Conflicting attitudes towards devotional art was a major factor in the confessional divisions that split Reformation Europe. By presenting essays concerned with both European subjects and European perceptions of other cultures, The Idol in the Age of Art contributes to ongoing attempts to globalize the study of European art. Approaching the Reformation idol as an essentially international problem, and placing particular emphasis on cultural encounters, it provides fresh perspectives on the very nature of Renaissance art, and underscores how colonial issues came to be often framed in terms of European religious conflicts.

After 1500, as Catholic Europe fragmented into warring sects, evidence of a pagan past came newly into view, and travelers to distant places encountered deeply unfamiliar visual cultures, it became ever more pressing to distinguish between the sacred image and its opposite, the 'idol'. Historians and philosophers have long attended to Reformation charges of idolatry - the premise for image-breaking - but only very recently have scholars begun to consider the ways that the idol occasioned the making no less than the destruction. The present book focuses on how idols and ideas about them matter for the history of early modern objects produced around the globe, especially those created in the context of an exchange or confrontation between an 'us' and a 'them'. Ranging widely within the early modern period, the volume contributes to the project of globalizing the study of European art, bringing the continent's commercial, colonial, antiquarian, and religious histories into dialogue. Its studies of crosses, statues on columns, wax ex-votos, ivories, prints, maps, manuscripts, fountains, banners, and New World gold all frame Western 'art' simultaneously as an idea and as a collection of real things, arguing that it was through the idol that object-makers and writers came to terms with what it was that art should be, and do.

A re-examinination of the Catholic Church’s response to Reformation-era iconoclasm by reconstructing debates about sacred images held in the fifteen years preceding the Council of Trent’s image decree (1563). The volume contains editions and translations of the original texts.

Analyzing the literature on art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, The Spiritual Language of Art explores the complex relationship between visual art and spiritual experiences during the Italian Renaissance. Though scholarly research on these writings has predominantly focused on the influence of classical literature, this study reveals that Renaissance authors consistently discussed art using terms, concepts and metaphors derived from spiritual literature. By examining these texts in the light of medieval sources, greater insight is gained on the spiritual nature of the artist’s process and the reception of art. Offering a close re-readings of many important writers (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, etc.), this study deepens our understanding of attitudes toward art and spirituality in the Italian Renaissance.

In the late fifteenth century, votive panel paintings, or tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images throughout Italy. Although often dismissed as popular art of little aesthetic consequence, more than 1,500 panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are extant, a testimony to their ubiquity and importance in religious practice. Humble in both their materiality and style, they represent donors in prayer and supplicants petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. In this book, Fredrika H. Jacobs traces the origins and development of the use of votive panels in this period. She examines the form, context and functional value of votive panels, and considers how they created meaning for the person who dedicated them as well as how they accrued meaning in relationship to other images and objects within a sacred space activated by practices of cultic culture.

Churches and palaces in Florence have been the subject matter of book-length, often multi-volume studies over the centuries. This book is a compendium of the main churches in Florence and has been written with two distinct audiences in mind: English-speaking students of Renaissance art, architecture, literature and history and the well-read traveller to Florence who wishes to place the works of art and architecture into the wider context of Italian culture. The choice of churches discussed here was influenced by the author’s experience as teacher for several university programmes on site in Florence. The buildings described and analysed are those which students will most likely encounter in the course of their study-abroad stay in Florence, whether they wish to specialise in art, architecture or the history of the Florentine Renaissance. This book represents a textbook that offers concise information on the history, art, and architecture of 25 of the main Florentine churches, provides plans and photos of the façades, and introduces the student to some of the most important vocabulary and the main textual sources of the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries.

Dramatic changes during the Reformation era in Northern Europe, such as witchcraft and new global discoveries, are examined through visual culture, both prints and paintings.

The first in-depth study of the Utrecht artist to address questions beyond connoisseurship and attribution, this book makes a significant contribution to Ter Brugghen and Northern Caravaggist studies. Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, Natasha Seaman nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings, all depicting New Testament subjects. They include Ter Brugghen's largest and first known signed work (Crowning with Thorns), his most archaizing (the Crucifixion), and the two paintings most directly related to the works of Caravaggio (the Doubting Thomas and the Calling of Matthew). By examining the ways in which Ter Brugghen's paintings deliberately diverge from Caravaggio's, Seaman sheds new light on the Utrecht artist and his work. For example, she demonstrates that where Caravaggio's paintings are boldly illusionistic and mimetic, thus de-emphasizing their materiality, Ter Brugghen's works examined here create the opposite effect, connecting their content to their made form. This study not only illuminates the complex meanings of the paintings addressed here, but also offers insights into the image debates and the status of devotional art in Italy and Utrecht in the seventeenth century by examining one artist's response to them.

Throughout history, and all over the world, viewers have treated works of art as if they are living beings: speaking to them, falling in love with them, kissing or beating them. Although over the past 20 years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses, drawing on the work of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell.

Contrary to the apocalyptic pronouncements of paper media's imminent demise in the digital age, there has been a veritable surge of creative reimaginings of books as bearers of the literary. From typographic experiments (Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts) to accordion books (Anne Carson's Nox), from cut ups (Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes) to collages (Graham Rawle's Woman's World), from erasures (Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow) to mixups (Simon Morris's The Interpretations of Dreams), print literature has gone through anything but a slow, inevitable death. In fact, it has re-invented itself materially. Starting from this idea of media plurality, Book Presence in a Digital Age explores the resilience of print literatures, book art, and zines in the late age of print from a contemporary perspective, while incorporating longer-term views on media archeology and media change. Even as it focuses on the materiality of books and literary writing in the present, Book Presence also takes into consideration earlier 20th-century "moments" of media transition, developing the concepts of presence and materiality as analytical tools to perform literary criticism in a digital age. Bringing together leading scholars, artists, and publishers, Book Presence in a Digital Age offers a variety of perspectives on the past, present, and future of the book as medium, the complex relationship of materiality to virtuality, and of the analog to the digital.