Mark J Millard Architectural Collection 04 Italian and Spanish Bo

Mark J Millard Architectural Collection 04 Italian and Spanish Bo
Author: Martha D Pollak
Publisher: George Braziller Publishers
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2001-02-06
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780807614785

The Mark J. Millard Architectural Collection is one of the finest private collections of rare illustrated books and bound series of prints on Western European architecture, design, and topography. Comprised of about 750 volumes now housed at the National Gallery of Art, it focuses on the most beautiful and influential books and prints published between the end of the fifteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century. Each architectural volume has been carefully described and illustrated, and includes, in addition to a catalogue entry, a complete bibliography. This final volume in the extraordinary Millard Architectural Collection features architectural books that helped define the artistic achievements of the Italian Renaissance. Included are illustrations from Vitruvius' De architectura, the treatise that provided architects with their first in-depth understanding of ancient Roman architecture, and works by architects inspired by Vitruvius, such as Leon Battista Alberti's designs for Santa Maria Novella in Florence and Andrea Palladio's ideally proportioned churches and country villas. This volume also features plans for buildings in Rome by Michelangelo, by the great architect, painter, and sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, by his arch-rival Francesco Borromini, by Carlo Fontana, and by Antonio da Sangallo, and includes superb examples of various projects for arguably the pre-eminent architectural project of the period, the redesign of the building and piazza of Saint Peter's Basilica. Standard texts by Sebastiano Serlio and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola are also featured, as are several books published in Madrid in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A highlight of the catalogue is an essay covering the approximately thirty books in the Gallery's collection by the architect and masterful printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi. 300 b/w illustrations.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Author: Boston, Mass. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300063417

"This book takes you through the collection gallery by gallery, illuminating the art and installations in each room"--From preface.

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance
Author: Marina Belozerskaya
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2005-10-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892367857

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.

Dilettanti

Dilettanti
Author: Bruce Redford
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2008-08-07
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892369248

Bruce Redford re-creates the vibrant culture of connoisseurship in Enlightenment England by investigating the multifaceted activities and achievements of the Society of Dilettani. Elegantly and wittily he dissects the British connoisseurs whose expeditions, collections, and publications laid the groundwork for the Neoclassical revival and for the scholarly study of Graeco-Roman antiquity. After the foundation of the society in 1732, the Dilettani commissioned portraits of the members. Including a striking group of mock-classical and mock-religious representations, these portraits were painted by George Knapton, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir Thomas Lawrence. During the second half of the century, the society’s expeditions to the Levant yielded a series of pioneering architectural folios, beginning with the first volume The Antiquities of Athens in 1762. These monumental volumes aspired to empirical exactitude in text and image alike. They prepared the way for Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809), which combines the didactic (detailed investigations into technique, condition, restoration, and provenance) with the connoisseurial (plates that bring the illustration of ancient sculpture to new artistic heights). The Society of Dilettanti’s projects and publications exemplify the Enlightenment ideal of the gentleman amateur, which is linked in turn to a culture of wide-ranging curiosity.

The International Style

The International Style
Author: Henry Russell Hitchcock
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 280
Release: 1995
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780393315189

The most influential work of architectural criticism and history of the twentieth century, now available in a handsomely designed new edition.

Dosso's Fate

Dosso's Fate
Author: Dosso Dossi
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 436
Release: 1998
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780892365050

Dosso Dossi has long been considered one of Renaissance Italy's most intriguing artists. Although a wealth of documents chronicles his life, he remains, in many ways, an enigma, and his art continues to be as elusive as it is compelling. In Dosso's Fate, leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines examine the social, intellectual, and historical contexts of his art, focusing on the development of new genres of painting, questions of style and chronology, the influence of courtly culture, and the work of his collaborators, as well as his visual and literary sources and his painting technique. The result is an important and original contribution not only to literature on Dosso Dossi but also to the study of cultural history in early modern Italy.