"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.

"Focuses primarliy on the social and historical context in which art was made and used"--Bibliographic essay (p. 326).

Gratuitous sex. Graphic violence. Lies, revenge, and murder. Before there was digital cable or reality television, there was Renaissance Italy and the courts in which Italian magistrates meted out justice to the vicious and the villainous, the scabrous and the scandalous. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy retells six piquant episodes from the Italian court just after 1550, as the Renaissance gave way to an era of Catholic reformation. Each of the chapters in this history chronicles a domestic drama around which the lives of ordinary Romans are suddenly and violently altered. You might read the gruesome murder that opens the book—when an Italian noble takes revenge on his wife and her bastard lover as he catches them in delicto flagrante—as straight from the pages of Boccaccio. But this tale, like the other stories Cohen recalls here, is true, and its recounting in this scintillating work is based on assiduous research in court proceedings kept in the state archives in Rome. Love and Death in Renaissance Italy contains stories of a forbidden love for an orphan nun, of brothers who cruelly exact a will from their dying teenage sister, and of a malicious papal prosecutor who not only rapes a band of sisters, but turns their shambling father into a pimp! Cohen retells each cruel episode with a blend of sly wit and warm sympathy and then wraps his tales in ruminations on their lessons, both for the history of their own time and for historians writing today. What results is a book at once poignant and painfully human as well as deliciously entertaining.

"The Garden of Love is an important subject in secular art of the fifteenth century, both in Italy and in northern Europe. The chief Italian examples were all painted in Tuscany in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. They depict a landscape consisting of a flowery meadow, a grove, and a great marble fountain, where lovers gather to sing, dance, and make love. Allied to the Garden of Love are variations on a horticultural theme--gardens for lovers celebrated in history, fountains of love, hunts set in a forest that conclude alongside a fountain. Sometimes, too, the Garden of Love becomes the setting for narratives and romances. In all these instances the Garden is more than a pleasing tapestry like backdrop: it serves as a visible symbol of the nature of love itself. This book illustrated with 97 excellent photographs, attempts to do two things ; to chart the history of the Garden of Love, and explain the significance it once had." -- Book jacket.

Even many Renaissance specialists believe that little secular painting survives before the late fifteenth century, and its appearance becomes a further argument for the secularizing of art. This book asks how history changes when a longer record of secular art is explored. It is the first study in any language of the decoration of Italian palaces and homes between 1300 and the mid-Quattrocento, and it argues that early secular painting was crucial to the development of modern ideas of art. Of the cycles discussed, some have been studied and published, but most are essentially unknown. A first aim is to enrich our understanding of the early Renaissance by introducing a whole corpus of secular painting that has been too long overlooked. Yet "Painted palaces" is not a study of iconography. In examining the prehistory of painted rooms like Mantegna's Camera Picta, the larger goal is to rethink the history of early Renaissance art.

This is the first book which gives a general overview of women as subject-matter in Italian Renaissance painting. It presents a view of the interaction between artist and patron, and also of the function of these paintings in Italian society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Using letters, poems, and treatises, it examines through the eyes of the contemporary viewer the way women were represented in paintings.

Between the 'Black Death' in the mid-fourteenth century and the French invasions at the end of the fifteenth, artists such as Masaccio, Donatello, Fra Angelico, and Leonardo, working in the kingdoms, princedoms, and republics of the Italian peninsula, created some of the most influential andexciting works in a variety of artistic fields. Yet the traditional story of the Renaissance has been dramatically revised in the light of new scholarship, and new issues have greatly enriched our understanding of the period. Emphasis has been placed on recreating the experience of contemporary Italians - the patrons who commissioned the works,the members of the public who viewed them, and the artists who produced them. In this book Evelyn Welch presents a fresh picture of the Italian Renaissance. Giving equal weight to the Italian regions outside Florence, she discusses a wide range of works, from paintings to coins, and from sculptures to tapestries, examines the issues of materials, workshop practises, andartist-patron relationships, and explores the ways in which visual imagery related to contemporary sexual, social and political behaviour.