The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence

The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence PDF

Author: Megan Holmes

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300176605

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In Renaissance Florence, certain paintings and sculptures of the Virgin Mary and Christ were believed to have extraordinary efficacy in activating potent sacred intercession. Cults sprung up around these "miraculous images" in the city and surrounding countryside beginning in the late 13th century. In The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence, Megan Holmes questions what distinguished these paintings and sculptures from other similar sacred images, looking closely at their material and formal properties, the process of enshrinement, and the foundation legends and miracles associated with specific images. Whereas some of the images presented in this fascinating book are well known, such as Bernardo Daddi's Madonna of Orsanmichele, many others have been little studied until now. Holmes's efforts center on the recovery and contextualization of these revered images, reintegrating them and their related cults into an art-historical account of the period. By challenging prevailing views and offering a reassessment of the Renaissance, this generously illustrated and comprehensive survey makes a significant contribution to the field.

Saints, Miracles and the Image

Saints, Miracles and the Image PDF

Author: Sandra Cardarelli

Publisher: Brepols Publishers

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9782503568188

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In recent years the study of miraculous images has experienced a substantial re-evaluation of their importance as powerful agents of divine intercession and assistance in Renaissance society. Nonetheless, aspects related to the genesis, devotional use and preferences of these images remain only broadly outlined and geographically constrained. In parallel with the great veneration for miracle-performing Marian and Christological imagery, other saintly figures became the objects of widespread devotion on account of their protective and curative powers, and the images of these saints became cult objects themselves.0This volume fills a void in current art historical research and examines how miraculous images and the imagery of healing saints were crucial to the creation of individual, corporate and collective identities in Florence, Siena, Rome, Naples and other lesser researched Italian centres. The essays in this collection address aspects related to the development of hagiographies, iconographies, cult of relics, and devotion of healing saints. Moreover, it considers imagery related to miraculous events also in terms of material culture in the private and public domains. The images will therefore be studied both as aesthetic objects and as cult objects, in order to interrogate the often tense relationship between mechanical?vision? and cultural?visuality?.0While dealing with specific curative, protective, and miraculous episodes related to the exposition of sacred images, this book unravels questions of patronage, authorship, agency, and tradition

Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300-1450

Painting and Illumination in Early Renaissance Florence, 1300-1450 PDF

Author: Laurence B. Kanter

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 0870997254

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. By way of introduction to the objects themselves are three essays. The first, by Laurence B. Kanter, presents an overview of Florentine illumination between 1300 and 1450 and thumbnail sketches of the artists featured in this volume. The second essay, by Barbara Drake Boehm, focuses on the types of books illuminators helped to create. As most of them were liturgical, her contribution limns for the modern reader the medieval religious ceremonies in which the manuscripts were utilized. Carl Brandon Strehlke here publishes important new material about Fra Angelico's early years and patrons - the result of the author's recent archival research in Florence.

The Noisy Renaissance

The Noisy Renaissance PDF

Author: Niall Atkinson

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0271077832

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From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.

Miraculous Encounters

Miraculous Encounters PDF

Author: Bruce Edelstein

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1606065890

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Jacopo Carucci, known as Pontormo (1494–1557), was the leading painter in mid sixteenth-century Florence and one of the most original and extraordinary Mannerist artists. His extremely personal style was much influenced by Michelangelo, though he also drew from northern art, especially the work of Albrecht Dürer. This catalogue brings together a small but important group of preparatory drawings and finished paintings that center on Pontormo’s great masterpiece, The Visitation, one of the most moving and mesmerizing works by the artist. The Visitation represents the intense moment of encounter between the Virgin Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, who reveal to each other that both are pregnant. The painting is presented—for the first time—along with its highly finished preparatory drawing, which is squared for transfer to the larger surface of the panel. The combination of rigorous research and gorgeous reproductions reveals the painter’s creative process as never before. Other acclaimed paintings, including Portrait of a Halberdier and Portrait of Carlo Neroni, will also be shown alongside their preparatory drawings. Readers will encounter Pontormo both as a religious painter and a painter of portraits, in this original and nuanced account of the celebrated artist.

Spectacular Miracles

Spectacular Miracles PDF

Author: Jane Garnett

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2013-06-15

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1780231423

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Winner of the ACE / Mercers' Book Award 2014 Spectacular Miracles confronts an enduring Western belief in the supernatural power of images: that a statue or painting of the Madonna can fly through the air, speak, weep, or produce miraculous cures. Although contrary to widely held assumptions, the cults of particular paintings and statues held to be miraculous have persisted beyond the middle ages into the present, even in a modern European city such as Genoa, the primary focus of this book. Drawing upon rich documentation from northwest Italy and elsewhere, Spectacular Miracles shows how these images “work” in a range of historical contexts. Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser vividly evoke ritual animation of the image and the phenomenology of the beholder’s experience. These images, they demonstrate, have the subversive potential of the miraculous image to bypass clerical and secular authority, a power enhanced by reproducibility—devotion is hard to control when a copy of a venerated image is held to carry the same supernatural potential as the original, even when in a digital form mediated by the Internet. Engaging with the history, anthropology, and visual culture of images and religion, Spectacular Miracles is a convincing study of the continuing power of faith and art.

Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence

Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence PDF

Author: Joanne Allen

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-05-05

Total Pages: 621

ISBN-13: 110898343X

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Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.

Titian's Icons

Titian's Icons PDF

Author: Christopher J. Nygren

Publisher: Penn State University Press

Published: 2020-05-27

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780271085036

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Titian, one of the most successful painters of the Italian Renaissance, was credited by his contemporaries with painting a miracle-working image, the San Rocco Christ Carrying the Cross. Taking this unusual circumstance as a point of departure, Christopher J. Nygren revisits the scope and impact of Titian's life's work. Nygren shows how, motivated by his status as the creator of a miracle-working object, Titian played an active and essential role in reorienting the long tradition of Christian icons over the course of the sixteenth century. Drawing attention to Titian's unique status as a painter whose work was viewed as a conduit of divine grace, Nygren shows clearly how the artist appropriated, deployed, and reconfigured Christian icon painting. Specifically, he tracks how Titian continually readjusted his art to fit the shifting contours of religious and political reformations, and how these changes shaped Titian's conception of what made a devotionally efficacious image. The strategies that were successful in, say, 1516 were discarded by the 1540s, when his approach to icon painting underwent a radical revision. Therefore, this book not only tracks the career of one of the most important artists in the tradition of Western painting but also brings to light new information about how divergent agendas of religious, political, and artistic reform interacted over the long arc of the sixteenth century. Original and erudite, this book represents an important reassessment of Titan's approach to devotional subject matter. It will appeal to students and specialists, as well as art aficionados interested in Titian and in religious painting.