Bøger i Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 serien

Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and reimagining landscape as a mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, the internal and the external. The lens of the “unrulyâ€? reveals the latent landscapes that undergirded their conception, the elemental resources that resurfaced from the bowels of the earth, the staged topographies that unsettled the boundaries between nature and technology, and the fragile ecologies that undermined the status quo of human environs. Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature argues for an art history attentive to the vicissitudes of circumstance and attributes the regrounding of representation during a transitional age to the unquiet landscape.

Baroque depictions of violence are often dismissed as `over the top¿ and `excessive¿. Their material richness and exciting visual complexity, together with the visceral engagement they demand from beholders, are usually explained in literature as reflecting the presumed violence of early modern society. This book explores the intersection between materiality, excess, and violence in seventeenth-century paintings through a close analysis of some of the most iconic works of the period. Baroque paintings expose or reference their materiality by insisting on various physical changes wrought through violence. This study approaches violence as the work of materiality, which has the potential to analogously stage pictorial surfaces as corporeal surfaces, where paint becomes flayed flesh, canvas threads ruptured skin, and red paint spilt blood.

This book examines a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figural silks depicting legendary lovers from the Khamsa (Quintet) of epic Persian poetry. Codified by Nizami Ganjavi in the twelfth century, the Khamsa gained popularity in the Persian-speaking realm through illustrated manuscripts produced for the elite, creating a template for illustrating climactic scenes in the love stories of “Layla and Majnunâ€? and “Khusrau and Shirinâ€? that appear on early modern silks. Attributed to Safavid Iran, the publication proposes that dress fashioned from these silks represented Sufi ideals based on the characters. Migration of weavers between Safavid and Mughal courts resulted in producing goods for a sophisticated and educated elite, demonstrating shared cultural values and potential reattribution. Through an examination of primary source materials, literary analysis of the original text, and close iconographical study of figural designs, the study presents original cross-disciplinary arguments about patronage, provenance, and the socio-cultural significance of wearing these silks.

The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered `decent¿ and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. Simultaneously, artists and the public became increasingly interested in the depiction of specific body parts or excretions. This book explores the concept of indecency and its relation to the human body across drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and texts. The ten essays investigate questions raised by such objects about practices and social norms regarding the body, and they look at the particular function of those artworks within this discourse. The heterogeneous media, genres, and historical contexts north and south of the Alps studied by the authors demonstrate how the alleged indecency clashed with artistic intentions and challenges traditional paradigms of the historiography of Early Modern visual culture.

This book investigates the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of fifteenth-century female portraiture on panel. Portraits of women increased substantially during this century. They formed part of a material and a visual culture borne out of the rapid rise of an oligarchy from entrepreneurial activities that was especially advanced in the urbanised territories of Italy and Flanders. For this reason, the portraits in this book are by Netherlandish and Italian painters. They are simultaneously illustrative of the emancipation of the genre from its medieval idiom, and of the responses to the matrix of patriarchy, under which society was organised. Patriarchy is an androcentric structure that places women in a paradoxical situation of legal and social disenfranchisement on the account of purported psychophysical inadequacy, whilst making them the catalysts, through arranged marriages, for the success of the spheres of power, which are controlled by men. Thus, these portraits are also a window into women¿s lives in this structure. This book is the first systematic study of their sign-system and of the feminine experience of seeing and being seen, at the intersection of disciplines that include art history, anthropology, legal history, philosophy. The surprising results suggest new interpretations of form and function in female portraiture, women¿s active role in the imaging process and the early instances of a pro-women ideology.

An inquiry on place-making and architectural production in early modern Europe (1400-1750)

Poussin's Women: Sex and Gender in the Artist's Works examines the paintings and drawings of the well-known seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) from a gender studies perspective, focusing on a critical analysis of his representations of women. The book's thematic chapters investigate Poussin's women in their roles as predators, as lustful or the objects of lust, as lovers, killers, victims, heroines, or models of virtue. Poussin's paintings reflect issues of gender within his social situation as he consciously or unconsciously articulated its conflicts and assumptions. A gender studies approach brings to light new critical insights that illuminate how the artist represented women, both positively and negatively, within the framework in his seventeenth-century culture. This book covers the artist's works from Classical mythology, Roman history, Tasso, and the Bible. It serves as a good overview of Poussin as an artist, discussing the latest research and including new interpretations of his major works.

This book focuses on artists who practiced depicting from life in Italy, both native Italians and migrants from northern Europe.

This book focuses on the integration of the Coromandel textile industries with French colonies in India from the founding of the French East India Company in 1664 to its debilitating defeat by the British during the Seven Years War.

Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World investigates for the first time how seismic religious changes, a dramatic rise in the availability and consumption of goods, and new global connections transformed the nature and experience of religious material life.

This ground-breaking collection of essays examines the evolving taste for Bolognese art during the seventeenth century, both within and outside Bologna itself, based on new archival research and also exploring issues of gender, class, and regional preferences during the Seicento.

The paradox of ornament and monstrosity launches an array of thought-provoking perspectives on sixteenth-century visual art by targeting its ambiguous artificiality and moments of anxiety.

This essay collection features innovative scholarship on women artists and patrons in the Netherlands 1500-1700.

This is the first collection of essays to examine how elite women in early modern Europe marshalled clothing and jewellery for political ends.

This highly original study explores how still-life 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.

Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illustrates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800.

This book regards the ideology, practice, and critcism in relation to the usage of unassimilated eclecticism -the use of more than a single style- in a given work of art in Early Modern Bolognese painting.