Early modern objects, images and artworks were often nodes of discussion and contestation. If images were sometimes contested by external and often competing agencies (religious and secular authorities, image theoreticians, various Inquisitions etc.), artists and objects were often just as likely to impose their own rules and standards through the continuation and/or contestation of established visual traditions, styles, iconographies, materialities, reproductions and reframings. While issues such as censorship and iconoclasm have already received much attention from scholars, the actual role and capacity of the image as agent?either in actual legal processes or, more generally, in the creation of new visual standards?has yet to be adequately thematised. At present, no comprehensive study collects the many diverse instances of the multi-layered normative power of images, objects and art. 0This volume?Contested forms? aims to provide a first exploration of image normativity by means of a series of case studies, which will focus in different ways on the intersections between the limits of the sacred image and the power of art, especially but not exclusively in Europe, between 1450 and 1650. Each essay will approach the question of normativity in sacred images from different perspectives. Dealing with different types of images and materials, authors will discuss the status of images and objects in trials, contested portraits, objects and iconographies, the limits to representations of suffering, the tensions between theology and art, and the significance of copies and adaptations that establish as well as contest visual norms from Europe and beyond.

This study reveals the broad material, devotional, and cultural implications of sculpture in Renaissance Venice. Examining a wide range of sources—the era’s art-theoretical and devotional literature, guidebooks and travel diaries, and artworks in various media—Lorenzo Buonanno recovers the sculptural values permeating a city most famous for its painting. The book traces the interconnected phenomena of audience response, display and thematization of sculptural bravura, and artistic self-fashioning. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, early modern art and architecture, material culture, and Italian studies.

Instilled with intrinsic emotional connotations and a distinctive aesthetic ambiguity, images of children possess diachronic, transcultural and anthropological relevance. The reinvention and the adaptations of the ?normative image? of the ancient "putto" in the Renaissance triggered the multiform transmigration, adaptation and uses of images of children in early modern Europe. So did Christianity?s attachment to a divine child, which catalyzed the reception and visual dissemination of images of children in various forms. 00While social historians have explored the changes in status and perception of childhood during the early modern period, an extensive exploration of the visual relevance of this theme in sacred imagery has yet to emerge from art historical studies. What are the aesthetic values, the emotional effects and the cultural significance of these ubiquitous and frequently liminal images? 0The proposed volume aims to offer an innovative exploration of the visualization and materiality of infancy in early modern sacred contexts in different medias, by looking at the relationship between form and meaning from a cross-cultural perspective. 0This is a collection of 9 essays that brings together well-known experts and fresh voices to approaches these questions through case studies. Issues addressed include the functions of images of infants and "putti" in baptismal context, visual and spatial interactions between images of children, migrations of images of infants from the sacred to the prophane sphere, and their associations with interreligious violence.

This book reflects the way in which the city interacts with the sacred in all its many guises, with religion and the human search for meaning in life. As the process of urbanization of society is accelerating thus giving an increasing importance to cities and the 'metropolis', it is relevant to investigate the social or cultural cohesion that these urban agglomerations manifest. Religion is keenly observed as witnessing a growth, crucially impacting cultural and political dynamics, as well as determining the emergence of new sacred symbols and their inscription in urban spaces worldwide. The sacred has become an important category of a new interpretation of social and cultural transformation processes. From a unique broader perspective, the volume focuses on the relationship between the city and the sacred. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, combining the expertise of philosophers, historians, architects, social geographers, sociologists and anthropologists, it draws a nuanced picture of the different layers of religion, of the sacred and its diverse forms within the city, with examples from Europe, South America and the Caribbean, and Africa.

Sometimes enjoying considerable favor, sometimes less, iconography has been an essential element in medieval art historical studies since the beginning of the discipline. Some of the greatest art historians – including Mâle, Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, and Schapiro – have devoted their lives to understanding and structuring what exactly the subject matter of a work of medieval art can tell. Over the last thirty or so years, scholarship has seen the meaning and methodologies of the term considerably broadened. This companion provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the influence of the foremost iconographers, as well as the methodologies employed and themes that underpin the discipline. The first section focuses on influential thinkers in the field, while the second covers some of the best-known methodologies; the third, and largest section, looks at some of the major themes in medieval art. Taken together, the three sections include thirty-eight chapters, each of which deals with an individual topic. An introduction, historiographical evaluation, and bibliography accompany the individual essays. The authors are recognized experts in the field, and each essay includes original analyses and/or case studies which will hopefully open the field for future research.

This volume explores the production of knowledge of normativity in the age of early modern globalisation by looking at an extraordinarily pragmatic and normative book: Manual de Confessores, by the Spanish canon law professor Martín de Azpilcueta (1492-1586). Intertwining expertise, methods, and questions of legal history and book history, this book follows the actors and analyses the factors involved in the production, circulation, and use of the Manual, both in printed and manuscript forms, in the territories of the early modern Iberian Empires and of the Catholic Church. It convincingly illustrates the different dynamics related to the materiality of this object that contributed to “glocal” knowledge production. Contributors are: Samuel Barbosa, Manuela Bragagnolo, Christiane Birr, Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, Idalia García Aguilar, Pedro Guibovich Pérez, Natalia Maillard Álvarez, César Manrique Figueroa, Stuart M. McManus, Yoshimi Orii, David Rex Galindo, Airton Ribeiro, and Pedro Rueda Ramírez.

In A Saving Science, Eric Ramírez-Weaver explores the significance of early medieval astronomy in the Frankish empire, using as his lens an astronomical masterpiece, the deluxe manuscript of the Handbook of 809, painted in roughly 830 for Bishop Drogo of Metz, one of Charlemagne’s sons. Created in an age in which careful study of the heavens served a liturgical purpose—to reckon Christian feast days and seasons accurately and thus reflect a “heavenly” order—the diagrams of celestial bodies in the Handbook of 809 are extraordinary signifiers of the intersection of Christian art and classical astronomy. Ramírez-Weaver shows how, by studying this lavishly painted and carefully executed manuscript, we gain a unique understanding of early medieval astronomy and its cultural significance. In a time when the Frankish church sought to renew society through education, the Handbook of 809 presented a model in which study aided the spiritual reform of the cleric’s soul, and, by extension, enabled the spiritual care of his community. An exciting new interpretation of Frankish painting, A Saving Science shows that constellations in books such as Drogo’s were not simple copies for posterity’s sake, but functional tools in the service of the rejuvenation of a creative Carolingian culture.