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  3. Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700

A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.

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24 results in Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700

Page 1 of 2

Jacob van Ruisdael's Ecological Landscapes
  • Catherine Levesque
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    10 January 2025
    Print publication:
    20 June 2024
  • This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects - dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands - that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered 'ecological'. The pattern of Ruisdael's reworking each environment and associated phenomena shows him as laboring over these themes. His work across media conveys something of his demanding and methodical procedure as he sought to achieve pictorially the force, temporality, vitality, and motion of nature. Ruisdael's paintings decenter humankind within familiar yet reimagined landscapes. His ability to depict nature's dynamism provided an alternative vision at a foundational moment when landscape, increasingly manipulated and controlled, was most often considered property and investment. His focus on the techniques and processes of his own work to render these entities was essential to his ecological perspective and invites a similar recognition from an attentive viewer.

Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture
  • Edited by Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, Federica Pich
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    22 February 2024
    Print publication:
    13 November 2023
  • The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch's legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch's vast literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and self-representation developed during the Renaissance. His two sonnets on Laura's portrait by Simone Martini and his ambivalent fascination with the illusionary power of portraiture in his Latin texts - such as the Secretum, the Familiares and De remediis utriusque fortune - constituted the theoretical reference for artists and writers alike. In a century dominated by the rhetorical comparison between art and literature (ut pictura poësis) and by the paragone debate, the interplay between Petrarch's oeuvre, Petrarchism and portraiture shaped the discourse on the relationship between the sitters' physical image and their inner life. The volume brings together diverse interdisciplinary contributions that explore the subject through a rich body of literary and visual sources.

Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe
  • Regular, Repellant, and Redemptive Death
  • Sarah Schell
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    17 February 2024
    Print publication:
    09 October 2023
  • Image and the Office of the Dead in Late Medieval Europe explores the Office of the Dead as a site of interaction between text, image, and experience in the culture of commemoration that thrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Office of the Dead was a familiar liturgical ritual, and its perceived importance and utility are evident in its regular inclusion in devotional compilations, which crossed the boundaries between lay and religious readers. The Office was present in all medieval deaths: as a focus for private contemplation, a site of public performance, a reassuring ritual, and a voice for the bereaved. Examining the images at the Office of the Dead and related written, visual, and material evidence, this book explores the relationship of these images to the text in which they are embedded and to the broader experiences of and aspirations for death.

The Portuguese Restoration of 1640 and Its Global Visualization
  • Political Iconography and Transcultural Negotiation
  • Urte Krass
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    13 February 2024
    Print publication:
    04 July 2023
  • The Portuguese Restoration of 1640 ended the dynastic union of Portugal and Spain. This book pioneers in reconstructing the global image discourse related to the event by bringing together visualizations from three decades and four continents. These include paintings, engravings, a statue, coins, emblems, miniatures, a miraculous crosier and other regalia, buildings, textiles, a castrum doloris, drawings, and ivory statues. Situated within the academic field of visual studies, the book interrogates the role of images and depictions before, during, and after the overthrow and how they functioned within the intercontinental communication processes in the Portuguese Empire. The results challenge the conventional notion of center and periphery and reveal unforeseen entanglements as well as an unexpected agency of imagery from the remotest regions under Portuguese control. The book breaks new ground in linking the field of early modern political iconography with transcultural art history and visual studies.

Trade, Globalization, and Dutch Art and Architecture
  • Interrogating Dutchness and the Golden Age
  • Marsely Kehoe
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    13 February 2024
    Print publication:
    10 July 2023
  • We all look to our past to define our present, but we don't always realize that our view of the past is shaped by subsequent events. It's easy to forget that the Dutch dominated the world's oceans and trade in the seventeenth century when our cultural imagination conjures up tulips and wooden shoes instead of spices and slavery. This book examines the Dutch so-called 'Golden Age' through its artistic and architectural legacy, recapturing the global dimensions of this period by looking beyond familiar artworks to consider exotic collectibles and trade goods, and the ways in which far-flung colonial cities were made to look and feel like home. Using the tools of art history to approach questions about memory, history, and how cultures define themselves, this book demonstrates the centrality of material and visual culture to understanding history and cultural identity.

