Announcements by Allison Levy
Fra Noi, 2020
"What an odd yet fascinating book. Allison Levy has produced a daring combination of intimate per... more "What an odd yet fascinating book. Allison Levy has produced a daring combination of intimate personal memoir and scholarly detective story...an accessible and interesting read."
"Suspicious Deaths and Strange Parties: Inside the Mysteries of Palazzo Rucellai" Corriere Fioren... more "Suspicious Deaths and Strange Parties: Inside the Mysteries of Palazzo Rucellai" Corriere Fiorentino, page 13, 4.23.2019.
Pre-order now at houseofsecretsbook.com
CASA ITALIANA ZERILLI-MARIMÒ, NYU. Thu, 03/28/2019 - 6:30pm
Launch Party at Daunt Books Holland Park on January 31. Please RSVP to [email protected]
For more information and to read an excerpt, please visit houseofsecretsbook.com
A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early ... more A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multidisciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.
Books by Allison Levy
I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury, 2019
House of Secrets tells the remarkable story of Palazzo Rucellai from behind its celebrated façade... more House of Secrets tells the remarkable story of Palazzo Rucellai from behind its celebrated façade. The house, beginning with its piecemeal assemblage by one of the richest men in Florence in the fifteenth century, has witnessed endless drama, from the butchering of its interior to a courtyard suicide to champagne-fueled orgies on the eve of World War I to a recent murder on its third floor. When the author, an art historian, serendipitously discovers a room for let in the house, she lands in the vortex of history and is tested at every turn—inside the house and out. Her residency in Palazzo Rucellai is informed as much by the sense of desire giving way to disappointment as by a sense of denial that soon enough must succumb to truth. House of Secrets is about the sharing of space, the tracing of footsteps, the overlapping of lives. It is about the willingness to lose oneself behind the façade, to live between past and present, to slip between the cracks of history and the crevices of our own imagination.
For more information and to read an excerpt, please visit houseofsecretsbook.com
Why do we play games—with and upon each other as well as ourselves? When are winners also losers,... more Why do we play games—with and upon each other as well as ourselves? When are winners also losers, and vice-versa? How and to what end do we stretch the spaces of play? What happens when players go ‘out of bounds,’ or when games go ‘too far’? Moreover, what happens when we push the parameters of inquiry: when we play with traditional narratives of ludic culture, when we re-write the rules?
An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular ‘plaything’ is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.
FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY
Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up ... more Emphasizing the peculiar, the perverse, the clandestine and the scandalous, this volume opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. Contributors consider not just painted (conventional) representations of sexual activities and eroticized bodies, but also images from print media, drawings, sculpted objects and painted ceramic jars. In this way, the volume presents an entirely new picture of Renaissance sexuality, stripping away layers of misconceptions and manipulations to reveal an often-misunderstood world.
'Sex acts' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one's (or another's) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.
Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rin... more Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell’Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d’ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un’ampia varietà di scenari “scandalosi”. Particolare attenzione è stata riservata all’aspetto materiale della cultura sessuale, dalle modalità di rappresentazione erotica del corpo agli oggetti e agli strumenti associati all’attività sessuale. Ne emerge un quadro completamente nuovo della sessualità rinascimentale, che spazza via secoli di manipolazioni ed equivoci socio-culturali, svelando scenari finora trascurati o volutamente nascosti. Diciassette saggi provocatori, con incursioni nel campo dell’arte, della letteratura, della storia, e persino della filosofia, organizzati intorno a quattro assi fondamentali: la pratica, la performance, la perversione e la punizione. Questo volume rivela un panorama molto più complesso e una visione del sesso e della sessualità rinascimentali carica di nuove sfumature.
"From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection ... more "From Pliny to Petrarch to Pope-Hennessy and beyond, many have understood the obvious connection between portraiture and commemorative practice. This book expands and nuances our understanding of Renaissance portraiture; the author shows it to be complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning. She argues that portraiture could defer memory loss or, at the very least, pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death.
This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety – the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten – and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability.
Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity – from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood."
Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have... more Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important relationship between ritual and representation. The fifteen new interdisciplinary essays assembled here read widowhood as a catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual material-representations of, for and by widows, whether through traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or through the so-called 'minor arts,' including popular print culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament, costume and gift objects, in early modern Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Arranged thematically, this unique collection allows the reader to recognize and appreciate the complexity and contradiction, iconicity and mutability, and timelessness and timeliness of widowhood and representation.
