Adam Sammut advances an original approach to cultural production in wartime, restoring St Paul's to the crux of Antwerp's civic life by examining Rubens's procurement of three outstanding works of painting.

This book is about the Dominican church in Antwerp (today St Paul’s). It is structured around three works of art, made or procured by Peter Paul Rubens: the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary cycle (in situ), Caravaggio’s Rosary Madonna (Vienna) and the Wrath of Christ high altarpiece (Lyon). Within the artist’s lifetime, the church and monastery were completely rebuilt, creating one of the most spectacular sacred spaces in Northern Europe. In this richly illustrated book, Adam Sammut reconceptualises early modern churches as theatres of political economy, advancing an original approach to cultural production in a time of war. Using methodologies at the cutting edge of the humanities, the place of St Paul’s is restored to the crux of Antwerp’s commercial, civic and religious life.

Of more than forty churches that fortified Antwerp as the bulwark of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands, only St. Jacob’s stands now with its art and archives intact. Parish church of the city’s elite, it is filled with masterpieces, including the altarpiece that Rubens painted for his own burial chapel. Works of architecture, painting, sculpture, and hundreds of sacred objects, documented by the archives, enable a reconstruction of the integral role that art played in the transformation of a whole society over the span of two centuries, from 1585 to the 1790s. It is a history of real people and organizations, who used art for religion, politics, and social purpose, joined together in a church that embodied a diverse community.

This is the first complete translation of the biographies of fifteen artists, including Annibale Carracci, Carvaggio, Rubens, Van Dyck, and Poussin, written by the seventeenth-century antiquarian Giovan Pietro Bellori. Originally conceived as a continuation of Vasari's famous Lives, it is a fundamental source for seventeenth-century Italian art and artistic theory, providing detailed descriptions of extant and lost works of art, while casting light on the cultural politics of contemporary Rome and the relations between Rome and France. The importance of Bellori's Lives lies in the scrupulous documentation of artists, many of whom he knew personally; the author's detailed descriptions of their works; and his exposition of the classicist theory of art in the introductory lecture, the Idea. This volume contains the twelve Lives published in the original edition of 1672 and three Lives (Guido Reni, Andrea Sacchi, and Carlo Maratti) that survive in manuscript form and that were published for the first time in 1942.

Space, Place, and Motion: Locating Confraternities in the Late Medieval and Early Modern City offers the first sustained comparative examination of the relationship between confraternal life and the spaces of the late medieval and early modern city. By considering cities large (Rome) and small (Aalst) in regions as disparate as Ireland and Mexico, the essays collected here seek to uncover the commonalities and differences in confraternal practice as they played out on the urban stage. From the candlelit oratory to the bustling piazza, from the hospital ward to the festal table, from the processional route to the execution grounds, late medieval and early modern cities, this interdisciplinary book contends, were made up of fluid and contested ‘confraternal spaces.’ Contributors are: Kira Maye Albinsky, Meryl Bailey, Cormac Begadon, Caroline Blondeau-Morizot, Danielle Carrabino, Andrew Chen, Ellen Decraene, Laura Dierksmeier, Ellen Alexandra Dooley, Douglas N. Dow, Anu Mänd, Rebekah Perry, Pamela A.V. Stewart, Arie van Steensel, and Barbara Wisch.