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.

The studies in this volume all deal with images and texts that relate to the veneration of the saints in Byzantium after the 9th century. Some papers are devoted to the church calendar and the annual commemorations of hundreds of saints through liturgical poetry and sequences of isolated images in fresco, icon painting and illuminated manuscripts. Others are concerned with the longer and rarer, narrative cycles devoted to the life of a single saint, cycles found mainly in fresco and on the so-called vita icons that first appear in the East in the late 12th century. Additional studies deal with the developing role of icons in liturgical ceremonies, and with images of a saint being approached by a supplicant or patron. A final section is devoted to places made holy by the saints, and to their holy relics.

The presence of the orthopedically impaired body in art is so pervasive that, paradoxically, it has failed to attract the attention of most art historians. In Picturing the Lame in Italian Art from Antiquity to the Modern Era, Livio Pestilli investigates the changing meaning that images of individuals with limited mobility acquired through the centuries. This study evinces that in distinct opposition to the practice of classical artists, who manifested a lack of interest in the subject of lameness since it was considered 'a defect or a deformity' and deformity a 'want of measure, which is always unsightly,' their Early Christian counterparts depicted them profusely, because images of the miraculous healing of the lame became the reassuring sign of universal acceptance and the promise of a more equitable existence in this life or the next. In the Middle Ages, instead, when voluntary poverty came to be associated with the necessary condition of faithfulness to Christ, the indigent lame, along with others who were forced to beg for a living, became the image of the alter Christus. This view was to change in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, when, with the resurgence of classical and Pauline ideals that condemned the idle, representations of the orthopedically impaired became associated with swindlers, freeloaders and parasites. This fascinating story came basically to an end in the Eighteenth century when, with the revival of the Greek ideal of the Beautiful, the lame gradually left center stage to be relegated again to the margins of the visual arts.

Available for the first time in English, An Introduction to Iconography explains the ways that artists use references and allusions to create meaning. The book presents the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of iconography and ICONCLASS, the comprehensive iconographical indexing system developed by Henri van de Waal. It gives particular emphasis to the history of iconography, personification, allegory, and symbols, and the literary sources that inform iconographic readings, and includes annotated bibliographies of books and journal articles from around the world that are associated with iconographic research. The author of numerous articles and a four-volume reference work on Italian prints, Roelof van Straten is currently working on an iconographic index covering the prints of Goltzius and his school.

Righteous Persecution examines the long-controversial involvement of the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, with inquisitions into heresy in medieval Europe. From their origin in the thirteenth century, the Dominicans were devoted to a ministry of preaching, teaching, and pastoral care, to "save souls" particularly tempted by the Christian heresies popular in western Europe. Many persons then, and scholars in our own time, have asked how members of a pastoral order modeled on Christ and the apostles could engage themselves so enthusiastically in the repressive persecution that constituted heresy inquisitions: the arrest, interrogation, torture, punishment, and sometimes execution of those who deviated in belief from Roman Christianity. Drawing on an extraordinarily wide base of ecclesiastical documents, Christine Caldwell Ames recounts how Dominican inquisitors and their supporters crafted and promoted explicitly Christian meanings for their inquisitorial persecution. Inquisitors' conviction that the sin of heresy constituted the graver danger to the Christian soul and to the church at large led to the belief that bringing the individual to repentance—even through the harshest means—was indeed a pious way to carry out their pastoral task. However, the resistance and criticism that inquisition generated in medieval communities also prompted Dominicans to consider further how this new marriage of persecution and holiness was compatible with authoritative Christian texts, exemplars, and traditions. Dominican inquisitors persecuted not despite their faith but rather because of it, as they formed a medieval Christianity that permitted—or demanded—persecution. Righteous Persecution deviates from recent scholarship that has deemphasized religious belief as a motive for inquisition and illuminates a powerful instance of the way Christianity was itself vulnerable in a context of persecution, violence, and intolerance.

A fresh look at the early Renaissance, considering Florentine and Netherlandish art as a single phenomenon, at once deeply spiritual and entirely new. Adam and Eve are driven from the Garden of Eden into a rocky landscape, their naked bodies lit by a cold sun, their gestures and expressions a study in shame and anguish. A serious man, well attired, kneels in prayer before the Virgin and Child, close enough to touch them almost, his furrowed brow setting off the saintly perfection of their features. In fifteenth-century Florence and Flanders, painters were using an arsenal of new techniques—including perspective, anatomy, and the accurate treatment of light and shade—to present traditional religious subjects with an unprecedented immediacy and emotional power. Their art was the product of a shared Christian culture, and their patrons included not only nobles and churchmen but also the middle classes of these thriving commercial centers. Shirley Neilsen Blum offers a new synthesis of this remarkable period in Western art—between the refinements of the Gothic and the classicism of the High Renaissance—when the mystical was made to seem real. In the first part of her text, Blum traces the emergence of a new naturalism in the sculpture of Claus Sluter and Donatello, and then in the painting of Van Eyck and Masaccio. In the second part, she compares scenes from the Infancy and Passion of Christ as rendered by artists from North and South. Exploring both the images themselves and the theological concepts that lie behind them, she re-creates, as far as possible, the experience of the contemporary fifteenth-century viewer. Abundantly illustrated with color plates of masterworks by Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Rogier van der Weyden, and others, this thought-provoking volume will appeal equally to general readers and students of art history.

A member of the art history generation from the golden age of the 1920s and 1930s, Millard Meiss (1904–1975) developed a new and multi-faceted methodological approach. This book lays the foundation for a reassessment of this key figure in post-war American and international art history. The book analyses his work alongside that of contemporary art historians, considering both those who influenced him and those who were receptive to his research. Jennifer Cooke uses extensive archival material to give Meiss the critical consideration that his extensive and important art historical, restoration and conservation work deserves. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historiography and heritage management and conservation.

"The chronology of the Italian Renaissance, its character, and context have long been a topic of discussion among scholars. Some date its beginnings to the fourteenthcentury work of Giotto, others to the generation of Masaccio, Brunelleschi, and Donatello that fl ourished from around 1400. The close of the Renaissance has also proved elusive. Mannerism, for example, is variously considered to be an independent (but subsidiary) late aspect of Renaissance style or a distinct style in its own right."