For any lover of Shakespeare, the thought of time-traveling back to London to see one of his plays at the Globe represents the ultimate theatrical fantasy. The look and feel of Shakespeare's London, the streets, shops, and churches the poet would have visited; the bookstalls where he found source material; the objects that appeared on his stages or sparked his imagination--what were they like? Shakespeare: Staging the World is based on an extraordinary collection of objects that evoke London in 1612, bringing to life not only Shakespeare the man, but also the characters, places, and events--real and imagined--featured in his plays. Jonathan Bate and Dora Thornton give readers a visual tour of Renaissance London, letting us glimpse the time and place through a series of objects that speak volumes about Shakespeare's day. Simon Forman's diary of 1611 provides a vivid account of attending a contemporary performance of A Winter's Tale; a dagger fished from the Thames gives new resonance to the gang violence of Romeo and Juliet; Henry V's saddle, helm, and shield--medieval relics that would have been a familiar sight in Westminster Abbey to Shakespeare's fellow Londoners--recall the history plays and their examination of the nature and conduct of war; and Guy Fawkes's lantern illustrates the Catholic counterculture revealed through the failed Gunpowder Plot, which later provided the inspiration for Macbeth. Authoritative, evocative, and filled with surprises, Shakespeare: Staging the World offers a completely new approach to one of the most creative imaginations in history and opens a window onto a fascinating moment in London's past.

Shakespeare: Staging the World

Literature & Fiction

BATE, Jonathan

Thornton, Dora

History & Criticism

Oxford University Press

Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy
In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, many leading citizens constructed and furnished distinctive studies for themselves. The study was an individually designed room for private and social use -- as an office, library, a family archive or treasury, as the nucleus of an art collection, or as a space for contemplation. This book is an engaging account of the Renaissance Italian study and its contents. Generously illustrated with depictions of studies and the precious and unusual objects they contained, the book examines the significance of the study to its owner and visitors, its structure and location, and the prized possessions that might fill such a special room.
To own a personal study was to lay claim to the civility and educated tastes that defined the ruling elite of the Italian Renaissance. Studies were created by members of the administrative and professional classes, notaries, doctors of law and medicine, clerics, patricians, merchants, and bankers. They were also owned by scholars, university teachers and students, artists and craftsmen. In this book, Dora Thornton draws on a variety of sources -- inventories, account books, contemporary literature, visual representations of scholars at work, and surviving art objects -- to document activities and collections associated with the study. She shows how urban elites, as well as rulers and patrons, contributed to the development of the study, a fascinating feature of Italian Renaissance culture that came to be widely imitated throughout Europe.

The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy

History

Europe

Yale University Press

Many famous Italian Renaissance artworks were made to celebrate love and marriage. They were the pinnacles of a tradition―dating from the early Renaissance―of commemorating betrothal, marriage, and the birth of a child by commissioning extraordinary objects or exchanging them as gifts. This important volume is the first to examine the entire range of works to which Renaissance rituals of love and marriage gave rise and makes a major contribution to our understanding of Renaissance art in its broader cultural context. Some 140 works of art, dating from about 1400 to 1600, are discussed by a distinguished group of scholars and are reproduced in full color.
 Marriage and childbirth gifts are the point of departure. These range from maiolica, glassware, and jewelry to birth trays, musical instruments, and nuptial portraits. Bonds of love of another sort were represented in erotic drawings and prints. From these precedents, an increasingly inventive approach to subjects of love and marriage culminated in paintings by some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, including Giulio Romano, Lorenzo Lotto, and Titian. [This book was originally published in 2008 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Art and Love in Renaissance Italy

