Search results for ""Author Rembrandt Duits""
Pindar Press Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting: A Study in Material Culture
Silk fabrics woven with gold thread, predominantly produced in Italy, were depicted frequently in Renaissance painting, both in costumes and as backdrops for important figures. These painted textiles carried an economic and social significance that a contemporary audience would have recognised as part of the message conveyed by the picture. Gold brocade and Renaissance painting focuses on examples from Italy and the southern Netherlands , dating from the fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. Setting aside traditional notions of the hierarchy of the major and minor arts, the book treats gold brocade and painting equally as exponents of the special segment of Renaissance material culture that was art. The fabrics rendered in painting reflected the tradition of actual weaving, but only to an extent, as many gold brocades were painted from imagination. Gold brocades were much more expensive than paintings; hence the two media functioned in different contexts. Gold brocade was an important element in the display of wealth and status at grand courts, while painting often formed the only affordable substitute for courtly splendour for the socially ambitious but less affluent urban upper-middle class. Their value and cultural role also meant that gold-brocaded textiles could be included in paintings both in praise of luxury and as a condemnation of it - sometimes in one and the same work. Gold brocade and Renaissance painting examines the skills artists developed for representing these lavish textiles. It uses a wide range of documents (from inventories and account books to letters, poems, educational treatises and sermons) to compare the economic value of gold brocade and painting, clarify the conditions of their use, and interpret the different messages given by brocades in different pictures. Primarily, however, the book deals with the distinction between fact and fiction, imagination and reality in the world shown in Renaissance paintings.
£150.00
Pindar Press Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting: A Study in Material Culture
Rembrandt Duits completed his PhD at the University of Utrecht , and works at the Photographic Collection of the Warburg Institute, where he also teaches Renaissance material culture. His thesis, Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting, won the Karel van Mander Prijs for the best publication on art between 1500 and 1800. Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting discusses the representation of Italian Renaissance patterned silks in paintings from Italy and the Southern Netherlands , from the 14th to the 16th century. It is the first study to approach this subject from the perspective of material culture, attempting to answer such questions as why the subject of luxury textiles gained so great a popularity in Renaissance painting, how artists catered for an audience that desired to have gold brocades depicted but did not always possess the financial means to own the actual fabrics, and what the skills artists developed in this field contributed to the rising social status of the medium of painting. The material culture of the grand courts at which real gold brocade played an essential role in the display of wealth and status is compared to that of the socially ambitious but less affluent middle class for whom paintings were often the only affordable substitute for courtly splendour. Thus, the book also addresses the problem of the distinction between fact and fiction, imagination and reality in the account of contemporary social history presented in paintings.
£30.59