1st Edition

Revaluing Renaissance Art

Edited By Gabriele Neher, Rupert Shepherd Copyright 2000
    258 Pages
    by Routledge

    This title was first published in 2000:  Michelangelo gave his painting of "Leda and the Swan" to an apprentice rather than hand it over to the emissary of the Duke of Ferrar, who had commissioned it. He was apparently disgusted by the failure of the emissary - who was probably more used to buying pigs than discussing art - to accord the picture and the artist the value they deserved. Any discussion of works of art and material culture implicitly assigns them a set of values. Whether these values be monetary, cultural or religious, they tend to constrict the ways in which such works can be discussed. The variety of potential forms of valuation becomes particularly apparent during the Italian Renaissance, when relations between the visual arts and humanistic studies were undergoing rapid changes against an equally fluid social, economic and political background. In this volume, 13 scholars explicitly examine some of the complex ways in which a variety of values might be associated with Italian Renaissance material culture.

    The price of quality - factors influencing the cost of pigments during the Renaissance; "artefici" and "huomini intendenti" - questions of artistic value in 16th-century Italy; "Dante Alighieri poeta fiorentino" - cultural values in the 1481 "Divine Comedy"; Mantegna's "Parnassus" - reading, collecting and the "studiolo"; Alfonso I. d'Este, Michelangelo and the man who bought pigs; new, old and second-hand culture - the case of the Renaissance sleeve; evaluating textiles in Renaissance Venice; re-valuing dress in history paintings for quattrocento Florence; the Madonna and child, a host of saints and domestic devolution in renaissance Florence; images of St Catherine - a re-evaluation of Cosimo Rosselli and the influence of his art on the woodcut and metal engraving images of the Dominican Third Order; voting with their feet - art, pilgrimage and ratings in the Renaissance; madness, reason, vision and the cosmos - evaluating the drawings of Opicinus de Canistris (1296-c 1351).

    Biography

    Edited by Gabriele Neher, Rupert Shepherd