The first monograph entirely devoted to the illuminated manuscripts of Sister Eufrasia Burlamacchi (1478-1548), this book demonstrates that her artistry should not be confined to painting or sculpture alone. Within the convent walls of San Domenico in Lucca where she lived and worked, Burlamacchi attained high levels of artistic proficiency ......
Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed. This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called the age of the consciousness soul, which ......
Previously unpublished, Camillo Palladini's discourse on fencing is crucial to a modern understanding of Italian renaissance rapier play. This stunning illustrated book, a joint endeavour between the Royal Armouries and the Wallace Collection, reproduces every page of the original manuscript alongside a new transcription and translation.
The Lives of Desert Saints in Fourteenth-Century Italy
During the fourteenth century in Western Europe, there was a growing interest in imitating the practices of a group of hermits known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Laypeople and religious alike learned about their rituals not only through readings from the Vitae patrum (Lives of the Desert Fathers) and sermons but also through the images that ......
A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones
In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. Lorenzo de' Medici, Philip II of Spain, and Popes Leo X and Clement VII were all treated with expensive potions incorporating ground gems such as rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. Medical and ......
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Japan sent its first diplomatic delegations to visit the popes and dignitaries of Europe. European artists portrayed these historic ambassadors-the Tensho embassy (1582-90) and the Keicho embassy (1613-20)-in numerous oil paintings, frescoes, drawings, and prints. Envisioning Diplomacy ......
Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In ......
Art, Animals, and European Court Culture, 1400-1550
Animal Sightings challenges two common ideas about the depiction of animals in early modern European court art: first, that the human figure relegated animals to peripheral and often symbolic roles, both compositionally and conceptually, and second, that the representation of animals during this period was predominantly tied to a growing interest ......
