Alexis R. Culotta explores how the Renaissance master’s recombination of visual sources ultimately served as a springboard for artistic innovation for his close associates as they collaborated in the years following Raphael’s death.

"In Tracing the Visual Language of Raphael's Circle to 1527, Alexis Culotta examines how the Renaissance master's style - one infused with borrowed visual quotations from other artists both past and present - proved influential in his relationship with associate Baldassare Peruzzi and in the development of the artists within his thriving workshop. Shedding new light on the important, yet often-overshadowed, figures within this network, this book calls upon key case studies to convincingly illustrate how this visual language and its recombination evolved during Raphael's Roman career and subsequently served as a springboard for artistic innovation for these close associates as they collaborated in the years following Raphael's death"--

This study explores the phenomenon of the cults of Raphael and Michelangelo in relation to their death, burial, and posthumous fame—or second life—from their own times through the nineteenth century. These two artists inspired fervent followings like no other artists before them. The affective response of those touched by the potency of the physical presence of their art- works, personal effects, and remains—or even touched by the power of their creative legacy—opened up new avenues for artistic fame, divination, and commemoration. Within this cultural framework, this study charts the elevation of the status of dozens of other artists in Italy through funerals and tomb memorialization, many of which were held and made in response to those of Raphael and Michelangelo. By bringing together disparate sources and engaging material as well as a variety of types of artworks and objects, this book will be of great interest to anyone who studies early modern Italy, art history, cultural history, and Italian studies.

The frescoes of Peruzzi, Raphael and Sodoma still dazzle visitors to the Villa Farnesina, but they survive in a stripped-down environment bereft of its landscape, sealed so it cannot breathe. Turner takes you outside that box, restoring these canonical images to their original context, when each element joined in a productive conversation. He is the first to reconstruct the architect-painter Peruzzi's original, well-proportioned, well-appointed building and to re-visualize his lost façade decoration‒erotic scenes and mythological figures who make it come alive and soar upward. More comprehensively than any previous scholar, he reintegrates painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, topographical prints and drawings, archaeological discoveries and literature from the brilliant circle around the patron Agostino Chigi, the powerful banker who 'loved all virtuosi' and commissioned his villa-palazzo from the best talents in multiple arts. It can now be understood as a Palace of Venus, celebrating aesthetic, social and erotic pleasure.

The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.

This volume gathers together recent research from leading scholars specializing in the history of collecting. American Southern art collections, both public and private, contain rich and representative holdings of Renaissance and Baroque art which remain understudied, compared to the collections bracketing the east and west coasts of the United States. This anthology considers how these works of art were acquired for both prominent public and private collections, how they have been curated and displayed in exhibitions, and how they have also been preserved historically. Individual essays address a variety of art media representative of the early modern period in Europe and the Americas. Case studies of specific works of art, collections, and collectors address the broad geographic scope of Southern collections, inclusive of Washington, DC, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas.

Frans Floris de Vriendt radically transformed Netherlandish art. His monumental mythologies introduced a new appreciation for the heroic nude to the Low Countries and his religious art challenged standards of decorum. Born into a family of sculptors and architects, Floris refashioned his art through travel, first studying with the humanist painter Lambert Lombard in Liège and then continuing on to Italy. These experiences defined the hybridizing novelty of his art, forged by juxtaposing antique and modern, Italian and northern sources. This book maps Floris’s hybrid style onto shifting conceptions of cultural, religious, and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt. It explores his collaborations and rivalries, engagement with artistic theory, hierarchical workshop, and revolutionary use of print.