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52 pages, 15462 KiB

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La Serenissima in Cyprus: Aspects of Venetian Art on the Edge of a Maritime Empire, 1474/89–1570/1

by Anthi Andronikou

Arts 2023, 12(5), 186; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12050186 - 31 Aug 2023

Viewed by 4815

This article investigates the manifestation of Venetian visual culture of the Renaissance in the island of Cyprus, which, between 1474/89 and 1570/1, stood as one of Venice’s Mediterranean colonies. To date, scholarship on panel and wall painting production of Venetian Cyprus has devoted careful attention to the infiltration of Italian details and styles in the broader sense—mainly drawn from the Italian Middle Ages—thus failing to notice any correlations between Cypriot visual arts and contemporary Venetian. In this study, I aim to provide an overarching perspective that will illuminate the presence and assimilation of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venetian visual vocabulary in Cypriot artistic capital. With an emphasis on devotional painting, I will examine iconographic schemes, such as the Man of Sorrows and the Holy Conversation, and facets of stylistic and iconographic correspondences between the two territories. I will also probe the architectural function, purpose, and tenor of lunette-shaped panels in Cyprus and collate them with their Venetian equivalents. Put simply, I hope to flesh out the artistic contact Cypriot artists and their sponsors maintained with Venice rather than with Italy as a whole. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Byzantine, Post-Byzantine and European Art History and Cultural Interchange)

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17 pages, 2548 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Post-Byzantine Cretan Icon Painting: Demand and Supply Revisited

by Angeliki Lymberopoulou

Arts 2023, 12(4), 139; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040139 - 4 Jul 2023

Viewed by 2849

Abstract

Since Manolis Chatzidakis’s pivotal publications on post-Byzantine Cretan icon painting in the 1970s, research in the field is, by now, very well established. In turn, these studies have demonstrated the contribution of Venetian Crete’s artistic production to European culture. Despite Giorgio Vasari’s condemnations of the ‘Greek style’, Byzantine icons remained popular in Renaissance Europe among Western patrons. Research on Venetian Crete has greatly benefitted from the survival of its archives, presently housed in Venice (Archivio di Stato di Venezia), an incredibly rich and invaluable source of information. One of the best-known published and referenced documents from these archives, supporting the wider popularity and dissemination of Cretan icons, is a contract offered to three Cretan painters dated 4 July 1499 concerning the production and delivery of 700 icons of the Virgin in just 42 days, by 15 August 1499, the day of the feast of the Dormition of the Virgin. This paper revisits the information the famous contract provides with the aim to scrutinise it further. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Byzantine, Post-Byzantine and European Art History and Cultural Interchange)

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16 pages, 1493 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Mapping Heresy in Sixteenth-Century Venice

by Alessandra Celati

Religions 2023, 14(5), 613; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14050613 - 6 May 2023

Viewed by 2791

Abstract

Drawing on a systematic study of the Savi sopra l’eresia archive in Venice, the most complete collection of historical records pertaining to Italian heretical movements and their repression, this article sketches the geography of heretical circles in Venice between the 1540s and the 1580s. The article puts space back into history and reads the history of religious dissent against the urban structure of sixteenth-century Venice, where streets and squares favored people’s encounters, allowing and fueling the exchange of information and the process of knowledge generation. Shifting the focus from people to places, and emphasizing fluidity and porosity, suggests new ways to pursue a more dynamic and performative conception of religious dissent. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Rethinking Catholicism in Early Modern Italy: Gender, Space, Mobility)

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21 pages, 7354 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Intermediaries and the Market: Hans Rottenhammer’s Use of Networks in the Copper Painting Market

by Sophia Quach McCabe

Arts 2019, 8(2), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8020075 - 24 Jun 2019

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 6653

Abstract

In Willem van Haecht’s Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest, The Last Judgment by the German artist Hans Rottenhammer stands prominently in the foreground. Signed and dated 1598, it is one of many copper panel paintings Rottenhammer produced and sent north of the Alps during his decade-long sojourn in Venice. That the work was valued alongside those of Renaissance masters raises questions about Rottenhammer’s artistic status and how the painting reached Antwerp. This essay examines Rottenhammer’s international market as a function of his relationships with artist-friends and agents, especially those in Venice’s German merchant community. By employing digital visualization tools alongside the study of archival documents, the essay attends to the intermediary connections within a social network, and their effects on the art market. It argues for Rottenhammer’s use of—and negotiation with—intermediaries to establish an international career. Through digital platforms, such as ArcGIS and Palladio, the artist’s patronage group is shown to have shifted geographically, from multiple countries around 1600 to Germany and Antwerp after 1606, when he relocated to Augsburg. Yet, the same trusted friends and associates he had established in Italy continued to participate in Rottenhammer’s business of art. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Art Markets and Digital Histories)

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41 pages, 20345 KiB

Open AccessArticle

From Domestic Devotion to the Church Altar: Venerating Icons in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Adriatic

by Margarita Voulgaropoulou

Religions 2019, 10(6), 390; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10060390 - 19 Jun 2019

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 15831

Abstract

Although traditionally associated with Eastern Christianity, the practice of venerating icons became deeply rooted in the Catholic societies of the broad Adriatic region from the Late Middle Ages onwards and was an indispensable part of everyday popular piety. The evidence lies in the massive amount of icons located today in public and private collections throughout the Italian Peninsula, Croatia, Slovenia, and Montenegro. At a time when Greeks were branded as “schismatics”, and although the Byzantine maniera greca had become obsolete in Western European art, icon painting managed to survive at the margins of the Renaissance, and ultimately went through its own renaissance in the sixteenth century. Omnipresent in Catholic households, icons were very often donated to churches as votive offerings and were gradually transformed into the focal points of collective public devotion. Through the combined study of visual evidence, archival records and literary sources, this article will shed light on the socio-political, confessional, and artistic dynamics that allowed for Byzantine or Byzantinizing icons to gain unprecedented popularity throughout the Catholic milieus of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Adriatic, and become integrated into domestic and public devotional practices. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Domestic Devotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe)

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