Renovation and Counter-Reformation: Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta Maria Novella and Sta Croce, 1565-1577 (Oxford-Warburg Studies)

Reference

Coffelt, Nancy

Hall, Marcia B.

Words, Language & Grammar

Oxford University Press

Underlying the religious art of the Renaissance is a tension between the needs of the Church and the impulse to create great works. This beautifully illustrated book presents sacred images from the 15th and 16th centuries, leading up to two pivotal events in 1563. The Council of Trent, which signified the beginning of the Counter-Reformation, defined requirements that curtailed the freedom of painters and patrons in creating art for churches, while the founding of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence symbolically acknowledged that artists had achieved the status of creators not craftsmen. Marcia B. Hall takes a fresh look at some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance not typically associated with sacred imagery and shows how they navigated their way through the paradox of "limited freedom" to forge a new kind of religious art.

The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, Caravaggio

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

Revealing the power of color as physical medium, a key to interpretation, and a mediator of social and political change This expansive study of color illuminates the substance, context, and meaning of five centuries of European painting. Between the mid-15th and the mid-19th centuries, the materials of painting remained remarkably unchanged, but innovations in their use flourished. Technical discoveries facilitated new visual effects, political conditions prompted innovations, and economic changes shaped artists’ strategies, especially as trade became global. Marcia Hall explores how Michelangelo radically broke with his contemporaries’ harmonizing use of color in favor of a highly saturated approach; how the robust art market and demand for affordable pictures in 17th-century Netherlands helped popularize subtly colored landscape paintings; how politics and color became entangled during the French Revolution; and how modern artists liberated color from representation as their own role transformed from manipulators of pigments to visionaries celebrated for their individual expression. Using insights from recent conservation studies, Hall captivates readers with fascinating details and developments in magnificent examples—from Botticelli and Titian to Van Gogh and Kandinsky—to weave an engaging analysis. Her insistence on the importance of examining technique and material to understand artistic meaning gives readers the tools to look at these paintings with fresh eyes.

The Power of Color: Five Centuries of European Painting

Recent restoration campaigns, particularly to the Sistine Chapel, have focused attention on the importance of colour in our experience of paintings, but until recently it has been neglected by art historians. The author believes that the work of art can only be fully appreciated when it is regarded as the product of both the artist's hand and mind. This study utilizes the traditional sources, such as contemporary theoretical writings and iconographical analysis, but in addition draws on the scientific findings of the conservation laboratories. This is a new body of data assembled in large part since World War II, which art historians are only beginning to exploit to fill out the history of technique. Rather than writing merely a history of technique, however, the author has integrated this material with traditional approaches to cultural history. She undertakes to examine twenty major paintings of the period from Giotto to Tintoretto to elucidate how colour and technique contribute to their meaning. She gives us then, the first modern consideration of Renaissance paintings both as physical objects and as monuments of cultural history.

Color and Meaning: Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting

Cambridge University Press

After Raphael is the first overview of sixteenth-century Italian painting to be published in over thirty years. Reevaluating the paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Bronzino and their followers in the light of recent research, Marcia Hall offers a new interpretation for the stylistic shifts that occurred after 1520. By taking into account the social, cultural, political, theological, and patronage issues that affected taste and stylistic developments, she demonstrates how the revival of interest in antique Roman sculpture relief affected Mannerist painters. She also examines the repercussions of the Reformation, which changed forever the Church's view of the function of images.

After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century

Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes, considered one of the great masterpieces of Western art, are explored in vivid detail in this comprehensive survey of the recently restored masterwork. 10,000 first printing.

Michelangelo: The Frescoes of Sistine Chapel

Individual Artists

Harry N. Abrams

Michel-Ange et les Fresques de la Chapelle Sixtine

Okamura, Takashi

La Renaissance du livre

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