Synopses & Reviews
Drawing on the most recent scholarship, this book is accessible to students and non-specialist readers, telling the story of art in the great centers of Rome, Florence, and Venice, while profiling a range of other cities and sites throughout Italy. While the book presents the classic canon of Renaissance painting and sculpture in full, it expands the scope of conventional surveys by offering a more through coverage of architecture, decorative and domestic art, and print media. Rather than emphasizing artists' biographies, this new account concentrates on the works, discussing means of production, the place for which images were made, concerns of patrons, and the expectation and responses of the works first viewers. Renaissance art is seen as decidedly new, a moment in the history of art whose concerns persist in the present.
Synopsis
Stephen Campbell & Michael Cole offer a new and invigorating approach to Italian Renaissance art that combines a straightforward chronological structure with new insights and approaches from contemporary scholarship.
About the Author
Stephen J. Campbell (Henry and Elizabeth Wisenfeld Professor Johns Hopkins University) is a specialist in Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, focusing on the artistic culture of North Italian court centers, on the Ferrarese painter Cosmè Tura, and the Paduan Andrea Mantegna. His research explores the relationship between artistic theory and practice and literary models of imitation and interpretation, along with the consequences of this encounter for the reception of the work of art in broader social and religious spheres.Michael W. Cole is Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, where he writes and teaches on European art of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, with a specialization in early modern Italy. His recent books and articles have focused on sculpture and urbanism in Rome and Florence, on Renaissance magic and demonology, and on experimental etching. In 2009-2010, he was Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College.