In recent years, historians of early modern Italian art have begun to delve into issues surrounding patronage, production, materials and materiality. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors and patrons dealt with the practical and esoteric issues of material choices and acquisition, production, shipping and transportation, and the changing meanings of sculptures. The epilogue reveals continuity in the challenges artists face today as they move large sculptures around the globe.

In recent years, art historians have begun to delve into the patronage, production and reception of sculptures-sculptors' workshop practices; practical, aesthetic, and esoteric considerations of material and materiality; and the meanings associated with materials and the makers of sculptures. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors in early modern Italy confronted such challenges as procurement of materials, their costs, shipping and transportation issues, and technical problems of materials, along with the meanings of the usage, hierarchies of materials, and processes of material acquisition and production. Contributors also explore the implications of these facets in terms of the intended and perceived meaning(s) for the viewer, patron, and/or artist. A highlight of the collection is the epilogue, an interview with a contemporary artist of large-scale stone sculpture, which reveals the similar challenges sculptors still encounter today as they procure, manufacture and transport their works.

This collection of essays by major scholars in the field explores how the rich intersections between Italy and Spain during the early modern period resulted in a confluence of cultural ideals. Various means of exchange and convergence are explored through two main catalysts: humans—their trips or resettlements—and objects—such as books, paintings, sculptures, and prints. The visual and textual evidence of the transmission of ideas, iconographies and styles are examined, such as triumphal ephemera, treatises on painting, the social status of the artist, collections and their display, church decoration, and funerary monuments, providing a more nuanced understanding of the exchanges of styles, forms and ideals across southern Europe.

The first book-length study of the fifteen surviving Little Gidding bible concordances, this book examines the visual culture of print in seventeenth-century England through the lens of one extraordinary family and their hand-made biblical manuscripts. The volumes were created by the women of the Ferrar-Collet family of Little Gidding, who selected works from the family's collection of Catholic religious prints, and then cut and pasted prints and print fragments, along with verses excised from the bible, and composed them in artful arrangements on the page in the manner of collage. Gaudio shows that by cutting, recombining, and pasting multi-scaled print fragments, the Ferrar-Collet family put into practice a remarkably flexible pictorial language. The Little Gidding concordances provide an occasion to explore how the manipulation of print could be a means of thinking through some of the most pressing religious and political questions of the pre-civil war period: the coherence of printed scripture, the nature of sovereignty, the relevance of the Mosaic law, and the protestant reform of images. By foregrounding the Ferrar-Collets' engagement with the print fragment, this book extends the scope of early modern print history beyond the printmaker's studio and expands our understanding of the ways an early modern Protestant community could productively engage with the religious image. Contrary to the long-held view that the English Reformation led to a decline in the importance of the religious image, this study demonstrates the ongoing vitality of religious prints in early modern England as instruments for thinking.

This collection of essays explores hybridity in early modern art through two primary lenses: hybrid media and hybrid time. The varied approaches in the volume to theories of hybridity reflect the increased presence in art historical scholarship of interdisciplinary frameworks that extend art historical inquiry beyond the single time or material. The essays engage with what happens when an object is considered beyond the point of origin or as a legend of information, the implications of the juxtaposition of disparate media, how the meaning of an object alters over time, and what the conspicuous use of out-of-date styles means for the patron, artist, and/or viewer. Essays examine both canonical and lesser-known works produced by European artists in Italy, northern Europe, and colonial Peru, ca. 1400–1600. The book will be of interest to art historians, visual culture historians, and early modern historians.

New Diplomatic History has turned into one of the most dynamic and innovative areas of research – especially with regard to early modern history. It has shown that diplomacy was not as homogenous as previously thought. On the contrary, it was shaped by a multitude of actors, practices and places. The handbook aims to characterise these different manifestations of diplomacy and to contextualise them within ongoing scientific debates. It brings together scholars from different disciplines and historiographical traditions. The handbook deliberately focuses on European diplomacy – although non-European areas are taken into account for future research – in order to limit the framework and ensure precise definitions of diplomacy and its manifestations. This must be the prerequisite for potential future global historical perspectives including both the non-European and the European world.

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Early Modern Spanish Literature and Culture introduces the intellectual and artistic breadth of early modern Spain from a range of disciplinary and critical perspectives. Spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a period traditionally known as the Golden Age), the volume examines topics including political and scientific culture, literary and artistic innovations, and religious and social identities and institutions in transformation. The 36 chapters of the volume include both expert overviews of key topics and figures from the period as well as new approaches to understudied questions and materials. This invaluable resource will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in Hispanic studies, as well as Renaissance and early modern studies more generally.

Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.

This book explores the cultural exchange between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century, examining Spanish collectors’ predilection for Italian painting and its influence on Spanish painters. Focused on collecting and using a novel methodology, this volume studies how the painters of the Sevillian school, including Francisco Pacheco, Diego Velázquez, Alonso Cano and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, perceived and were influenced by Italian painting. Through many examples, it is shown how the presence in Andalusia of various works and copies of works by artists such as Michelangelo, Caravaggio and Guido Reni inspired famous compositions by these Spanish artists. In addition, the book delves into the historical, political and social context of this period. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and Italian and Spanish history.

Sebastiano del Piombo (c.1485-1547) was a close associate and rival of the central artistic figures of the High Renaissance, notably Michelangelo and Raphael. After the death of Raphael and the departure of Michelangelo from Rome, Sebastiano became the dominant artistic personality in the city. Despite being one of most significant artistic figures of the period, he remains the last artist of major importance in the western canon about whom no recent work has been published in English. In this study, Piers Baker-Bates approaches Sebastiano?s career through analysis of the patrons he attracted following his arrival at Rome. The first half of the book concentrates on Sebastiano?s network of patrons, predominantly Italian, who had strong factional ties to the Imperial camp; the second half discusses Sebastiano?s relationship with his principal Spanish patrons. Sebastiano is a leading example of a transcultural artist in the sixteenth century and his relationship with Spain was fundamental to the development of his careerThe author investigates the domination of Sebastiano?s career by patrons who had geographically different origins, but who were all were members of a wider network of Imperial loyalties. Thus Baker-Bates removes Sebastiano from the shadow of his contemporaries, bringing him to life for the reader as an artistic personality in his own right. Baker-Bates? characterization of the Rome in which Sebastiano made his career differs from previous scholarly accounts, and he describes how Sebastiano was ideally suited to flourish in the environment he depicts.Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome thus re-appraises not only Sebastiano?s place in the canon of Renaissance art but, using him as a lens, also the cultural worlds of Early Modern Italy and Spain in which he operated.