In City Views in the Habsburg and Medici Courts, Ryan E. Gregg relates how Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, and Duke Cosimo I of Tuscany employed city view artists such as Anton van den Wyngaerde and Giovanni Stradano to aid in constructing authority. These artists produced a specific style of city view that shared affinity with Renaissance historiographic practice in its use of optical evidence and rhetorical techniques. History has tended to see city views as accurate recordings of built environments. Bringing together ancient and Renaissance texts, archival material, and fieldwork in the depicted locations, Gregg demonstrates that a close-knit school of city view artists instead manipulated settings to help persuade audiences of the truthfulness of their patrons’ official narratives.

What is the relation between image practices and the iconic power of flying and more specifically falconry? The book investigates for the first time this interaction by focussing on common intersections between culture and nature, vision and gaze, tactility and perception, perspective and surveillance, material and symbol. Also questions concerning political iconology, the migration of objects and images of human-animal interactions are addressed. With contributions by Baudouin van den Abeele, Horst Bredekamp, Robert Felfe, Peter Geimer, Yannis Hadjinicolaou, Christine Kleiter, Klaus Krüger, Tanja Michalsky, Andrea Pinotti, Herman Roodenburg, Monika Wagner, Gerhard Wolf and Frank Zöllner.

Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed. Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations, impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks in which human and non-human elements continually interact and acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices, shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of cities on knowledge production and innovation. Providing the ideal starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and the development of the so-called ‘modern’ knowledge society, this is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern history and knowledge.

The history of cities is also the history of city squares. The agora, the forum, the piazza, the plaza: All presuppose the idea of a center. It’s a material and mental phenomenon. Literature is an important part of this history, and the interplay between the square as physical space and the square as literature is the topic of this book. This is an encyclopedic book combining an overview of the history of city squares with a plethora of analytical examples of its reflection in literature: Literature uses the city square as a frame; city squares serve as frames for drama; novels and other kinds of literature comment on city squares; city squares are sources of inspiration for all sorts of literary activities. Socrates in the agora, Cicero in the Forum, Calderón in the Plaza Mayor, Corneille in the Place Royale, Richardson in Grosvenor Square, James in Washington Square, Woolf in Bloomsbury Square, Döblin and Gröschner in Alexanderplatz, Rodoreda in Diamond Square in Barcelona, DeLillo in Times Square, Al Aswany in Tahrir Square, the Maidanistas in the Maidan of Kyiv: These are just some of the examples presented and analyzed in this book. The book is of direct interest for researchers, students, and professionals such as architects and urban planners, but it is written in a way that makes it accessible for all readers with an interest in urban culture, architecture, history, literature, and cultural studies.

Painting Flanders Abroad: Flemish Art and Artists in Seventeenth-Century Madrid traces how Flemish immigrant painters and imported Flemish paintings fundamentally transformed the development of Spanish taste, collecting, and art production in the Spanish “Golden Age.”

A look at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political and artistic changes of the era In the long eighteenth century, artists from Udaipur, a city of lakes in northwestern India, specialized in depicting the vivid sensory ambience of its historic palaces, reservoirs, temples, bazaars, and durbars. As Mughal imperial authority weakened by the late 1600s and the British colonial economy became paramount by the 1830s, new patrons and mobile professionals reshaped urban cultures and artistic genres across early modern India. The Place of Many Moods explores how Udaipur’s artworks—monumental court paintings, royal portraits, Jain letter scrolls, devotional manuscripts, cartographic artifacts, and architectural drawings—represent the period’s major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts. Dipti Khera shows that these immersive objects powerfully convey the bhava—the feel, emotion, and mood—of specific places, revealing visions of pleasure, plenitude, and praise. These memorialized moods confront the ways colonial histories have recounted Oriental decadence, shaping how a culture and time are perceived. Illuminating the close relationship between painting and poetry, and the ties among art, architecture, literature, politics, ecology, trade, and religion, Khera examines how Udaipur’s painters aesthetically enticed audiences of courtly connoisseurs, itinerant monks, and mercantile collectives to forge bonds of belonging to real locales in the present and to long for idealized futures. Their pioneering pictures sought to stir such emotions as love, awe, abundance, and wonder, emphasizing the senses, spaces, and sociability essential to the efficacy of objects and expressions of territoriality. The Place of Many Moods uncovers an influential creative legacy of evocative beauty that raises broader questions about how emotions and artifacts operate in constituting history and subjectivity, politics and place.