Arts & Photography

Musacchio, Jacqueline Marie

Syson, Luke

Turner, James Grantham

Bayer, Andrea

Wolk-Simon, Linda

Edwards, Nancy

Brown, Beverly Louise

Fahy, Everett

Krohn, Deborah L.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

A beautiful and sumptuously illustrated book presenting the highlights of Renaissance court treasures This book presents and explores the Waddesdon Bequest, the name given to the Kunstkammer or cabinet collection of Renaissance treasures which was bequeathed to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, MP in 1898. The Bequest is named after Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, a fairy tale French chateau built by Baron Ferdinand from 1874–83, where the collection was housed during his lifetime. As a major Jewish banking family, the Rothschilds were the greatest collectors of the nineteenth century, seeking not only the finest craftsmanship in their treasures, but also demonstrating great discernment and a keen sense of historical importance in selecting them. Baron Ferdinand’s aim, often working in rivalry with his cousins, was to possess a special room filled with splendid, precious and intricate objects in the tradition of European courts of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. It was understood at the time that a collection of this quality could never be formed again, given the rarity and expense of the pieces, and the problems of faking and forgery of just this kind of material. The book will unlock the history and romance of this glorious collection through its exploration of some of its greatest treasures and the stories they tell. It will introduce makers and patrons, virtuoso craftsmanship, faking and the history of collecting from the late medieval to modern periods, as told through the objects. Treasures discussed will include masterpieces of goldsmiths’ work in silver; jewelry; hardstones and engraved rock crystal; astonishing microcarvings in boxwood, painted enamel, ceramic and glass; arms and armor and ‘curosities’: exotic treasures incorporating ostrich eggs, Seychelles nut, amber or nautilus shell. Scholarly catalogues have appeared for parts of this splendid collection but this book will open up the Bequest for the general reader. By looking at individual objects in detail, and drawing on new photography and research, the book will enable readers to see and understand the objects in a completely different light. Table of Contents Foreword 1. Introduction, including a brief biography of the Rothschilds, an overview of the type of collection and collecting as a family activity 2. The treasures of the collection: art of devotion – incl. the Holy Thorn Reliquary, wooden sculptures and miniature carvings; the Goldsmith’s art – incl. Renaissance dining silver, curiosities, hardstone and rock crystal, jewels; arts of fire – incl. enamels, glass and ceramics, portraiture and arms and armour 3. Into the 21st century: the collection today Notes Further reading Index

A Rothschild Renaissance: The Waddesdon Bequest

BRITISH MUSEUM

A superb catalogue of the British Museum collection of maiolica and other Italian Renaissance pottery, published in two volumes with a slipcase, ribbon and cloth binding. The British Museum collection of Italian Renaissance ceramics is one of the most important and most comprehensive anywhere in the world. Apart from containing many works of great artistic beauty, it is unequalled for its high proportion of signed, marked, dated and armorial pieces, crucial for scholarly study of the subject. This is the first systematic catalogue of the collection. The 495 detailed entries cover the period from 1400 to 1700 and include maiolica, incised slipware and the rare 'Medici porcelain' made in the ground-breaking Granducal workshop in Florence in the late 16th century. Every item is illustrated at least once, and most twice, in colour. Particular attention is given to patronage (the collection includes works made for such eminent patrons as Pope Leo X and Isabella d'Este), to the relationship with painting and other arts, and to the history of collecting and the role of the British Museum collection in developing the international study of the subject. The catalogue entries incorporate the results of a long programme of scientific analysis of the clays used by Renaissance potters. The book will also contain the fullest bibliography of the subject ever published.

Italian Renaissance Ceramics: A Catalogue of the British Museum Collection

Reference

British Museum Press

You are what you own. So believed many of the elite men and women of Renaissance Italy. The notion that a person's belongings transmit something about their personal history, status, and "character" was renewed in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Objects of Virtue explores the multiple meanings and values of the objects with which families like the Medici, Este, and Gonzaga surrounded themselves. This lavishly illustrated volume examines the complicated relationships between the so-called "fine arts"--painting and sculpture--and artifacts of other kinds for which artistry might be as important as utility-furniture, jewelry, and vessels made of gold, silver, and bronze, precious and semi-precious stone, glass, and ceramic. The works discussed were designed and made by artists as famous as Andrea Mantegna, Raphael, and Michelangelo, as well as by lesser-known specialists--goldsmiths, gem-engravers, glassmakers, and maiolica painters.

Objects of Virtue: Art in Renaissance Italy (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum)

J.paul Getty Museum

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