The Birth of Venus

Author: Sarah Dunant
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588364429
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Book Description
Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.

Sandro Botticelli: The Birth of Venus (Foiled Blank Journal)

Author: Flame Tree Studio
Publisher: Flame Tree Gift
ISBN: 9781804177143
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
New title in the Flame Tree Blank Notebook collection, combining beautiful art with high-quality production, with blank pages, a pocket at the back and two ribbon bookmarks. Perfect as a gift, or an essential personal choice for writers, note takers, artists and list makers. A FLAME TREE NOTEBOOK. Beautiful and luxurious the journals combine high-quality production with magnificent art. Perfect as a gift, and an essential personal choice for writers, notetakers, travellers, students, poets and diarists. Features a wide range of well-known and modern artists, with new artworks published throughout the year. BEAUTIFULLY DESIGNED. The highly crafted covers are embossed and foil stamped, complemented by the luxury binding and rose red end-papers. The covers are created by our artists and designers who spend many hours transforming original artwork into gorgeous 3d masterpieces that feel good in the hand, and look wonderful on a desk or table. PRACTICAL, EASY TO USE. Flame Tree Notebooks come with practical features too: a pocket at the back for scraps and receipts; two ribbon markers to help keep track of more than just a to-do list and robust ivory text paper. THE ARTIST. Sandro Botticelli was one of the most esteemed artists of the Florentine Renaissance. His Birth of the Venus depicts the goddess Venus arriving at the shore after her birth, when she had emerged from the sea fully-grown. The painting is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. THE FINAL WORD. As William Morris said, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

Botticelli Past and Present

Author: Ana Debenedetti
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 178735461X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 334

Book Description
The recent exhibitions dedicated to Botticelli around the world show, more than ever, the significant and continued debate about the artist. Botticelli Past and Present engages with this debate. The book comprises four thematic parts, spanning four centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception from the fifteenth century. Each part comprises a number of essays and includes a short introduction which positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The parts are organised chronologically beginning with discussion of the artist and his working practice in his own time, moving onto the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design. Expertly written by researchers and eminent art historians and richly illustrated throughout, the broad range of essays in this book make a valuable contribution to Botticelli studies.

Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence

Author: Rebekah Compton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108916058
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Book Description
In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes – her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.

The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano

Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271044608
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 133

Book Description

Europe's Top 100 Masterpieces

Author: Rick Steves
Publisher: Rick Steves
ISBN: 9781641712231
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Explore Europe's top 100 works of art with America's most trusted travel authority, Rick Steves. Travel through time and discover Europe's most iconic paintings, sculptures, and historic buildings. From Venus to Versailles, Apollo to David, and Mona Lisa to The Thinker, Rick and co-author Gene Openshaw will have you marveling, learning, and laughing, one masterpiece at a time. Whether you're traveling to Europe or just dreaming about it, this book both stokes your wanderlust and kindles a greater appreciation of art, with historical context and information on where to see it for yourself. With Rick's trusted insight and gorgeous, full-color photos throughout, Europe's Top 100 Masterpieces celebrates nearly 20,000 years of unforgettable art.

Voyage of the Sable Venus

Author: Robin Coste Lewis
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 1101911204
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a "powerfully evocative" (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Robin Coste Lewis's electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems meditating on the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. In the center of the collection is the title poem, "Voyage of the Sable Venus," an amazing narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis's own autobiographical poems, "Voyage" is a tender and shocking meditation on the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, juxtaposing our names for things with what we actually see and know. A new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role did art play in this ancient, often heinous story? Here we meet a poet who adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire—how they define us all, including her own sometimes painful history. Lewis's book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.

Botticelli

Author: Ana Debenedetti
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781789149289
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A revealing look at the commercial strategy and diverse output of this canonical Renaissance artist. In this vivid account, Ana Debenedetti reexamines the life and work of Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli through a novel lens: his business acumen. Focusing on the organization of Botticelli’s workshop and the commercial strategies he devised to make his way in Florence’s very competitive art market, Debenedetti looks with fresh eyes at the remarkable career and output of this pivotal artist within the wider context of Florentine society and culture. Uniquely, Debenedetti evaluates Botticelli’s celebrated works, like The Birth of Venus, alongside less familiar forms such as tapestry and embroidery, showing the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre and his talent as a designer across media.

Blood & Beauty

Author: Sarah Dunant
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0748128727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 565

Book Description
By the end of the fifteenth century, the beauty and creativity of Italy is matched only by its brutality and corruption. When Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia buys his way into the papacy, he is defined not just by his wealth, charisma and power, but by his blood: a Spanish Pope in a city run by Italians. If he is to succeed, he must use his Machiavellian son and innocent daughter. Stripping away the myths around the Borgias, Blood & Beauty breathes life into the astonishing family of Alexander VI and celebrates the raw power of history itself: compelling, complex, and relentless.

Titian's 'Venus of Urbino'

Author: Rona Goffen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521444484
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Arguably the quintessential work of the High Renaissance in Venice, Titian's Venus of Urbino also represents one of the major themes of western art: the female nude. But how did Titian intend this work to be received? Is she Venus, as the popular title - a modern invention - implies; or is she merely a courtesan? This book tackles this and other questions in six essays by European and American art historians. Examining the work within the context of Renaissance art theory, as well as the psychology and society of sixteenth-century Italy, and even in relation to Manet's nineteenth-century 'translation' of the work, their observations begin and end with the painting itself, and with appreciation of Titian's great achievement in creating this archetypal image of feminine beauty.