A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art provides a diverse, fresh collection of accessible, comprehensive essays addressing key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700, a period that might be termed the beginning of modern history.

Through the masterpieces produced by artists ranging from Michelangelo and Leonardo to Rembrandt, Rubens, and Vermeer, Europe’s Renaissance and Baroque period grew into one of the most creative times in world history. A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art presents a comprehensive collection of interdisciplinary essays that address major aspects of European visual arts produced from approximately 1300 to 1700, a period of artistic flourishing that many consider the beginning of modern history. These essays, however, transcend the traditional period labels of “Renaissance” and “Baroque” by addressing works from Duccio and Chaucer to Velazquez and Newton as a single continuum, inclusive in terms of both disciplinary and geographical boundaries, as an era best characterized as “early modern.”

Featuring original contributions by an international roster of scholars from various disciplines, writings are grouped by concept in five sections that spotlight the varied components and processes that constitute the world of the visual arts and the variety of interpretive methods and ideas that can be, and have been, brought to bear on art objects. Essays explore how art interacts with the cultural paradigms of this explosive time: the interface between art and religion, art and science, and gender and sexuality to name a few.

Combining an unprecedented breadth of coverage and depth of scholarship with lucid and accessible writing, A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art represents the most comprehensive reference on the study of Renaissance and Baroque visual arts available today.

A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art provides a diverse, fresh collection of accessible, comprehensive essays addressing key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700, a period that might be termed the beginning of modern history.

• Presents a collection of original, in-depth essays from art experts that address various aspects of European visual arts produced from circa 1300 to 1700
• Divided into five broad conceptual headings: Social-Historical Factors in Artistic Production; Creative Process and Social Stature of the Artist; The Object: Art as Material Culture; The Message: Subjects and Meanings; and The Viewer, the Critic, and the Historian: Reception and Interpretation as Cultural Discourse
• Covers many topics not typically included in collections of this nature, such as Judaism and the arts, architectural treatises, the global Renaissance in arts, the new natural sciences and the arts, art and religion, and gender and sexuality
• Features essays on the arts of the domestic life, sexuality and gender, and the art and production of tapestries, conservation/technology, and the metaphor of theater
• Focuses on Western and Central Europe and that territory's interactions with neighboring civilizations and distant discoveries
• Includes illustrations as well as links to images not included in the book