Renaissance Secrets

Renaissance Secrets PDF

Author: Maurizio De Luca

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2023-02-21

Total Pages: 162

ISBN-13: 1606067990

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Engagingly written and profusely illustrated, this book offers readers a close-up “view from the scaffolding” of some of the greatest Renaissance wall paintings at the Vatican. Beginning in the late 1400s, the greatest artists of Renaissance Italy were summoned to Rome, where they decorated the walls and ceilings of the Vatican. Expert restorer Maurizio De Luca spent his forty-year career in the Vatican Museums, including fifteen years as head restorer of the Painting Restoration Laboratory. He personally oversaw some of the most important restorations of the last half century, including wall paintings by Perugino, Botticelli, and others on the walls of the Sistine Chapel; the Pintoricchio wall paintings in the Borgia Apartments; the Raphael Rooms; and the last two frescoes by Michelangelo, in the Pauline Chapel at the Apostolic Palace. In this accessible and copiously illustrated book, De Luca conveys the kind of knowledge that can only be derived from close personal observation. The reader is offered a stunningly intimate perspective that illuminates the distinctive expressive challenges, choices, and techniques of each artist and demonstrates how the conservation process enriches the understanding and interpretation of these iconic works.

Renaissance Secrets

Renaissance Secrets PDF

Author: Jo Wheeler

Publisher: Victoria & Albert Museum

Published: 2009-11

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13:

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The term 'Secret' was used throughout the Renaissance to describe a recipe or formula. Thousands of 'books of secrets' - compilations of recipes claiming to reveal trade secrets and occult knowledge - were printed. From recipes for plague amulets to aphrodisiacs, and formulas for everything from lip balm to paint pigments, this book takes you into the clandestine world of Renaissance trades and explains why certain recipes were jealously guarded while others were printed for a new general readership. New research offers intriguing insights into the use of obscure, exotic and toxic ingredients and explains now unfamiliar or arcane techniques. Each recipe is linked to real objects from the V and A's outstanding collections. Renaissance Secrets tells the compelling stories behind the original recipes.

Renaissance Mysteries Volume I

Renaissance Mysteries Volume I PDF

Author: Michael Price

Publisher: Page Publishing, Incorporated

Published: 2015-10-11

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781682139073

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The two volumes are an in-depth examination of a lost painting tradition. The books examine how the physical properties of natural and mineral pigments such as azurite, lapis lazuli, malachite, or cinnabar used by artists of the European Renaissance shaped a painting process in which each painting required a thorough plan or composition which began with the geometry of the format (i.e. the proportion of height to width of a rectangle). Volume 1 presents the artist as a painter-craftsman with the preparation of natural colour from rocks and crystals and their application in appropriate binding mediums. The difference in colour quality between natural mineral pigments and modern synthetic paint is examined. Chapters include comprehensive step-by-step instruction for the contemporary artist and conservation scientist on how to prepare and paint with the incomparably luminous colours of the Renaissance palette, as well as the preparation of historical painting supports and grounds. Volume 2, the artist as a creative intellectual, links the painter's craft with the creative process and elucidates the degree of compositional planning starting with the painting's rectangular format. The demonstrated evidence for the application of Euclidean geometry is based upon exact measurements of painted surfaces on panels, X-radiographs, and infrared images from paintings. The final chapter concludes with the reasons for the demise of this painting tradition and how industrialization and the standardization of art materials led to a new painting tradition from the nineteenth century.

The Secret Language of the Renaissance

The Secret Language of the Renaissance PDF

Author: Richard Stemp

Publisher: Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9781844833221

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Magnificently illustrated throughout, and with a six-color gold-foil cover, this remarkable book provides an all-encompassing survey of the literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and decorative arts of the Renaissance.

Secrets of a Kept Chick Saga

Secrets of a Kept Chick Saga PDF

Author: Ambria Davis

Publisher: Urban Renaissance

Published: 2017-01-31

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1622865553

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Amina “Mimi” Washington was born in poverty and raised on the south side of New Orleans to parents who were not capable of raising a child. From a very young age, she has had to fend for herself. Young Mimi wants more out of life, and she wants a way out of the ghetto. Fate intervenes on her behalf when she meets one of New Orleans’ biggest dope boys. When she falls in love with the mysterious stranger, everything in her life changes for the better and her future seems brighter. She will soon learn however, that being a hustler’s wife comes with serious consequences. Mimi decides to move to Atlanta, where she has it all: a beautiful family, fast cars, the finest clothes, and everything that she’s ever dreamed about. How can a woman who has so much going for herself be so unhappy? With a man who’s constantly cheating and her past rapidly catching up to her, she must figure out a way to get all those secrets out in the open—without taking a loss. Take a ride on this roller coaster with Amina Washington and uncover the Secrets of a Kept Chick.