Dissertation by Allison Levy
Articles and Essays by Allison Levy
An exploration of the current and future landscape of digital scholarly publishing, this paper re... more An exploration of the current and future landscape of digital scholarly publishing, this paper reports the findings of a spring 2021 summit co-hosted by Brown University and Emory University on multimodal digital monographs. With its focus on scholarly content, the summit convened scholars, academic staff experts, and representatives from university presses. Case studies of eight recently published or in-development works provided the basis for in-depth, evidence-based discussions about the most pressing concerns and challenges facing stakeholders in digital scholarly publishing today. In particular, participants considered questions of cross-institutional collaboration, community engagement, professional development, open access, peer review, metadata and discoverability, preservation, and sustainability. Although the summit focused on a selection of projects supported by the Mellon Foundation’s Digital Monographs Initiative, the presentations and generative discussions that followed raised important concerns and opportunities that extend well beyond the initial aims of the featured projects. A key objective of this report is to promote greater inclusion and equitable access of diverse voices as the development, validation, and dissemination of multimodal digital monographs continues to unfold. Thus, this report serves as a starting point, to acknowledge the work that is already under way, to learn what we can from it, and to seek viable, sustainable means of furthering our shared mission to increase the visibility and reach of humanities scholarship to audiences both within and beyond the academy.
The Florentine, 2019
You could say there was something of an age difference. I was 18 years old; the house was 536. Ne... more You could say there was something of an age difference. I was 18 years old; the house was 536. Nevertheless, it was love at first sight. Sitting in a darkened college classroom in the American South, hazily absorbing the steady stream of Renaissance masterpieces that flickered before me, my eyes suddenly widened. The professor's monologue on classical pilasters and arched windows quickly faded as I fixated on glowing skin, chiseled features and an elegant stature. Rucellai was the name-Palazzo Rucellai-a private residence in via della Vigna Nuova. I duly took note and, changing my major from biology to art history as a result of this chance encounter, wore my heart on my sleeve from that day forward.
Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency and Identity, ed. Andrea Pearson, 2008
Growing Old in Early Modern Europe: Cultural Representations, ed. Erin J. Campbell, 2006
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Announcements by Allison Levy
Books by Allison Levy
For more information and to read an excerpt, please visit houseofsecretsbook.com
An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular ‘plaything’ is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.
FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY
'Sex acts' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one's (or another's) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.
This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety – the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten – and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability.
Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity – from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood."
Dissertation by Allison Levy
Articles and Essays by Allison Levy
For more information and to read an excerpt, please visit houseofsecretsbook.com
An innovative volume of fifteen interdisciplinary essays at the nexus of material culture, performance studies, and game theory, Playthings in Early Modernity emphasizes the rules of the game(s) as well as the breaking of those rules. Thus, the titular ‘plaything’ is understood as both an object and a person, and play, in the early modern world, is treated not merely as a pastime, a leisurely pursuit, but as a pivotal part of daily life, a strategic psychosocial endeavor.
FOR PRIVATE AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE ONLY
'Sex acts' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one's (or another's) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered, now or then, peculiar practices and preferences and a variety of possibly scandalous scenarios. While the contributors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, this collection foregrounds the visual culture of early modern sexuality, from representations of sex and sexualized bodies to material objects associated with sexual activities. The picture presented here nuances our understanding of Renaissance sexuality as well as our own.
This book recognizes a socio-cultural anxiety – the fear not merely of death but also of being forgotten – and identifies a set of pictorial, literary and theoretical strategies consequently formulated to ensure memory. To explore this phenomenon, this interdisciplinary but fundamentally art historical project merges early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body. The author examines an extensive selection of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century male and female portraits, primarily associated with the Medici family, circle and court, in and against both historical writings and contemporary discourses, including literary and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, feminism and gender studies, and critical theories of race and disability.
Re-membering Masculinity generates new ideas about both male and female portraiture in early modern Florence, raises even more questions about the experiences and representations of widowhood and mourning, and re-configures our understanding of masculinity – from the early modern male body to 'Renaissance Man' to postmodern manhood."
The second half of “Bodybuilding” considers the sociopolitical use of fashion in the early twentieth century. Italy, the fascist regime argued in the years immediately following the First World War, needed a strong national identity, a single social body, a population refashioned. To this end, the tuta, “the most innovative and futuristic garment ever produced in the history of Italian fashion,” its maker proclaimed, “was born in Florence.” Invented by the Futurist artist Ernesto Michahelles, better known as Thayaht, the tuta, or unisex jumpsuit, was created “for the masses.” Constructed of inexpensive white cotton, the simple uniform was designed to erase differences of class and culture and, to some degree, gender. It was only logical, then, that Thayaht should market his egalitarian tuta through the local media. On June 17, 1920, the newspaper La Nazione ran an article on the novel creation, but the universal garment, Thayaht believed, needed a proper coming-out party, an exclusive stage to truly popularize it. In July 1920, a “serata futurista” was held in Palazzo Rucellai. Following the much-talked-about party, the tuta did indeed become a sensation—but with the wrong crowd. Thayaht’s standardized dress, conceived as a reaction against luxury, became the uniform of the very group that defined luxury—or had, at least, before the war. Alas, the aristocrats’ adoption of the class-less garment was short-lived, for the novelty of Thayaht’s tuta quickly wore off, leaving Florentine society as starched as before.
