Ten years after completing his work The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, Bolognese painter Domenichino was accused by his rival Giovanni Lanfranco of stealing the idea for the painting from an altarpiece crafted by Lanfranco’s teacher, Agostino Carracci. The resulting scandal reverberated through the centuries, drawing responses by artists and critics from Poussin and Malvasia to Fuseli and Delacroix.Why was Domenichino attacked in this way when other related paintings--including Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin and Perugino’s painting of the same subject--aroused no such negative response? In this fast-paced book, Elizabeth Cropper investigates the Domenichino affair and addresses the perennial debate regarding the precise nature of originality and of imitation. She offers close readings of the paintings involved in the story, detailed analysis of attitudes toward imitation, emulation, and plagiarism, and a fascinating discussion of what Domenichino’s plight signifies in art history.

This book examines how Poussin cultivated a poetics of painting from the literary culture of his own time, and especially through his response to the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's poetic discourses were the most important source for Poussin's theory of painting. Poussin does not merely illustrate Tasso's verse, but cultivates pictorial means to refashion the poet's metaphors of desire. Offering new interpretations of these works, this book also investigates Poussin's larger literary culture and how this context illuminates the artist's response to contemporary poetic texts, especially in his mythological paintings.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ?s post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

The art of Rubens is rooted in an era darkened by the long shadow of devastating wars between Protestants and Catholics. In the wake of this profound schism, the Catholic Church decided to cease using force to propagate the faith. Like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) sought to persuade his spectators to return to the true faith through the beauty of his art. While Rubens is praised for the “baroque passion” in his depictions of cruelty and sensuous abandon, nowhere did he kindle such emotional fire as in his religious subjects. Their color, warmth, and majesty—but also their turmoil and lamentation—were calculated to arouse devout and ethical emotions. This fresh consideration of the images of saints and martyrs Rubens created for the churches of Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire offers a masterly demonstration of Rubens’s achievements, liberating their message from the secular misunderstandings of the postreligious age and showing them in their intended light.

If you have tattoos, who owns the rights to the imagery inked on your body? What about the photos you just shared on Instagram? And what if you are an artist, responding to the surrounding landscape of preexisting cultural forms? Most people go about their days without thinking much about intellectual property, but it shapes all aspects of contemporary life. It is a constantly moving target, articulated through a web of laws that are different from country to country, sometimes contradictory, often contested. Some protections are necessary—not only to benefit creators and inventors but also to support activities that contribute to the culture at large—yet overly broad ownership rights stifle innovation. Is It Ours? takes a fresh look at issues of artistic expression and creative protection as they relate to contemporary law. Exploring intellectual property, particularly copyrights, Martha Buskirk draws connections between current challenges and early debates about how something intangible could be defined as property. She examines bonds between artist and artwork, including the ways that artists or their heirs retain control over time. The text engages with fundamental questions about the interplay between authorship and ownership and the degree to which all expressions and inventions develop in response to innovations by others. Most importantly, this book argues for the necessity of sustaining a vital cultural commons.

The Renaissance era was launched in Italy and gradually spread to the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, and other parts of Europe and the New World, with figures like Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht DYrer, and Albrecht Altdorfer. It was the era that produced some of the icons of civilization, including Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Last Supper and Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Piet^, and David. Marked as one of the greatest moments in history, the outburst of creativity of the era resulted in the most influential artistic revolution ever to have taken place. The period produced a substantial number of notable masters, among them Caravaggio, Donato Bramante, Donatello, El Greco, Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto. The result was an outstanding number of exceptional works of art and architecture that pushed human potential to new heights. The A to Z of Renaissance Art covers the years 1250 to 1648, the period most disciplines place as the Renaissance Era. A complete portrait of this remarkable period is depicted in this book through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 500 hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on major Renaissance painters, sculptors, architects, and patrons, as well as relevant historical figures and events, the foremost artistic centers, schools and periods, major themes and subjects, noteworthy commissions, technical processes, theoretical material, literary and philosophic sources for art, and art historical terminology.

The art of the Renaissance is usually the most familiar to non-specialists, and for good reason. This was the era that produced some of the icons of civilization, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Last Supper and Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling, Pietà, and David. Marked as one of the greatest moments in history, the outburst of creativity of the era resulted in the most influential artistic revolution ever to have taken place. The period produced a substantial number of notable masters, among them Donatello, Filippo Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, and Tintoretto. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Renaissance Art contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on artists from Italy, Flanders, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, historical figures and events that impacted the production of Renaissance art. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about the Renaissance art.

This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Baroque Art and Architecture contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on famous artists, sculptors, architects, patrons, and other historical figures, and events.

A new intellectual biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay, showing how nineteenth-century British liberal culture retained and transformed the ideas of the Enlightenment in a rapidly changing world.

The Triumph of Modernism probes the intricate interplay of Western modernism and Indian nationalism in the evolution of colonial-era Indian art.