In color, the rest in duotone; there are also eighty comparative illustrations.

In color, the rest in duotone; there are also eighty comparative illustrations.

This issue of Museum Studies focuses on the Art Institute of Chicago's impressive collection of Old Master paintings, works on paper, textiles, tapestries, and sculptures. With an introduction by Larry J. Feinberg on the growth and evolution of the museum's Old Master collection, the book includes five fascinating and richly illustrated essays written by museum curators and scholars. They examine recent acquisitions and present new discoveries and scholarship on a range of works--including a recently rediscovered Nativity by Fra Bartolommeo; a late-15th-century Hispano-Flemish sculpture of Saint Michael and the Devil; a series of reattributed drawings by 17th-century artists such as Guido Reni and Guercino; a pair of early-18th-century tapestries designed by the French artist Charles LeBrun; and a stunning group of works by Charles-Antoine Coypel, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, and Maurice Quentin de La Tour, the preeminent pastellists of 18th-century France. Distributed for the Art Institute of Chicago

"Publisdhed in conjuntion with the exhibition: Magnificenza! the Medici, Michelangelo, & the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (In Italy, L'Ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l'arte a Firenze, 1538-1631) ..."--Title page verso.

Tracing the history of St. Antoninus' cult and burial from the time of his death in 1459 until his remains were moved to their final resting place in 1589, this interdisciplinary study demonstrates that the saint's relic cult was a key element of Florence's sacred cityscape. The works of art created in his honor, as well as the rituals practiced at his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century places of burial, advertised Antoninus' saintly power and persona to the people who depended upon his intercessory abilities to negotiate life's challenges. Drawing on a rich variety of contemporary visual, literary, and archival sources, this volume explores the ways in which shifting political, familial, and ecclesiastical aims and agendas shaped the ways in which St. Antoninus' holiness was broadcast to those who visited his burial church. Author Sally Cornelison foregrounds the visual splendor of the St. Antoninus Chapel, which was designed, built, and decorated by Medici court artist Giambologna and his collaborators between 1579 and 1591. Her research sheds new light on the artist, whose secular and mythological sculptures have received far more scholarly attention than his religious works. Cornelison draws on social and religious history, patronage and gender studies, and art historical and anthropological inquiries into the functions and meanings of images, relics, and ritual performance, to interpret how they activated St. Antoninus' burial sites and defined them in ways that held multivalent meanings for a broad audience of viewers and devotees. Among the objects for which she provides visual and contextual analyses are a banner from the saint's first tomb, early printed and painted images, and the sculptures, frescoes, panel paintings, and embroidered textiles made for the present St. Antoninus Chapel.

For too long, the ?centre? of the Renaissance has been considered to be Rome and the art produced in, or inspired by it. This collection of essays dedicated to Deborah Howard brings together an impressive group of internationally recognised scholars of art and architecture to showcase both the diversity within and the porosity between the ?centre? and ?periphery? in Renaissance art. Without abandoning Rome, but together with other centres of art production, the essays both shift their focus away from conventional categories and bring together recent trends in Renaissance studies, notably a focus on cultural contact, material culture and historiography. They explore the material mechanisms for the transmission and evolution of ideas, artistic training and networks, as well as the dynamics of collaboration and exchange between artists, theorists and patrons. The chapters, each with a wealth of groundbreaking research and previously unpublished documentary evidence, as well as innovative methodologies, reinterpret Italian art relating to canonical sites and artists such as Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Sebastiano del Piombo, in addition to showcasing the work of several hitherto neglected architects, painters, and an inimitable engineer-inventor.

"This volume celebrates the construction of the largest expansion in the history of the Art Institute of Chicago. Designed by Renzo Piano, principal of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with offices in Paris and Genoa, the Modern Wing adds a bold new Modernist structure to Chicago's downtown lakefront area, directly across the street from the successful Millennium Park and its major feature, the Jay Pritzker Pavilion designed by Frank Gehry." "The story of the Modern Wing - from its commissioning in 1999, to its groundbreaking in 2005, to its dedication in May 2009 - is told in this volume by the Art Institute's president and directory, James Cuno. In addition, well-known architecture critic Paul Goldberger places the Modern Wing in the context of the Art Institute's existing buildings and its many additions through the years. Throughout this book, the many remarkable features of the Modern Wing - its galleries and grand spaces, its "flying carpet" and its enclosed garden - are celebrated in the photographs of Paul Warchol." --Book Jacket.

. By way of introduction to the objects themselves are three essays. The first, by Laurence B. Kanter, presents an overview of Florentine illumination between 1300 and 1450 and thumbnail sketches of the artists featured in this volume. The second essay, by Barbara Drake Boehm, focuses on the types of books illuminators helped to create. As most of them were liturgical, her contribution limns for the modern reader the medieval religious ceremonies in which the manuscripts were utilized. Carl Brandon Strehlke here publishes important new material about Fra Angelico's early years and patrons - the result of the author's recent archival research in Florence.