Titian is best known for paintings that embodied the tradition of the Venetian Renaissance—but how Venetian was the artist himself? In this study, Tom Nichols probes the tensions between the individualism of Titian’s work and the conservative mores of the city, showing how his art undermined the traditional self-suppressing approach to painting in Venice and reflected his engagement with the individualistic cultures emerging in the courts of early modern Europe. Ranging widely across Titian’s long career and varied works, Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance outlines his radical innovations to the traditional Venetian altarpiece; his transformation of portraits into artistic creations; and his meteoric breakout from the confines of artistic culture in Venice. Nichols explores how Titian challenged the city’s communal values with his competitive professional identity, contending that his intensely personalized way of painting resulted in a departure that effectively brought an end to the Renaissance tradition of painting. Packed with 170 illustrations, this groundbreaking book will change the way people look at Titian and Venetian art history.

This book demonstrates how artists have radically revisited the genre of the self-portrait by using a range of technologies and media that mark different phases in what can be described as a history of self- or selves-production. Gabriella Giannachi shows how artists constructed their presence, subjectivity, and personhood, by using a range of technologies and media including mirrors, photography, sculpture, video, virtual reality and social media, to produce an increasingly fluid, multiple, and social representation of their ‘self’. This interdisciplinary book draws from art history, performance studies, visual culture, new media theory, philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience to offer a radical new reading of the genre.

After classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance raised the portrait, whether literary or pictorial, to the status of an important art form. Among sixteenth-century Renaissance painters, Titian made his reputation, and much of his living, by portraiture. Titian's portraits were promoted by his friend, Pietro Aretino, an eminent poet and critic, who addressed his letters and sonnets to the same personages whom Titian portrayed. In many of these letters (which often included sonnets), Aretino described both an individual patron and Titian's portrait of that patron, thus stimulating the reciprocal relation between a verbal and pictorial portrait. By investigating this unprecedented historical phenomenon, Luba Freedman elucidates the meaning conveyed by the portrait as an artistic form in Renaissance Italy. Fusing iconographical analysis of the most famous Titian portraits with rhetorical analysis of Aretino's literary legacy as compared to contemporary reactions, Freedman demonstrates that it is due to Titian's many portraits and to Aretino's repeated simultaneous writings about them that the portrait ceased being primarily a social-historical document, preserving the sitter's likeness for posterity. It gradually became, as it is today, a work of art, the artist's invention, which gives its viewer an aesthetic pleasure.

Although the root of the Hebrew name “Salome” is “peaceful”, the image spawned by the most famous woman to carry that name has been anything but peaceful. She and her story have long been linked to the beheading of John the Baptist, as described in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, since Salome was the supposed catalyst for the prophet’s execution. This history of the myth of Salome describes the process by which that myth was created, the roles that art, literature, theology and music played in that creation, and how Salome’s image as evil varied from one period to another according to the prevailing cultural myths surrounding women. After setting forth the Biblical and historical origins of the Salome story, the book examines the major cultural, literary and artistic works which developed and propagated it, including those by Filippo Lippi, Rogier van der Weyden, Titian, Moreau, Beardsley, Mallarmé, Wilde and Richard Strauss.

One of the most noticeable features of the Renaissance is what Jacob Burckhardt called the rise of the individual - in politics and religion, in its social life and in the arts, and in the mentality of Renaissance man, with his inclination to explore, to invent and to make new discoveries. Yet this characteristic is also very puzzling to modern people, who see that although the categories of art which depict particular people increased to a spectacular degree in a period when biography and portrait painting were among the most popular genres, and autobiography began to emerge as a genre in itself and painters began to produce self-portraits, an interest individuals is not necessarily the same thing as the more recent interest in the purely personal aspects of individuals. Literary and artistic traditions, social and ideological backgrounds, and the motives for the production of literature have changed profoundly: Renaissance biography and autobiography, portraiture and self-portraiture have little to do with their modern counterparts. Therefore this book stresses that the Renaissance is not predominantly a mirror of modernity, but rather a period of stimulating difference or alterity. The contributors to this collection of essays aim to create a better understanding of Renaissance biographies and portraits through the analysis and reconstruction of the traditions, contexts, backgrounds and circumstances of their production.

An exploration of the genesis and early development of the genre of self-portraiture in Italy in the 15th and 16th centuries. The author examines a series of self-portraits in Renaissance Italy, arguing that they represented the aspirations of their creators to change their social standing.

The goal of the twelve essays in this volume, contributed by scholars in the fields of history, literature, art history, and medicine, is to enrich our understanding of cultural discourses on ageing in early modern Europe. While a number of books examine old age in other eras, and a few touch on the early modern period, this is the first to focus explicitly on representations of ageing in Europe from 1350-1700. These studies invite the reader to take a closer look at images of ageing; they show that representations are embedded in specific communities, life situations, and structures of power. As well, the book explores how representations of old age function in various and often surprising ways: as repositories of socio-cultural anxieties, as strategies of self-fashioning, and as instruments of ideology capable of disciplining the body and the body politic. Since this book is about how old age as a cultural category was produced and maintained through representation, the essays in this volume are organised thematically across geographic, disciplinary, and media boundaries to foreground the politics and poetics of representational strategies. The contributors to this collection show that our understanding not only of ageing, but also of power, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and the body is enriched by the study of cultural representations of old age. Through sensitive and sophisticated readings of a wide range of sources, these papers collectively demonstrate the formative influence and generative force of images of old age within early modern European culture.

A major account of Renaissance portraiture by one of the twentieth century’s most eminent art historians In this book, John Pope-Hennessy provides an unprecedented look at two centuries of experiment in portraiture during the Renaissance. Pope-Hennessy shows how the Renaissance cult of individuality brought with it a demand that the features of the individual be perpetuated, a concept first manifested in the portraits that fill the great Florentine fresco cycles and led, later in the fifteenth century, to the creation of the independent portrait by such artists as Sandro Botticelli, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Giovanni Bellini, and Antonello da Messina. Pope-Hennessy goes on to describe the process by which Titian and the great artists of the High Renaissance transformed the portrait from a record of appearance into an analysis of character.