, the works discussed included translations, poetry, plays, novels, short stories, and memoirs). In so doing, it not only offers us a valuable perspective on the work of the selected female authors and a new and vital landmark in the history of Ovidian reception, but also reveals to us an Ovid who remains our contemporary and an enduring source of inspiration.

'The Rape of Europa' is one of Titian's great masterpieces, a work charged with eroticism and classical mystique behind which lies a tale as compelling as the painting itself. Here Charles FitzRoy weaves a unique account of its history and the painting's movement following the rise and fall of the countries in which it has been housed. The story ranges from its place at the court of King Philip II of Spain, through French revolution and English intrigue, to its final move to America, engineered by the brilliant but devious art historian Bernard Berenson. This is the tale of how Titian's masterpiece has captivated kings, nobles, artists, and lovers alike for over four centuries since its conception and continues to do so today.

Titian is best known for paintings that embodied the tradition of the Venetian Renaissance—but how Venetian was the artist himself? In this study, Tom Nichols probes the tensions between the individualism of Titian’s work and the conservative mores of the city, showing how his art undermined the traditional self-suppressing approach to painting in Venice and reflected his engagement with the individualistic cultures emerging in the courts of early modern Europe. Ranging widely across Titian’s long career and varied works, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance outlines his radical innovations to the traditional Venetian altarpiece; his transformation of portraits into artistic creations; and his meteoric breakout from the confines of artistic culture in Venice. Nichols explores how Titian challenged the city’s communal values with his competitive professional identity, contending that his intensely personalized way of painting resulted in a departure that effectively brought an end to the Renaissance tradition of painting. Packed with 170 illustrations, this groundbreaking book will change the way people look at Titian and Venetian art history.

A celebration of one of the most important groups of Renaissance paintings