Lavinia Fontana’s Mythological Paintings

Lavinia Fontana’s Mythological Paintings
Author: Liana De Girolami Cheney
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2020-08-18
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1527558274

This volume investigates emblematic and art-historical issues in Lavinia Fontana’s mythological paintings. Fontana is the first female painter of the sixteenth century in Italy to depict female nudes, as well as mythological and emblematic paintings associated with concepts of beauty and wisdom. Her paintings reveal an appropriation of the antique, a fusion between patronage and culture, and a humanistic pursuit of Mannerist conceits. Fontana’s secular imagery provides a challenging paragone with the male tradition of history painting during the sixteenth century and paves the way for new subjects to be depicted and interpreted by female painters of the seventeenth century.

Nomad

Nomad
Author: Sibella Court
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2012-08-17
Genre: House & Home
ISBN: 1452120188

“A rich-tapestry celebration of [Court’s] meanderings—from Japan to Italy, Syria to Mexico and India . . . Essential for anyone who adores travel.” —Australian Women Online In this deluxe guide, celebrated designer Sibella Court travels the world in search of eclectic inspiration. She explores far-flung destinations and captures the essence of each in small details, exotic color palettes, exquisite textures, and traditional crafts. Along the way, she shows readers how to incorporate these elements into interiors and how to replicate the ideas in their own spaces. Overflowing with imaginative ideas from across the globe with breathtaking photos of each destination accompanied by examples of gorgeous real-life interiors, plus tips for applying the looks at home Nomad promises to serve as the ultimate lookbook for designers and wanderers the world over. “Stylist Sibella Court shows us how to bring our travels home with us in the most unexpected of ways. She has travelled to Syria, Mexico, Italy, India and Japan to be inspired by everything from door knobs and street signs to roadside shrines and household brooms. The ideas, photographs and mementos she collected are used to inspire room settings, illustrating simple, practical and surprising ways to be reminded of your travel experiences.” —The House Directory “Sibella Court shows us how to incorporate the objects you collected during your travels in your interior. Again, this is not a step-by-step book but rather a book to get ideas and make them your own. It also makes you aware of what to bring with you from your journeys be it textiles, traditional crafts or small details that capture the essence of a foreign place.” —30s Magazine

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.

Possessing Nature

Possessing Nature
Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 1994-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520917782

In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory. Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.

The Amateurs

The Amateurs
Author: Jordan Harrison
Publisher: Concord Theatricals
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2019
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 0573707847

An intrepid troupe of pageant players races across medieval Europe, struggling to outrun the Black Death. The arrival of a mysterious outsider sends Hollis, the leading lady, in search of answers that can only be found off-script... and soon the 14th century plague begins to look like another, more recent one. This wildly inventive and funny new work examines the evolution of human creativity in a dark age: when does a crisis destroy us, and when does it open new frontiers?

Cabinet of Curiosities

Cabinet of Curiosities
Author: Colleen Josephine Sheehy
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2006
Genre: Cabinets of curiosities
ISBN: 9781452908939

Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750

Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750
Author: Lorraine Daston
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 520
Release: 1998-05
Genre: History
ISBN:

Discusses how European scientists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonders, monsters, curiosities, marvels, and other phenomena to envision the natural world.