In this important and revelatory book, David Young Kim examines how mobility and travel affected the identities and artistic styles of artists such as Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian. It is well known that Italian Renaissance artists traveled; this book considers the cultural and historical contexts of their voyages. Kim establishes connections between artists’ travel and responses to their work in early modern literature, with critical analysis of 16th-century written culture. Relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari’s monumental Lives of the Artists are explored in depth. Through new readings of critical ideas, prejudices, and entire biographies in Renaissance art literature, Kim makes a groundbreaking case for the circuitous development of the artists’ individual styles, offering a complex understanding of how the concepts of mobility and identity were changing in a shifting and widening world.

An illuminating look at a fundamental yet understudied aspect of Italian Renaissance painting The Italian Renaissance picture is renowned for its depiction of the human figure, from the dramatic foreshortening of the body to create depth to the subtle blending of tones and colors to achieve greater naturalism. Yet these techniques rely on a powerful compositional element that often goes overlooked. Groundwork provides the first in-depth examination of the complex relationship between figure and ground in Renaissance painting. “Ground” can refer to the preparation of a work’s surface, the fictive floor or plane, or the background on which figuration occurs. In laying the material foundation, artists perform groundwork, opening the ground as a zone that can precede, penetrate, or fracture the figure. David Young Kim looks at the work of Gentile da Fabriano, Giovanni Bellini, Giovanni Battista Moroni, and Caravaggio, reconstructing each painter’s methods to demonstrate the intricacies involved in laying ground layers whose translucency and polychromy permeate the surface. He charts significant transitions from gold ground painting in the Trecento to the darkened grounds in Baroque tenebrism, and offers close readings of period texts to shed new light on the significance of ground forms such as rock face, wall, and cave. This beautifully illustrated book reconceives the Renaissance picture, revealing the passion and mystery of groundwork and discovering figuration beyond the human figure.

"The chronology of the Italian Renaissance, its character, and context have long been a topic of discussion among scholars. Some date its beginnings to the fourteenthcentury work of Giotto, others to the generation of Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Donatello that fl ourished from around 1400. The close of the Renaissance has also proved elusive. Mannerism, for example, is variously considered to be an independent (but subsidiary) late aspect of Renaissance style or a distinct style in its own right."

Known as the "century of anatomy," the 16th century in Italy saw an explosion of studies and treatises on the discipline. Medical science advanced at an unprecedented rate, and physicians published on anatomy as never before. Simultaneously, many of the period's most prominent artists--including Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, and Rubens working in Italy--turned to the study of anatomy to inform their own drawings and sculptures, some by working directly with anatomists and helping to illustrate their discoveries. The result was a rich corpus of art objects detailing the workings of the human body with an accuracy never before attained. "Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy "examines this crossroads between art and science, showing how the attempt to depict bone structure, musculature, and our inner workings--both in drawings and in three dimensions--constituted an important step forward in how the body was represented in art. While already remarkable at the time of their original publication, the anatomical drawings by 16th-century masters have even foreshadowed developments in anatomic studies in modern times.

Vivid images of the painter's work are accompanied by illuminating and detailed text written by William E. Wallace, the world-leading expert on Michelangelo.

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.

A fascinating and counterintuitive portrait of the sordid, hidden world behind the dazzling artwork of Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and more Renowned as a period of cultural rebirth and artistic innovation, the Renaissance is cloaked in a unique aura of beauty and brilliance. Its very name conjures up awe-inspiring images of an age of lofty ideals in which life imitated the fantastic artworks for which it has become famous. But behind the vast explosion of new art and culture lurked a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity, and corruption that has more in common with the present day than anyone dares to admit. In this lively and meticulously researched portrait, Renaissance scholar Alexander Lee illuminates the dark and titillating contradictions that were hidden beneath the surface of the period’s best-known artworks. Rife with tales of scheming bankers, greedy politicians, sex-crazed priests, bloody rivalries, vicious intolerance, rampant disease, and lives of extravagance and excess, this gripping exploration of the underbelly of Renaissance Italy shows that, far from being the product of high-minded ideals, the sublime monuments of the Renaissance were created by flawed and tormented artists who lived in an ever-expanding world of inequality, dark sexuality, bigotry, and hatred. The Ugly Renaissance is a delightfully debauched journey through the surprising contradictions of Italy’s past and shows that were it not for the profusion of depravity and degradation, history’s greatest masterpieces might never have come into being.