Awe-inspiring classics become accessible, captivating stories thanks to this investigation into the covert world of Renaissance masterpieces. From Botticelli to Michelangelo, delve into the works of Italian masters like never before. Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen meticulously dissect 12 key pieces alongside analytical essays and enlarged details...

Masterpieces under the microscope: Paintings' hidden secrets revealed This important addition to our understanding of art history's masterworks puts some of the world's most famous paintings under a magnifying glass, to help us look much, much closer at images we might have thought we knew well. Guiding our eye to the minutiae of subject and symbolism, Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen help us become detectives of details, solving the mysteries of a masterpiece through its most small and subtle elements. Is the bride pregnant? Why is just one candle burning in the chandelier? And what does the mirror in the background reveal? As they address these and many more intricacies in some of art's most celebrated scenes, the authors not only offer us a vastly enriched appreciation of these paintings, but also shed light on the fashions and lifestyles, loves and intrigues, politics and people that first informed and inspired these works. Delve in and be dazzled, as even the most familiar panels and canvases come alive anew in all the intricacies of their composition and in a very real sense of context of time and place.

"Many famous artworks of the Italian Renaissance were made to celebrate love, marriage, and family. They were the pinnacles of a tradition, dating from early in the era, of commemorating betrothals, marriages, and the birth of children by commissioning extraordinary objects - maiolica, glassware, jewels, textiles, paintings - that were often also exchanged as gifts. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of artworks arising from Renaissance rituals of love and marriage and makes a major contribution to our understanding of Renaissance art in its broader cultural context. The impressive range of works gathered in these pages extends from birth trays painted in the early fifteenth century to large canvases on mythological themes that Titian painted in the mid-1500s. Each work of art would have been recognized by contemporary viewers for its prescribed function within the private, domestic domain."--BOOK JACKET.

Zuffi reveals the world of the Renaissance masters in a new and rich light. Each spread uses an important painting as a way to explain a key concept. Includes brief biographies of the major artists, provided an accessible introduction to the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance.

These are the kinds of question Rose-Marie and Rainer Hagen ask when faced with world-famous masterpieces. In the language of today they comment on the fashions and attitudes, trends and intrigues, love, vice and lifestyles of past times. Book jacket.

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

"The chronology of the Italian Renaissance, its character, and context have long been a topic of discussion among scholars. Some date its beginnings to the fourteenthcentury work of Giotto, others to the generation of Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Donatello that fl ourished from around 1400. The close of the Renaissance has also proved elusive. Mannerism, for example, is variously considered to be an independent (but subsidiary) late aspect of Renaissance style or a distinct style in its own right."