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Francis Bacon produced his final draft of the New Atlantis around the years 1624-1625. Standing at the threshold of early modern thought, Bacon's text operates at the interstices of its contemporary culture and does indeed signal a desire to 'illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge'. This book presents a collection of essays that show how the New Atlantis negotiates a variety of contexts, namely literary, philosophical, political, religious and social, in order to achieve this. The narrative begins with a standard literary device. When Bacon wrote the New Atlantis, he clearly had More's Utopia in mind as a model. For all his strictures on the use of language for rhetorical effect, Francis Bacon was thoroughly grounded in the Renaissance art of rhetoric. He consciously drew on his rhetorical skill in his writings, adapting his style as occasion demanded. The New Atlantis is a text about natural philosophy which seems to offer connections at almost every point with moral and political philosophy. The book discusses two forms of natural knowledge that Bacon takes up and develops in the New Atlantis: natural magic, and medicine. The modern project is crucially dependent on two fundamental miracles: the miracle of creation and the miracle of divine revelation. The book also analyses Bacon's representations of colonialism and Jewishness in the New Atlantis has revealed. The New Atlantis raises questions concerning the relationship between censorship and knowledge.
This book brings together essays on the burgeoning array of local antiquarian practices that developed across Europe in the early modern era (c. 1400–1700). Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative method it investigates how individuals, communities and regions invented their own ancient pasts according to the concerns they faced in the present. A wide range of ‘antiquities’ – real or fictive, Roman or pre-Roman, unintentionally confused or deliberately forged – emerged through archaeological investigations, new works of art and architecture, collections, history-writing and literature. This book is the first to explore the concept of local concepts of antiquity across Europe in a period that has been defined as a uniform ‘Renaissance’. Contributions take a new novel approach to the revival of the antique in different parts of Italy and also extend to other, less widely studied antiquarian traditions in France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal, Britain and Poland. They examine how ruins, inscriptions and literary works were used to provide evidence of a particular idea of local origins, rewrite history or vaunt civic pride. They consider municipal antiquities collections in southern Italy and southern France, the antiquarian response to the pagan, Christian and Islamic past on the Iberian peninsula, and Netherlandish interest in megalithic ruins thought to be traces of a prehistoric race of giants. This interdisciplinary book is of interest for students and scholars of early modern art history, architectural history, literary studies and history, as well as classics and the reception of antiquity.
: the Angelic Mission, the Angelic Salutation and the Angelic Colloquy, and others have followed him in discussing the five successive ‘laudable conditions of the virgin’, stages of the event depicted in pre-Renaissance and Renaissance art. According to Michael Baxandall, the first two stages – disquiet (conturbio) and reflection (cogitatio) – are the most frequently depicted, in which Mary is shown at first alarmed by the appearance of Gabriel and then considering his greeting and announcement. The fourth stage, humility or submission (humiliatio) is also common; the
surroundings, with hints at Japanese decoration, Greek and Renaissance art. Crane's garden featured as ‘a Versailles castle garden setting’ and there was not any ‘wildness in either the setting or the Beast, a cloven-booted boar that wears a monocle’, dressed in an eighteenth-century French court costume. Boyle's version emphasized, on the contrary, the natural world through ‘an almost pantheistic obsession in the landscapes and descriptions of nature’, as Betsy Hearne has argued. 11 Her illustrations evoked the botanical
writers interpreted and represented the sensory worlds they encountered. Art historian François Quiviger, for example, explores the ‘presence, nature, function and meaning of sensation in Renaissance art as productive of space and meaning’, opening up new avenues for a profound engagement with not only visual components of art but how it reflected sound, taste, touch and smell.2 The editors of this volume take up the question of how a theory of early modern sense perception can aid our own interpretation of art work and its reception in its moment as well as ours
Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which could only be visited at night.17 Some renaissance art theorists believed that the aesthetic value of sculpture was best understood through touch: in fact Lorenzo Ghiberti in his fifteenth-century treatise on tactility in Italian sculpture argued that there were elements of sculpture only discernible through touch.18 Likewise, seventeenth-century MUP_Smith_Printer.indd 95 02/04/2015 16:18 96 Tracing a sense collections designed to invoke curiosity about nature emphasized that all aspects of perception were needed to evaluate materiality
Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (London: Reaktion Books, 2000 ). 5 See Matthew Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005 ). 6 William West
Deduction#2 (1996) conveys a tongue-in-cheek commentary on cultural stereotypes and binary thinking. It seems to ironically reappropriate the in-between representation of the Korean artist Nam June Paik who portrayed himself in a triangle configuration with a sculpture of Buddha and Rodin’s Thinker ( Triangle , 1976). The installation Deduction#2 is composed of three fax machines which, when the work was exhibited, spewed endless paper copies of three portraits: Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as an icon of Western Renaissance art; the image of Buddha as a symbol of
Baroque (which he considered emblematic of what had replaced Renaissance art) as the style in which form struggles to restrain materials that are increasingly out of control. According to Wölfflin, Renaissance art did not face this problem because its forms were matched to their material whilst the adequacy of classical forms is challenged in the Baroque. 23 It is hard to overestimate the importance of Wölfflin's book – as well as his Classical Art (1899) and Principles of Art
Verlag, 2002), pp. 195–207; Georges Roque, ‘Portrait de la couleur en femme fatale’, Art&Fact. Revue des historiens de l’art de l’université de Liège, 10 (1991), 4–10, and for the early modern period Partricia L. Reilly, ‘Writing out color in Renaissance art theory’, Genders, 12 (1991), 78–99. 6 Blanc, Grammaire, p. 53. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Charles Blanc, Grammar of Painting and Engraving, trans. Kate Newell Doggett (New York; Cambridge/Mass.: Hurd & Houghton, 1874), p. 162; Grammaire, p. 537; on Blanc and Delacroix see Gage, Colour and Meaning, pp. 47–8, 199