Bernardino Poccetti and the Art of Religious Painting at the End of the Florentine Renaissance
  • Douglas N. Dow
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    13 February 2024
    Print publication:
    16 August 2023
  • By almost any measure Bernardino Barbatelli, called Poccetti, was a successful and sought after painter in late sixteenth-century Florence, but his works have remained largely overlooked. This study situates representative examples of his religious painting within their respective contexts to demonstrate how Poccetti and his patrons negotiated the increasingly fraught terrain of sacred painting in the period of religious reform. These case studies demonstrate how patrons ranging from the Dominicans to the Carthusians to prominent Florentine patricians relied on Poccetti's skill in creating compelling narratives that reflected current concerns within the Catholic world. In the process, Poccetti invoked an august Florentine tradition of fresco painting, shaping it to better address the demands placed on religious imagery at the end of the Renaissance.

The Art and Government Service of Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei (c.1421-c.1495)
  • Visual Propaganda and Undercover Agency for the Republic of Siena
  • Anabel Thomas
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    24 November 2023
    Print publication:
    15 May 2023
  • In 1454 the Sienese painter Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei faced litigation from the Mercanzia in Siena for defaulting on a contract from one of the leading Franciscan confraternities in the city. Two fellow Sienese artists, Giovanni di Paolo and Sano di Pietro, had recently completed a new altarpiece for the same entity. Anabel Thomas considers how the two commissions were linked and questions why Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei's brief to fresco the confraternity chapel remained unfinished.

    In a wide ranging analysis of mainly unpublished records, focussing on the artist's association with key members of Sienese society, fellow artisans and government officials, Thomas concludes that Francesco di Bartolomeo Alfei might have honoured his contract had he not become immersed in the military strategy, diplomacy and visual propaganda of the Republic of Siena.

Architecture, Opportunity, and Conflict in Eighteenth-Century Sicily
  • Rebuilding after Natural Disaster
  • Martin Nixon
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    24 November 2023
    Print publication:
    15 May 2023
  • The catastrophic Sicilian earthquake of 1693 led to the rebuilding of over sixty towns in the island's south-west. The rebuilding extended into the eighteenth century and gave opportunities for the reassertion and the transformation of power relations. Although eight of the towns are now protected by UNESCO, the remarkable architecture resulting from this rebuilding is little known outside Sicily.

    This is the first book-length study in English of this interesting area of early modern architecture. Rather than seek to address all of the towns, five case studies discuss key aspects of the rebuilding by approaching the architecture from different scales, from that of a whole town to parts of a town, or single buildings, or parts of buildings and their decoration. Each case study also investigates a different theoretical assumption in architecture, including ideas of the Baroque, rational planning, and the relegation of decoration in architectural discourse.

In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800
  • Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters
  • Edited by Beatriz Marín-Aguilera, Stefan Hanß
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    14 October 2023
    Print publication:
    15 February 2023
  • In-Between Textiles is a decentred study of how textiles shaped, disrupted, and transformed subjectivities in the age of the first globalisation. The volume presents a radically cross-disciplinary approach that brings together world-leading anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians, conservators, curators, historians, scientists, and weavers to reflect on the power of textiles to reshape increasingly contested identities on a global scale between 1400 and 1800. Contributors posit the concept of 'in-between textiles', building upon Homi Bhabha's notion of in-betweenness as the actual material ground of the negotiation of cultural practices and meanings; a site identified as the battleground over strategies of selfhood and the production of identity signs troubled by colonialism and consumerism across the world. In-Between Textiles establishes cutting-edge conversations between textile studies, critical cultural theory, and material culture studies to examine how textiles created and challenged experiences of subjectivity, relatedness, and dis/location that transformed social fabrics around the globe.

Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity
  • Picturing Unruly Nature
  • Edited by Christine Göttler, Mia Mochizuki
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    20 June 2023
    Print publication:
    12 December 2022
  • Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and reimagining landscape as a mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, the internal and the external. The lens of the 'unruly' reveals the latent landscapes that undergirded their conception, the elemental resources that resurfaced from the bowels of the earth, the staged topographies that unsettled the boundaries between nature and technology, and the fragile ecologies that undermined the status quo of human environs. Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature argues for an art history attentive to the vicissitudes of circumstance and attributes the regrounding of representation during a transitional age to the unquiet landscape.

