Fusing the social and economic history with the cultural and artistic achievements of seventeenth and eighteenth century Italy, this book presents a unique and invaluable perspective on the period.

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

A well-illustrated study of the patronage that allowed the fledging art colony in northern New Mexico to flourish.

"Lovell delights, astonishes, and challenges us with her insightful new readings of early American paintings and material culture objects."--"Journal of the Early Republic"

This broad and lively anthology reveals the breadth of his influence and the vitality of the field of Native American art history.

This essay collection features innovative scholarship on women artists and patrons in the Netherlands 1500-1700. Covering painting, printmaking, and patronage, authors highlight the contributions of women art makers in the Netherlands, showing that women were prominent as creators in their own time and deserve to be recognized as such today.

The fresco decoration of the Royal Chapel in Pyrga on Cyprus is usually dated 1421. The coat of arms featuring the Cross of Jerusalem and the lion rampant points to royal French commissioners, namely members of the Lusignan dynasty. Western, French patronage left its imprint on this chapel in terms of architecture and pictorial decoration - although within a complex Cypriot frame. The study presents iconographical and stylistic evidence supporting a much earlier dating into the first half or the middle of the fourteenth century. The choice of scenes (with French tituli) has no comprehensive model on Cyprus. Significant western additions and variations distinguish this Lusignan program from other indigenous Cypriot predecessors and contemporaries. The iconographical analysis shows that the workshop made use of earlier Palaiologan Constantinopolitan models, such as the Kariye Camii mosaics. The iconography and the emotional pathos of some scenes suggest an awareness of western, French source material, and in particular of Franciscan book illuminations, Psalters, Missals, and Books of Hours. If this revised dating is correct, the program of decoration is an outstanding testament to royal, specifically Lusignan, commission and represents the first and most faithful adoption and adaptation of Palaiologan models in Cyprus.

Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome offers a new perspective on the world of painting in Rome at the beginning of the Baroque, from both an artistic and a socioeconomic point of view. Biased by the accounts of seventeenth-century biographers, who were often academic painters concerned about elevating the status of their profession, art historians have long believed that in Italy, and in Rome in particular, paintings were largely produced by major artists working on commission for the most important patrons of the time. Patrizia Cavazzini&’s extensive archival research reveals a substantially different situation. Cavazzini presents lively and colorful accounts of Roman artists&’ daily lives and apprenticeships and investigates the vast popular art market that served the aesthetic, devotional, and economic needs of artisans and professionals and of the laboring class. Painting as Business reconstructs the complex universe of painters, collectors, and merchants and irrevocably alters our understanding of the production, collecting, and merchandising of painting during a key period in Italian art history.

Cologne in the later Middle Ages was an elegant and wealthy mercantile city much favoured by popes and emperors. The largest town in Northern Europe, the site of an important university and seat of a major archbishopric, it had a cosmopolitan population of painters, illuminators, sculptors and goldsmiths and a patrician class who were sophisticated collectors and knowledgeable patrons of art. This book - the first such study in English - traces the development of the Cologne school of painting over two centuries. It begins with the period before 1400, when the adaption of French ideas to the indige- nous tradition produced an elegant, genteel art, characterized by elongated figures and graceful gestures. A change was heralded by the Veronica Master's introduction of the International Courtly Style around 1400, with its sophisticated iconography, costly pigments, exquisite punchwork, gesso jewels and precious brocade fabrics, and by the Dombild Master's introduction around 1440 of Eyckian proportions and realism. In the final phase of this development, the Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece opened the door to the Renaissance with his highly distinctive style and innovative iconography. The book is fully illustrated and accompanied by a translation of the guild regulations; a biographical index of archbishops and lay patrons; and a hand- list of cited panels grouped according to location.