Renowned throughout Italy, as well as Europe, at his death in 1576, Titian was the pre-eminent artist of Venice during the sixteenth century. His importance has never been questioned and his works have been admired from his own day to the present. This Companion serves as an introduction to the prolific artist. Covering all aspects of his life and career, the anthology examines Titian's secular and religious painting, prints and pictures related to poetry, as well as his contributions to architecture.

Titian is best known for paintings that embodied the tradition of the Venetian Renaissance—but how Venetian was the artist himself? In this study, Tom Nichols probes the tensions between the individualism of Titian’s work and the conservative mores of the city, showing how his art undermined the traditional self-suppressing approach to painting in Venice and reflected his engagement with the individualistic cultures emerging in the courts of early modern Europe. Ranging widely across Titian’s long career and varied works, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance outlines his radical innovations to the traditional Venetian altarpiece; his transformation of portraits into artistic creations; and his meteoric breakout from the confines of artistic culture in Venice. Nichols explores how Titian challenged the city’s communal values with his competitive professional identity, contending that his intensely personalized way of painting resulted in a departure that effectively brought an end to the Renaissance tradition of painting. Packed with 170 illustrations, this groundbreaking book will change the way people look at Titian and Venetian art history.

This Companion volume brings together commissioned essays by an international team of scholars on Giovanni Bellini, the dominant painter of Early Renaissance Venice. Among the topics and themes to be discussed are Bellini's position in the social and professional life of early modern Venice; his artistic relationships with his brother-in-law Mantegna, with Flemish painting, and with the 'modern style' that emerged in Italy around 1500; and the connections between Bellini's paintings and the sister arts of architecture and sculpture. Further essays reassess the artist's approaches to landscape and color, elements that have always been recognized as central to his pictorial genius.

This book examines all facets of the High Renaissance painter Raphael.

The Renaissance in Italy continues to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination and on scholarly enquiry. This Companion presents a lively, comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and current approach to the period that extends in Italy from the turn of the fourteenth century through the latter decades of the sixteenth. Addressed to students, scholars, and non-specialists, it introduces the richly varied materials and phenomena as well as the different methodologies through which the Renaissance is studied today both in the English-speaking world and in Italy. The chapters are organized around axes of humanism, historiography, and cultural production, and cover a wide variety of areas including literature, science, music, religion, technology, artistic production, and economics. The diffusion of the Renaissance throughout Italian territories is emphasized. Overall, the Companion provides an essential overview of a period that witnessed both a significant revalidation of the classical past and the development of new, vernacular, and increasingly secular values.

Extends formalism to facture and situates the materiality of Titian's later works within the late sixteenth-century interest in embodiment and violence rather than within the Renaissance ideals of classicizing beauty and perfection.

Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605) is one of the classic texts of Western literature and the foundation of European fiction. Yet Cervantes himself remains an enigmatic figure. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes offers a comprehensive treatment of Cervantes life and work, including his lesser known writing. The essays, by some of the most outstanding scholars in the field, cover the historical and political context of Cervantes writing, his place in Renaissance culture, and the role of his masterpiece, Don Quixote, in the formation of the modern novel. They draw on contemporary critical perspectives to shed new light on Cervantes work, including the Exemplary Novels , the plays and dramatic interludes, and the long romances, Galatea and Persiles. The volume provides useful supporting material for students; suggestions for further reading, a detailed chronology, a complete list of his published writings, an overview of translations and editions, and a guide to electronic resources.