While studying art history at New York University, brilliant and beautiful Finn Ryan makes a startling discovery: a Michelangelo drawing of a dissected corpse-supposedly from the artist's near-mythical notebook. But that very night, someone breaks into her apartment-murdering her boyfriend and stealing the sketches she made of the drawing. Fleeing for her life, Finn heads to the address her mother had given her for emergencies, where she finds the enigmatic antiquarian book dealer, Michael Valentine.
Almost 500 years after Michelangelo Buonarroti frescoed the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the site still attracts throngs of visitors and is considered one of the artistic masterpieces of the world. Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling unveils the story behind the art's making, a story rife with all the drama of a modern-day soap opera. The temperament of the day was dictated by the politics of the papal court, a corrupt and powerful office steeped in controversy; Pope Julius II even had a nickname, "Il Papa Terrible," to prove it. Along with his violent outbursts and warmongering
Cultures, Beliefs and Traditions Medieval and Early Modern Peoples...
Turning a skeptical eye on the idea that Renaissance artists were widely believed to be as utterly admirable as Vasari claimed, this book re-opens the question of why artists were praised and by whom, and specifically why the language of divinity was invoked, a practice the ancients did not license. The epithet ''divino'' is examined in the context of claims to liberal arts status and to analogy with poets, musicians, and other ''uomini famossi.''
It was the era that produced some of the icons of civilization: Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa and Last Supper and Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, Pieta, and David. As masterpieces by the likes of Caravaggio, Donato Bramante, Donatello, El Greco, Filippo Brunelleschi, Sandro Botticelli, Raphael, and Titian emerged, new heights of human potential were imagined. The Historical Dictionary of Renaissance Art covers the years 1250 to 1648, the period most disciplines place as the Renaissance Era. A complete portrait of this remarkable period is depicted in this book through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 500 hundred cross-referenced dictionary entries on major Renaissance painters, sculptors, architects, and patrons, as well as relevant historical figures and events, the foremost artistic centers, schools and periods, major themes and subjects, noteworthy commissions, technical processes, theoretical material, literary and philosophic sources for art, and art historical terminology.
