Leonardo da Vinci's arguments for the supremacy of painting over the arts of poetry, music, and sculpture address issues that have been relevant to debates over the nature of representation since the time Plato discussed imitation until today, maintains Claire Farago in this wide-ranging critical analysis of the first important modern contribution to the comparison of the arts. This study systematically examines 46 passages compiled in the mid-sixteenth century from eighteen of Leonardo's notebooks and their relationship to the artist's holograph writings on painting, providing a critical transcription newly made from the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas 1270 and a new English translation with extensive notes that take into account Leonardo's scientific terminology, the highly contrived form of his rhetorical argumentation, and the role played by his original editors.

"Preimesberger's incisive and erudite analysis of social history, biography, rhetoric, art theory, wordplay, and history illuminates these works anew, thus affording a modern audience a better understanding of the subtleties of their composition and meaning."--Jacket.

Offering an examination of the paragone, meaning artistic rivalry, in nineteenth-century France and England, this book considers how artists were impacted by prevailing aesthetic theories, or institutional and cultural paradigms, to compete in the art world. The paragone has been considered primarily in the context of Renaissance art history, but in this book readers will see how the legacy of this humanistic competitive model survived into the late nineteenth century.

In Elizabethan England, dramatists and painters were both achieving the greatest degree of artistic excellence yet witnessed, but they were also in a state of transition, vying for social status and patronage, as well as struggling against religious reformers' accusations of idolatry and eroticism. This interdisciplinary study brings to light the radical, inventive ways in which dramatists such as Shakespeare, Lyly, and Marston appropriated painting and subtly competed with painters to advance their own art and defend theater against Puritan attacks. They transformed painting into a provocative stage property and trope that enhanced the language of their scripts and the audience's imaginative participation in the drama. At the same time, they reflected a profound ambivalence towards painting by staging scenes with painters and pictures that emphasized the dangerous powers inherent in visual images and image-making.

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. Ekphrasis has been traditionally regarded as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection of essays seeks to complicate this critical paradigm and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect and intersubjectivity. Ekphrastic encounters brings together leading scholars working in the field of word-and-image studies and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. Taken together, the chapters establish a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter.

The only volume on the work of Vicente Carducho in English Analysis of the Dialogues on Painting by international experts Contributors are art historians or hispanists, offering a multi-disciplinary approach