Bøker av Michael W. Cole

The formation and career of the first major woman artist of the RenaissanceSofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1535ΓÇô1625) was the daughter of minor Lombard aristocrats who made the unprecedented decision to have her trained as a painter outside the family house. She went on to serve as an instructor to Isabel of Valois, the young queen of Spain. Sofonisba''s Lesson sheds new light on Sofonisba''s work, offering a major reassessment of a Renaissance painter who changed the image of women''s education in EuropeΓÇöand who transformed Western attitudes about who could be an artist.In this gorgeously illustrated book, Michael Cole demonstrates how teaching and learning were central themes of Sofonisba''s art, which shows women learning to read, play chess, and paint. He looks at how her painting challenged conventional ideas about the teaching of young girls, and also discusses her place in the history of the amateur, a new Renaissance type. Cole examines Sofonisba''s relationships with the group of people for whom her work was importantΓÇöher father Amilcare, her teacher Bernardino Campi, the men and women who sought to be associated with her, and her sisters and the other young women who followed her path.Sofonisba''s Lesson concludes with an illustrated catalog of the more than two hundred paintings and drawings that writers have associated with Sofonisba over the past 450 years, with a full report of modern scholarly opinion on each.

In late 1504 and early 1505, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were both at work on commissions they had received to paint murals in Florence's City Hall. This book looks again at the one moment when Leonardo and Michelangelo worked side by side.

Ambitious Form describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors--Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti--as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked. Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.