The collection is the inaugural volume in the book series Ludic Cultures, 1100-1700. More information about the series can be found at https://mip-archumanitiespress.org/series/mip/ludic-cultures/.
Author: Giles Knox
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Giles Knox examines how El Greco, Velaìzquez, and Rembrandt, though a disparate group of artists, were connected by a new self-consciousness with respect to artistic tradition. In particular, Knox considers the relationship of these artists to the art of Renaissance Italy, and sets aside nationalist art histories in order to see the period as one of fruitful exchange. Across Europe during the seventeenth century, artists read Italian-inspired writings on art and these texts informed how they contemplated their practice. Knox demonstrates how these three artists engaged dynamically with these writings, incorporating or rejecting the theoretical premises to which they were exposed.
Additionally, this study significantly expands our understanding of how paintings can activate the sense of touch. Knox discusses how Velaìzquez and Rembrandt, though in quite different ways, sought to conjure for viewers thoughts about touching that resonated directly with the subject matter they depicted.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Polemics of Painting
Part One – Origin Stories and the Challenge of Italy
Chapter One – El Greco: Italy, Crete, Toledo
Chapter Two – From El Greco to Velázquez: Juan Bautista Maíno
Part Two – Illusion, Materiality, Touch
Chapter Three – Velázquez and Inversion: Making and Illusion
Chapter Four – Vulcan, Mars, and Venus: Erotic Touch
Chapter Five – Late Rembrandt I: Texture and Skilled Touch
Chapter Six – Late Rembrandt II: Feeling with the Eyes
Conclusion
Index
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Satire, Veneration, and St. Joseph in Art, c. 1300.1550 is the first book to reclaim satire as a central component of Catholic altarpieces, devotional art, and veneration, moving beyond humor™'s relegation to the medieval margins or to the profane arts alone. The book challenges humor™'s perception as a mere teaching tool for the laity and the antithesis of ™'high™' veneration and theology, a divide perpetuated by Counter-Reformation thought and the inheritance of Mikhail Bakhtin (Rabelais and His World, 1965). It reveals how humor, laughter, and material culture played a critical role in establishing St. Joseph as an exemplar in western Europe as early as the thirteenth century. Its goal is to open a new line of interpretation in medieval and early modern cultural studies by revealing the functions of humor in sacred scenes, the role of laughter as veneration, and the importance of play for pre-Reformation religious experiences.
Contents:
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Ridicule or Reverence? A History of Scholarship on St. Joseph
Sanctity, Humor, and the Gap between Material Reality and Religious Experience
Chapter One: Joseph’s Hosen, Devotion, and Humor: The ‘Domestic’ Saint and the Earliest Material Evidence of His Cult
1.1 Introduction: Rethinking ‘Higher’ Levels of Literature and Art
1.2 Joseph’s Hosen and Early Material Evidence of His Cult
1.2.1 The Ivories
1.2.2 The Power of Relics in Fourteenth-Century Europe
1.2.3 The Hosen and Humor in Royal Commissions: The Antwerp-Baltimore Polyptych of Philip the Bold
1.3 Nutritor Domini and Bumbling Old Fool: The Hamburg Petri-Altar
1.3.1 The Kindelwiegenspiele
1.4 Conclusion
Chapter Two: Satire Sacred and Profane
2.1 Introduction: Laughter as Veneration
2.2 From the Margins to the Center: Humor and the ‘World Upside Down’ in Sacred Art and Ritual
2.3 Diaper-Washer Josephs and the ‘Battle for the Pants’
2.4 Joseph, the Ass, the Peasant, and the Fool
2.5 Complexities of Early Modern Humor: The Virtue of the ‘Natural Man’
2.6 Dirty Old Man: The Bawdy and the Chaste Saint
2.7 Conclusion: Satirizing the Sacred
Chapter Three: Urbanitas, the Imago Humilis, and the Rhetoric of Humor in Sacred Art
3.1 Sacred Humor Beyond Edification
3.2 Urbanitas, Facetia, and Courtliness in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
3.3 Dissimulatio, Christian Irony, and the Imago Humilis
3.4 The Art of Rhetorical Humor and the Artist as vir facetus: Early Humanism and Social Exchange
3.5 Conclusion
Chapter Four: The Miserly Saint and the Multivalent Image: Sanctity, Satire, and Subversion
4.1 The Early Modern paterfamilias and the Profit Economy
4.2 Treasurer or Miser?
4.3 Satire, Subversion, and the Multivalent Image
4.4 Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres.
Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis.
The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.
Volume editors: Karen Hope Goodchild, April Oettinger & Leopoldine Prosperetti
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture 1300-1700
The green mantle of the earth! This metaphor is a poetic image that borrows from the vocabulary of weaving and epitomizes the Renaissance interest in "fashioning green worlds" in art and poetry. Here it serves as a motto for a cultural poetics that made representing living nature increasingly popular across Italy in the Early Modern period. The explosion of landscape art in this era is often associated with the rise of interest in the literary pastoral, narrowly defined, but this volume expands that understanding to show Green’s broad appeal as it intrigued audiences ranging from the ecclesiastic to the medical and scientific to the humanistic and courtly. The essays gathered here explore the expanding technologies and varied cultural dimensions of verzure and verdancy in the Italian Renaissance, and thus the role of visual art in shaping the poetics and expression of greenery in the arts of the 16th-century and beyond.
Table of Content:
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
A Fresh Vision of the Natural World in Renaissance Italy
Karen Goodchild, April Oettinger, Leopoldine Prosperetti
Part I. Devotional Viridescence
The Green Spaces of Fra Filippo Lippi and Sandro Botticelli
Rebekah Compton
Anthropomorphic Trees and Animated Nature in Lorenzo Lotto’s 1509 St. Jerome
April Oettinger,
'Honesta voluptas': the Renaissance Justification for Enjoyment of the Natural World
Paul Holberton,
Part II. Building Green
The Sala delle Asse as Locus Amoenus: Revisiting Leonardo da Vinci’s Arboreal Imagery in Milan’s Castello Sforzesco
Jill Pederson
Naturalism and Antiquity, Redefined, in Vasari’s Verzure
Karen Goodchild
Verdant Architecture and Tripartite Chorography: Toeput and the Italian villa Tradition
Natsumi Nonaka
Part III. The Sylvan Exchange
Titian: Sylvan Poet
Leopoldine Prosperetti
From Venice to Tivoli: Girolamo Muziano and the ‘Invention’ of the Tiburtine Landscape
Patrizia Tosini
Of Oak and Elder, Cloud-like Angels, and a Bird’s Nest. The Graphic Interpretations of Titian’s The Death of St. Peter Martyr by Martino Rota, Giovanni Battista Fontana, Valentin Lefebre, John Baptist Jackson, and Their Successors
Sabine Peinelt-Schmidt
The Verdant as Violence: The Storm Landscapes of Herman van Swanevelt and Gaspard Dughet
Susan Russell
Afterword
A Brief Journey Through the Green World of Renaissance Venice
Paul Barolsky
Author: Maria Maurer
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
This book investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. It examines the ceremonial use and artistic reception of the Palazzo Te from the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530 to the Sack of Mantua in 1630. This book further proposes that we conceptualise the built environment as a performative space, a space formed by the gendered relationships and actors of its time. The Palazzo Te was constituted by the gendered behaviors of sixteenth-century courtiers, but it was not simply a passive receptor of gender performance. Through its multivalent form and ceremonial function, Maria F. Maurer argues that the palace was an active participant in the construction and perception of femininity and masculinity in the early modern court.
Author: Ornat Lev-Er
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low". Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries, intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time. In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social, aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.
Author: Andrew Chen
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
This book examines the art and ritual of flagellant confraternities in Italy from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Meeting regularly to beat themselves with whips, members of these confraternities concentrated on the suffering of Christ in the most extreme and committed way, and the images around them provided visual prompts of the Passion and the model suffering body. This study presents new findings related to a variety of artworks including altarpieces, banners, wall paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and paintings for the condemned, many from outside the Florence-Rome-Venice triangle.
Available in North America through the University of Chicago Press: http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo26265826.html
In the mid-to late seventeenth century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors. In this book, Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative use of repetition-such as crafting virtuosic, self-referential compositions around signature motifs, or engaging esteemed predecessors in a competitive dialogue through emulation-to project a distinctive artistic personality. The resulting paintings enabled purchasers and viewers to exercise their connoisseurial eye and claim membership in an exclusive circle of sophisticated enthusiasts—making creative repetition a successful strategy for both artists and viewers.