Sufi Lovers, Safavid Silks and Early Modern Identity
  • Nazanin Hedayat Munroe
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    19 April 2023
    Print publication:
    14 February 2023
  • This book examines a group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figural silks depicting legendary lovers from the 'Khamsa' (Quintet) of epic Persian poetry. Codified by Nizami Ganjavi in the twelfth-century, the Khamsa gained popularity in the Persian-speaking realm through illustrated manuscripts produced for the elite, creating a template for illustrating climactic scenes in the love stories of 'Layla and Majnun' and 'Khusrau and Shirin' that appear on early modern silks. Attributed to Safavid Iran, the publication proposes that dress fashioned from these silks represented Sufi ideals based on the characters. Migration of weavers between Safavid and Mughal courts resulted in producing goods for a sophisticated and educated elite, demonstrating shared cultural values and potential reattribution. Through an examination of primary source materials, literary analysis of the original text, and close iconographical study of figural designs, the study presents original cross-disciplinary arguments about patronage, provenance, and the socio-cultural significance of wearing these silks.

Indecent Bodies in Early Modern Visual Culture
  • Edited by Fabian Jonietz, Mandy Richter, Alison Stewart
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    19 April 2023
    Print publication:
    20 December 2022
  • The life-like depiction of the body became a central interest and defining characteristic of the European Early Modern period that coincided with the establishment of which images of the body were to be considered 'decent' and representable, and which disapproved, censored, or prohibited. Simultaneously, artists and the public became increasingly interested in the depiction of specific body parts or excretions. This book explores the concept of indecency and its relation to the human body across drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures, and texts. The ten essays investigate questions raised by such objects about practices and social norms regarding the body, and they look at the particular function of those artworks within this discourse. The heterogeneous media, genres, and historical contexts north and south of the Alps studied by the authors demonstrate how the alleged indecency clashed with artistic intentions and challenges traditional paradigms of the historiography of Early Modern visual culture.

The Matter of Violence in Baroque Painting
  • Bogdan Cornea
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    18 April 2023
    Print publication:
    14 February 2023
  • Baroque depictions of violence are often dismissed as 'over the top' and 'excessive'. Their material richness and exciting visual complexity, together with the visceral engagement they demand from beholders, are usually explained in literature as reflecting the presumed violence of early modern society. This book explores the intersection between materiality, excess, and violence in seventeenth-century paintings through a close analysis of some of the most iconic works of the period. Baroque paintings expose or reference their materiality by insisting on various physical changes wrought through violence. This study approaches violence as the work of materiality, which has the potential to analogously stage pictorial surfaces as corporeal surfaces, where paint becomes flayed flesh, canvas threads ruptured skin, and red paint spilt blood.

Early Modern Spaces in Motion
  • Design, Experience and Rhetoric
  • Edited by Kimberley Skelton
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    11 January 2023
    Print publication:
    14 December 2020
  • Stretching back to antiquity, motion had been a key means of designing and describing the physical environment. But during the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, individuals across Europe increasingly designed, experienced, and described a new world of motion: one characterized by continuous, rather than segmented, movement. New spaces that included vistas along house interiors and uninterrupted library reading rooms offered open expanses for shaping sequences of social behaviour, scientists observed how the Earth rotated around the sun, and philosophers attributed emotions to neural vibrations in the human brain. Early Modern Spaces in Motion; examines this increased emphasis on motion with eight essays encompassing a geographical span of Portugal to German-speaking lands and a disciplinary range from architectural history to English. It consequently merges longstanding strands of analysis considering people in motion and buildings in motion to explore the cultural historical attitudes underpinning the varied impacts of motion in early modern Europe.

Stigmatics and Visual Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy
  • Cordelia Warr
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    06 December 2022
    Print publication:
    29 August 2022
  • This book places the discourse surrounding stigmata within the visual culture of the late medieval and early modern periods, with a particular focus on Italy and on female stigmatics. Echoing, and to a certain extent recreating, the wounds and pain inflicted on Christ during his passion, stigmata stimulated controversy. Related to this were issues that were deeply rooted in contemporary visual culture such as how stigmata were described and performed and whether, or how, it was legitimate to represent stigmata in visual art. Because of the contested nature of stigmata and because stigmata did not always manifest in the same form - sometimes invisible, sometimes visible only periodically, sometimes miraculous, and sometimes self-inflicted - they provoked complex questions and reflections relating to the nature and purpose of visual representation.

Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century
  • Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power
  • Elisabetta Toreno
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    24 November 2022
    Print publication:
    12 September 2022
  • This book investigates the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of fifteenth-century female portraiture on panel. Portraits of women increased substantially during this century. They formed part of a material and a visual culture borne out of the rapid rise of an oligarchy from entrepreneurial activities that was especially advanced in the urbanised territories of Italy and Flanders. For this reason, the portraits in this book are by Netherlandish and Italian painters. They are simultaneously illustrative of the emancipation of the genre from its medieval idiom, and of the responses to the matrix of patriarchy, under which society was organised.

