ART015080 Archives

Fragmented Illuminations

Sweeping secularisation of Catholic Church property across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries brought countless medieval and Renaissance manuscripts into private hands. While the text of these books was often obsolete, their jewel-like illuminations appealed to collectors and the market for single leaves, miniatures, initials or ornamented borders cut out of illuminated manuscripts took off in the mid-1820s. Today, thousands of manuscript cuttings can be found in collections around the world: a global jigsaw.

With over 2,000 examples, the V&A has one of the largest collections of this kind, originally assembled to form a visual sourcebook for contemporary artists and craftspeople. Using this collection as a guiding thread, Fragmented Illuminations seeks to contextualise cuttings and chart their changing meanings and functions from the time of their making to their unexpected afterlives in the hands of private collectors and Europe’s museums of applied arts. To complete the picture, new interdisciplinary research revives the books they came from, alongside the artists and patrons involved in their making. In sum, the book demonstrates how these complex objects can only be understood by mobilising knowledge from many disciplines, including art history, codicology, liturgiology, musicology, and provenance research.

Botticelli Past and Present

The recent exhibitions dedicated to Botticelli around the world show, more than ever, the significant and continued debate about the artist. Botticelli Past and Present – based on the proceedings of an international conference held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2016 in conjunction with an exhibition exploring the reception of Botticelli’s art from its inception to the present day – engages with this debate. The book comprises four thematic chapters, spanning four centuries of Botticelli’s artistic fame and reception from the fifteenth century. Each chapter comprises a number of essays and includes a short introduction which positions them within the wider scholarly literature on Botticelli. The chapters are organised chronologically beginning with discussion of the artist and his working practice in his own time, moving onto the progressive rediscovery of his work from the late eighteenth to the turn of the twentieth century, through to his enduring impact on contemporary art and design. Expertly written by researchers and eminent art historians and richly illustrated throughout, the broad range of essays in this book make a valuable contribution to Botticelli studies.

Renaissance Fun

Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes.

How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born.

Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.

From Revolt to Riches

This collection investigates the culture and history of the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from both international and interdisciplinary perspectives. The period was one of extraordinary upheaval and change, as the combined impact of Renaissance, Reformation and Revolt resulted in the radically new conditions – political, economic and intellectual – of the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. While many aspects of this rich and nuanced era have been studied before, the emphasis of this volume is on a series of interactions and interrelations: between communities and their varying but often cognate languages; between different but overlapping spheres of human activity; between culture and history.

The chapters are written by historians, linguists, bibliographers, art historians and literary scholars based in the Netherlands, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States. In continually crossing disciplinary, linguistic and national boundaries, while keeping the culture and history of the Low Countries in the Renaissance and Golden Age in focus, this book opens up new and often surprising perspectives on a region all the more intriguing for the very complexity of its entanglements.

Fonthill Recovered

Fonthill, in Wiltshire, is traditionally associated with the writer and collector William Beckford who built his Gothic fantasy house called Fonthill Abbey at the end of the eighteenth century. The collapse of the Abbey’s tower in 1825 transformed the name Fonthill into a symbol for overarching ambition and folly, a sublime ruin. Fonthill is, however, much more than the story of one man’s excesses. Beckford’s Abbey is only one of several important houses to be built on the estate since the early sixteenth century, all of them eventually consumed by fire or deliberately demolished, and all of them oddly forgotten by historians. Little now remains: a tower, a stable block, a kitchen range, some dressed stone, an indentation in a field.

Fonthill Recovered draws on histories of art and architecture, politics and economics to explore the rich cultural history of this famous Wiltshire estate. The first half of the book traces the occupation of Fonthill from the Bronze Age to the twenty-first century. Some of the owners surpassed Beckford in terms of their wealth, their collections, their political power and even, in one case, their sexual misdemeanours. They include Charles I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the richest commoner in the nineteenth century. The second half of the book consists of essays on specific topics, filling out such crucial areas as the complex history of the designed landscape, the sources of the Beckfords’ wealth and their collections, and one essay that features the most recent appearance of the Abbey in a video game.