Customised Books in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400‒1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of alterations made by users to the physical structure of their book, through insertion or interpolation, subtraction or deletion, adjustments in the ordering of folios or quires, amendments of image or text. Although our primary interest is in printed books and print series bound like books, we also consider selected manuscripts since meaningful alterations made to incunabula and early printed books often followed the patterns such changes took in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century codices. Throughout Customised Books the emphasis falls on the hermeneutic functions of the modifications made by makers and users to their manuscripts and books. Contributors: B. Boler Hunter, T. Cummins, A. Dlabačova, K.A.E. Enenkel, C.D. Fletcher, P.F. Gehl, P. Germano Leal, J. Kiliańczyk-Zięba, J. Koguciuk, A. van Leerdam, S. Leitch, S. McKeown, W.S. Melion, K. Michael, S. Midanik, B. Purkaple, J. Rosenholtz-Witt, B.L. Rothstein, M.R. Wade, and G. Warnar.

The large-scale building projects of artists Martha Fleming & Lyne Lapointe are legendary in certain circles. And yet, because of the independent nature of their production, a comprehensive overview of this seminal work has not yet been published. This book fills that gap. A document, a bookwork, a manifesto, Studiolo explores the extensive and varied creative process of this collaborative pair. It covers not only the site works produced for entire abandoned buildings in Montréal and New York City, but also the discursive underpinnings of their fifteen-year practice. The artists' image research and aesthetic are part and parcel of showing and telling in Studiolo - itself a work of art.

Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Andrea Odoni is one of the most famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Son of an immigrant and a member of the non-noble citizen class, Odoni understood how the power of art could make a name for himself and his family in his adopted homeland. Far from emulating Venetian patricians, however, he set himself apart through the works he collected and the way he displayed them. In this book, Monika Schmitter imaginatively reconstructs Odoni's house – essentially a 'portrait' of Odoni through his surroundings and possessions. Schmitter's detailed analysis of Odoni's life and portrait reveals how sixteenth-century individuals drew on contemporary ideas about spirituality, history, and science to forge their own theories about the power of things and the agency of object. She shows how Lotto's painting served as a meta-commentary on the practice of collecting and on the ability of material things to transform the self.

The studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio, Italy, demonstrate architecture's capacity to transact between the mental and physical realms of human experience. Constructed between 1474 and 1483 for the military captain Federico da Montefeltro and his young motherless son, the studioli may be described as treasuries of emblems: they contain not things but images of things, rendered with remarkable perspectival exactitude. These small, image-filled chambers reflect how architecture and its ornament equipped a quattrocento mind with metaphors for wisdom and methods for statecraft and intellectual activity. Drawing on the densely layered imagery in the studioli and text sources readily available to the Urbino court, Robert Kirkbride examines the position of the studioli in the Western tradition of the memory arts, considering how architecture bridged the mathematical arts, which lent themselves to mechanical pursuits, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline central to memory and eloquence. As subtle ramifications of material and mental craft, the studioli provided ideal methods for education and prudent governance, extending an ancient legacy of open-ended models that were conceived to activate the imagination and exercise the memory. At the time of their construction, the studioli represented the leading edge of technologies of visual representation and offer a case study of how contemporary advances in interactive technologies reactivate and transform ancient metaphors for thought and learning.

Where and how an artwork is presented can enhance it or detract from it - painting and sculpture can denote a religious, political, decorative, or educational significance, as well as aesthetic and commercial value. Just how powerful the effect of placement can be is demonstrated in this book by case studies and comparisons of art installations.

This volume presents the proceedings of an international symposium organized by the Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The first conference of its kind in twenty years, the symposium assembled an international group of conservators of painted panels, and gave them the opportunity to discuss their philosophies and share their work methods. Illustrated in color throughout, this volume presents thirty-one papers grouped into four topic areas: Wood Science and Technology, History of Panel-Manufacturing Techniques, History of the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings, and Current Approaches to the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings.