Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700
About the Book Series
A forum for innovative research on the role of images and objects in the late medieval and early modern periods, Visual and Material Culture, 1300-1700 publishes monographs and essay collections that combine rigorous investigation with critical inquiry to present new narratives on a wide range of topics, from traditional arts to seemingly ordinary things. Recognizing the fluidity of images, objects, and ideas, this series fosters cross-cultural as well as multi-disciplinary exploration. We consider proposals from across the spectrum of analytic approaches and methodologies.
Jacob van Ruisdael’s Ecological Landscapes
1st Edition
By Catherine Levesque
December 01, 2025
This book examines Jacob van Ruisdael's treatment of five subjects—dunes, grainfields, ruins, rushing water, and woodlands—that recur throughout his career. The paintings, though fictive, show close attention to the complexities of particular environments that can be fruitfully considered “...
Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature
1st Edition
Edited
By Christine Göttler, Mia Mochizuki
December 01, 2025
Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and ...
Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture
1st Edition
By Katrina Grant
December 01, 2025
Landscape and the Arts in Early Modern Italy: Theatre, Gardens and Visual Culture argues that theatre, and the new genre of opera in particular, played a key role in creating a new vision of landscape during the long seventeenth century in Italy. It explores how the idea of gardens as theatres ...
Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750
1st Edition
Edited
By Natasha Seaman, Joanna Woodall
December 01, 2025
Money Matters in European Artworks and Literature, c. 1400-1750 focuses on coins as material artefacts and agents of meaning in early modern arts. The precious metals, double-sided form, and emblematic character of coins had deep resonance in European culture and cultural encounters. Coins embodied...
Netherlandish and Italian Female Portraiture in the Fifteenth Century: Gender, Identity, and the Tradition of Power
1st Edition
By Elisabetta Toreno
December 01, 2025
This book investigates the aesthetic and conceptual characteristics of fifteenth-century female portraiture on panel. Portraits of women increased substantially during this century. They formed part of a material and a visual culture borne out of the rapid rise of an oligarchy from entrepreneurial ...
Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art
1st Edition
Edited
By Chris Askholt Hammeken, Maria Fabricius Hansen
December 01, 2025
Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating...
Petrarch and Sixteenth-Century Italian Portraiture
1st Edition
Edited
By Ilaria Bernocchi, Nicolò Morelli, Federica Pich
December 01, 2025
The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch’s legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch’s vast literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and ...
Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550-1800
1st Edition
Edited
By Tamara H. Bentley
December 01, 2025
Combining strikingly new scholarship by art historians, historians, and ethnomusicologists, this interdisciplinary volume illuminates trade ties within East Asia, and from East Asia outwards, in the years 1550 to 1800. While not encyclopedic, the selected topics greatly advance our sense of this ...
Portrait Cultures of the Early Modern Cardinal
1st Edition
Edited
By Piers Baker-Bates, Irene Brooke
December 01, 2025
The visual legacy of early modern cardinals constitutes a vast and extremely rich body of artworks, many of superb quality, in a variety of media, often by well-known artists and skilled craftsmen. Yet cardinal portraits have primarily been analyzed within biographical studies of the represented ...
Poussin's Women: Sex and Gender in the Artist's Works
1st Edition
By Troy Thomas
December 01, 2025
Poussin's Women: Sex and Gender in the Artist's Works examines the paintings and drawings of the well-known seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) from a gender studies perspective, focusing on a critical analysis of his representations of women. The book's thematic chapters...
Prints as Agents of Global Exchange: 1500-1800
1st Edition
Edited
By Heather Madar
December 01, 2025
The significance of the media and communications revolution occasioned by printmaking was profound. Less a part of the standard narrative of printmaking’s significance is recognition of the frequency with which the widespread dissemination of printed works also occurred beyond the borders of Europe...
Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Bolognese Painting: Ideology, Practice, and Criticism
1st Edition
By Daniel M. Unger
December 01, 2025
Redefining Eclecticism in Early Modern Bolognese Painting. Ideology, Practice, and Criticism focuses on the unique nature of early modern Bolognese painting that found its expression in stylistic diversity. The flourishing of different stylistic approaches in the Mannerist paintings of the previous...