    Patriarchy is an androcentric structure that places women in a paradoxical situation of legal and social disenfranchisement on the account of purported psychophysical inadequacy, whilst making them the catalysts, through arranged marriages, for the success of the spheres of power, which are controlled by men. Thus, these portraits are also a window into women's lives in this structure. This book is the first systematic study of their sign-system and of the feminine experience of seeing and being seen, at the intersection of disciplines that include art history, anthropology, legal history, philosophy. The surprising results suggest new interpretations of form and function in female portraiture, women's active role in the imaging process and the early instances of a pro-women ideology.

Titian's Allegory of Marriage
  • New Approaches
  • Edited by Daniel M. Unger
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 November 2022
    Print publication:
    30 May 2022
  • This book offers nine new approaches toward a single work of art, Titian's Allegory of Marriage or Allegory of Alfonso d'Avalos, dated to 1530/5. In earlier references, the painting was named simply Allegory, alluding to its enigmatic nature. The work follows in a tradition of such ambiguous Venetian paintings as Giovanni Bellini's Sacred Allegory and Giorgione's Tempest. Throughout the years, Titian's Allegory has engendered a range of diverse interpretations. Art historians such as Hans Tietze, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Friedlaender, and Louis Hourticq, to mention only a few, promoted various explanations. This book offers novel approaches and suggests new meanings toward a further understanding of this somewhat abstruse painting.

The Painted Triptychs of Fifteenth-Century Germany
  • Case Studies of Blurred Boundaries
  • Lynn F. Jacobs
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    16 November 2022
    Print publication:
    04 July 2022
  • This book presents four case studies that interrogate how German fifteenth-century painted triptychs engage with, and ultimately blur various boundaries. Some of the boundaries are internal to the triptych format, for example, transgressed frames between narratives scenes on triptychs' interiors, or interconnections between imagery on triptychs' interiors and exteriors. Other blurred boundaries are regional ones between the Netherlands and Cologne; metaphysical ones between heaven and earth; and artistic distinctions between the media of painting and sculpture. The book's case studies, which shed new light on Conrad von Soest, Stefan Lochner, and the Master of the St Bartholomew Altarpiece, illuminate the importance of German fifteenth-century painting, while providing a fresh assessment of relations between German triptychs and their more famous Netherlandish counterparts' and demonstrating the value of probing Medialität, the implications of format and medium for generating meaning. The book's coda assesses the triptych in the age of Dürer.

Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750
  • Edited by Natasha Seaman, Joanna Woodall
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    15 September 2022
    Print publication:
    03 May 2022
  • This is the first book to focus on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in the arts of the early modern period. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied Europe's impressive power and the labour, increasingly located in colonised regions, of extracting gold and silver. Their efficacy depended on faith in their inherent value and the authority perceived to be imprinted into them, guaranteed through the institution of the Mint. Yet they could speak eloquently of illusion, debasement and counterfeiting. A substantial introduction precedes paired essays by interdisciplinary scholars organised around five themes: power and authority in the Mint; currency and the anxieties of global trade; coins and persons; coins in and out of circulation; credit and risk. A thought-provoking afterword focused on an American contemporary artist demonstrates the continuing expressive and symbolic power of numismatic forms.

Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy
  • Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture
  • Katrina Grant
  • Published by:
    Amsterdam University Press
    Published online:
    15 September 2022
    Print publication:
    20 April 2022
  • This book argues that theatre, and the new genre of opera in particular, played a key role in creating a new vision of landscape during the long seventeenth century in Italy. It explores how the idea of gardens as theatres emerged at the same time as opera was developed in Italian courts around the turn of the seventeenth century. During this period landscape painting emerged as a genre and the aesthetic of designed landscapes and gardens was wholly transformed, which resulted in a reconceptualization of the relationship between humans and landscape. The importance of theatre as a key cultural expression Italy is widely recognised, but the visual culture of theatre and its relationship to the broader artistic culture is still being untangled. This book argues that the combination of narratives playing out in natural settings (Arcadia, Parnassus, Alcina), the emotional responses elicited by sets and special effects (the apparent magical manipulation of the laws of nature), and the way that garden theatres were used for displays of power and to enact princely virtue and social order, all contributed to this shifting idea of landscape in the seventeenth century.

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