The Professor of Secrets

The Professor of Secrets PDF

Author: William Eamon

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 142620650X

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Examines the life and work of sixteenth-century physician Leonardo Fioravanti, and describes the medical community and practices of Renaissance Italy.

Three Golden Ages

Three Golden Ages PDF

Author: Alf J. Mapp

Publisher: Madison Books

Published: 1998-11-13

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 146173598X

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In this intriguing book, best-selling author Alf Mapp, Jr. explores three periods in Western history that exploded with creativity: Elizabethan England, Renaissance Florence, and America's founding. What enabled these societies to make staggering jumps in scientific knowledge, develop new political structures, or create timeless works of art?

Venice's Secret Service

Venice's Secret Service PDF

Author: Ioanna Iordanou

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2019-10-24

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0198791313

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Venice's Secret Service is the untold and arresting story of the world's earliest centrally-organised state intelligence service. Long before the inception of SIS and the CIA, in the period of the Renaissance, the Republic of Venice had masterminded a remarkable centrally-organised state intelligence organisation that played a pivotal role in the defence of the Venetian empire. Housed in the imposing Doge's Palace and under the direction of the Council of Ten, the notorious governmental committee that acted as Venice's spy chiefs, this 'proto-modern' organisation served prominent intelligence functions including operations (intelligence and covert action), analysis, cryptography and steganography, cryptanalysis, and even the development of lethal substances. Official informants and amateur spies were shipped across Europe, Anatolia, and Northern Africa, conducting Venice's stealthy intelligence operations. Revealing a plethora of secrets, their keepers, and their seekers, Venice's Secret Service explores the social and managerial processes that enabled their existence and that furnished the foundation for an extraordinary intelligence organisation created by one of the early modern world's most cosmopolitan states.

Books of Secrets

Books of Secrets PDF

Author: Allison Kavey

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2010-10-01

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 0252091590

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How cultural categories shaped--and were shaped by--new ideas about controlling nature Ranging from alchemy to necromancy, "books of secrets" offered medieval readers an affordable and accessible collection of knowledge about the natural world. Allison Kavey's study traces the cultural relevance of these books and also charts their influence on the people who read them. Citing the importance of printers in choosing the books' contents, she points out how these books legitimized manipulating nature, thereby expanding cultural categories, such as masculinity, femininity, gentleman, lady, and midwife, to include the willful command of the natural world.

The Montefeltro Conspiracy

The Montefeltro Conspiracy PDF

Author: Marcello Simonetta

Publisher: Doubleday

Published: 2008-06-03

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0385526806

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A brutal murder, a nefarious plot, a coded letter. After five hundred years, the most notorious mystery of the Renaissance is finally solved. The Italian Renaissance is remembered as much for intrigue as it is for art, with papal politics and infighting among Italy’s many city-states providing the grist for Machiavelli’s classic work on take-no-prisoners politics, The Prince. The attempted assassination of the Medici brothers in the Duomo in Florence in 1478 is one of the best-known examples of the machinations endemic to the age. While the assailants were the Medici’s rivals, the Pazzi family, questions have always lingered about who really orchestrated the attack, which has come to be known as the Pazzi Conspiracy. More than five hundred years later, Marcello Simonetta, working in a private archive in Italy, stumbled upon a coded letter written by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, to Pope Sixtus IV. Using a codebook written by his own ancestor to crack its secrets, Simonetta unearthed proof of an all-out power grab by the Pope for control of Florence. Montefeltro, long believed to be a close friend of Lorenzo de Medici, was in fact conspiring with the Pope to unseat the Medici and put the more malleable Pazzi in their place. In The Montefeltro Conspiracy, Simonetta unravels this plot, showing not only how the plot came together but how its failure (only one of the Medici brothers, Giuliano, was killed; Lorenzo survived) changed the course of Italian and papal history for generations. In the course of his gripping narrative, we encounter the period’s most colorful characters, relive its tumultuous politics, and discover that two famous paintings, including one in the Sistine Chapel, contain the Medici’s astounding revenge.