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Maximilian I (1459–1519) skillfully crafted a public persona and personal mythology that eventually earned him the romantic sobriquet “Last Knight.” From the time he became duke of Burgundy at the age of eighteen until his death, his passion for the trappings and ideals of knighthood served his worldly ambitions, imaginative strategies, and resolute efforts to forge a legacy. A master of self-promotion, he ordered exceptional armor from the most celebrated armorers in Europe, as well as heroic autobiographical epics and lavish designs for prints. Indeed, Maximilian’s quest to secure his memory and expand his sphere of influence, despite chronic shortages of funds that left many of his most ambitious projects unfinished, was indomitable. Coinciding with the 500th anniversary of Maximilian’s death, this catalogue is the first to examine the masterworks that he commissioned, revealing how art and armor contributed to the construction of Maximilian’s identity and aspirations, and to the politics of Europe at the dawn of the Renaissance. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}
This volume offers the first comprehensive survey of regime change in Italy in the period c.1494–c.1559. Far from being a purely modern phenomenon, regime change was a common feature of life in Renaissance Italy – no more so than during the Italian Wars (1494–1559). During those turbulent years, governments rose and fell with dizzying regularity. Some changes of regime were peaceful; others were more violent. But whenever a new reggimento took power, old social tensions were laid bare and new challenges emerged – any of which could easily threaten its survival. This provoked a variety of responses, both from newly established regimes and from their opponents. Constitutional reforms w...
Armor and weaponry were central to Islamic culture not only as a means of conquest and the spread of the faith, but also as symbols of status, wealth, and power. The finest arms were made by master craftsmen working with the leading designers, goldsmiths, and jewelers, whose work transformed utilitarian military equipment into courtly works of art. This book reveals the diversity and artistic quality of one of the most important and encyclopedic collections of its kind in the West. The Metropolitan Museum's holdings span ten centuries and include representative pieces from almost every Islamic culture from Spain to the Caucasus. The collection includes rare early works, among them the oldest...
Portraits have a long history in royal courts as a way of communicating the monarch’s status, rulership, and even piety. This anthology places such art works studied in the context of their commission, production, and display. Artists use different representational strategies to convey important information about the sitter. These aspects combined with patronage, location and use of the work form a departure point from which to address portraits comprehensively. The intersection between artist, the portrayed and audience with the additional layer of formed identity allows the portrait to hold a special place as popular genre of Spanish art. The relationship between the use of the work and its context is key to understanding better the cultural and social norms of Spanish aristocracy and what they reveal about Spanish identity in general. Used to solidify governance, lineage, and marriage, portraits legitimized the negotiation of status, power, and social mobility.
Painting Flanders Abroad: Flemish Art and Artists in Seventeenth-Century Madrid traces how Flemish immigrant painters and imported Flemish paintings fundamentally transformed the development of Spanish taste, collecting, and art production in the Spanish “Golden Age.”
The Royal Armory in Madrid, assembled at a time when the Spanish Crown was at the height of its international power, is the oldest and one of the finest and largest armories in the world, imbued with great historical, artistic, and symbolic significance. Armor drawn from the unsurpassed holdings of the Spanish Royal Armory is shown in this exhibition alongside portraits of rulers dressed in the same armor, painted by such masters as Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Diego Velázquez, and Alonso Sánchez Coello. Several large and magnificent tapestries from the royal collection also depict the armor in use. Together, some 75 works illustrate the use of luxurious armor in projecting an imag...
The contributions to this volume enter into a dialogue about the routes, modes and institutions that transferred and transformed knowledge across the late antique Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Each contribution not only presents a different case study but also investigates a different type of question, ranging from how history-writing drew on cross-culturally constructed stories and shared sets of skills and values, to how an ancient warlord was transformed into the iconic hero of a newly created monotheistic religion. Between these two poles, the emergence of a new, knowledge-related, but market-based profession in Baghdad is discussed, alongside the long-distance transfer of texts, d...
The Denver Art Museum held a symposium in 2006 to examine a little-known aspect of globalization in the early modern era. Specialists in the arts and history of Asia and Latin America came from Europe, Asia, and the Americas to present recent research on connections between the two areas. Edited by Denver Art Museum curators Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, this volume presents revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the symposium. Gustavo Curiel opens the volume with a discussion of the reception and re-interpretation of Asian motifs in the various art forms of viceregal New Spain (Mex-ico). Essays by Etsuko Rodríguez and George Kuwayama present detailed analyses of Chinese...
Based on extensive archival research, The Power of Huacas is the first book to take account of the reciprocal effects of religious colonization as they impacted Andean populations and, simultaneously, dramatically changed the culture and beliefs of Spanish Christians. Winner, Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion in the category of Historical Studies, American Academy of Religion, 2015 The role of the religious specialist in Andean cultures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was a complicated one, balanced between local traditions and the culture of the Spanish. In The Power of Huacas, Claudia Brosseder reconstructs the dynamic interaction between religious speci...
The best new research on medieval clothing and textiles, drawing from a range of disciplines. The essays collected here continue the Journal's wide-ranging and eclectic tradition. Topics include literary evidence for linen armour; serial production in late medieval silks; the inventory of Isabella Bruce's bridal goods; the depiction of women textile workers in the frescoes of the Salone of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, Italy; ideal female beauty in the Middle Ages and the means used to attain and assess it; and social status as evidenced by clothing and textiles in the Scottish royal treasurer's accounts of the mid-sixteenth century.