Renaissance
Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach's Adam and Eve - OUT OF PRINT
260 x 216 mm, 144 pages, hardback, 80 colour illustrations
PRICE: £25.00
DOWNLOAD PRICE: £12.50
ISBN: 9781903470541
Out of print in the UK, but still available in the US and Canada. CLICK HERE.
Essays by Caroline Campbell, Curator at the Courtauld Gallery; Susan Foister, Senior curator at the National Gallery, London; Dr Stephanie Buck, Curator of Drawings at The Courtauld Gallery.
This is the catalogue to the first exhibition in Britain to be devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) who was one of the greatest German Renaissance painters. Cranach spent the majority of his career in Wittenberg, as court artist to the powerful Electors of Saxony, and was a close associate of the Protestant theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546). Throughout his career, Cranach devoted his considerable artistic talents to the furthering of the Lutheran cause. He found in Eve’s temptation of Adam a subject which was ideally suited to his outstanding gifts as a portrayer of landscape, animals and the female nude, and to which Protestant theologians like Luther did not object.
The Courtauld’s Adam and Eve is arguably the most beautiful of Cranach’s fifty or more depictions of this subject. It brilliantly combines devotional meaning with pictorial elegance and invention. The scene is set in a forest clearing where Eve stands before the Tree of Knowledge, caught in the act of handing an apple to a bewildered Adam. This exhibition will explore the making and meaning of this Protestant and courtly masterpiece, and the contexts in which it was made and seen. It will incorporate much conservation and technical research. More than twenty loans of paintings, drawings and prints will be drawn from major British and international collections, including the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.
This illuminated manuscript, a gradual of large size which the whole congregation of monks could see and read as they sang in choir (just as they are shown doing in an illustration in the manuscript itself), was previously unknown to scholars and has only recently come to light. It was clearly produced for a monastery of the Olivetan order, a branch of the Benedictines with a particular reverence for the Virgin Mary – probably Santa Maria di Baggio near Milan. More
The portly figure of Henry VIII depicted by Holbein may be very familiar, but this book reveals much more about the portrait, the sitter, the artist and his workshop. It gathers together and analyses the several copies and variants of Holbein’s Whitehall cartoon of Henry VIII, more than one of which is by the only significant painter immediately after Holbein in England, Hans Eworth. More
A very handsome addition to any art library" (Art Times)
"There is a wealth of information, scholarly insight, and sound reasoning in this work, which serves as both a tribute to one man and a contribution to art history." (Library Journal Reviews) More
Accompanying an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, this catalogue explores one of the most important and historically neglected art forms of Renaissance Florence: cassoni – pairs of chests that were lavishly decorated with precious metals and elaborate paintings and were often the most expensive of a whole suite of decorative objects commissioned to celebrate marriage alliances between powerful families. More
"The whole thing is a curatorial and scholarly triumph ... the catalogue essays do full justice to the power of Michelangelo's intellect, as well as to hand and eye." (Richard Dorment, Telegraph)
Michelangelo's Dream (or Il Sogno) is one of the finest of all Italian Renaissance drawings and is amongst The Courtauld Gallery's greatest treasures. Executed at the height of the artist's career, this magnificent work exemplifies Michelangelo's unrivalled skill as draughtsman and his extraordinary power of invention. More
There can be few examples of intensive fashioning and self-fashioning by a Renaissance figure more remarkable than Prince Henry (1594-1612). Two decades after the appearance of Roy Strong's revelatory Henry Prince of Wales and England's Lost Renaissance this collection of essays re-examines the extraordinary artistic and cultural response to Prince Henry and presents many new findings in the context of recent scholarship. More
