Search

This is the 1st volume in a 4-volume work entitled The Mage's Images. The work provides the first in-depth examination of the life and works of Heinrich Khunrath (1560-1605), ‘one of the great Hermetic philosophers', whose Amphitheatre of Eternal Wisdom (1595/1609) has been described as ‘one of the most important books in the whole literature of theosophical alchemy and the occult sciences'. Khunrath is best known for his novel combination of ‘scripture and picture'in the complex engravings in his Amphitheatre. In this richly illustrated monograph, Forshaw analyses occult symbolism, with previously unpublished material, offering insight into Khunrath's insistence on the necessary combination of alchemy, magic, and cabala in ‘Oratory and Laboratory'.

Valuable biographical dictionary of Cologne artists, incorporating oeuvre-catalogues, references, bibliographies, etc. Contains inter alia (col. 971-1099) the best oeuvre-catalogue of Anton Woensam von Worms.

Lists 6.265 German pamphlets of the 16th- and 17th century, now in the Frankfort Public Library. Descriptions comprise full transcriptions of titles, collations, and references. Fully indexed.

Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880) provides a broad spectre of early modern manifestations of human fascination with fish – “fish” understood in the early modern sense of the term, as aquatilia: all aquatic animals, including sea mammals and crustaceans. It addresses the period's quickly growing knowledge about fish in its multiple, varied and rapidly changing interaction with culture. This topic is approached from various disciplines: history of science, cultural history, history of collections, historical ecology, art history, literary studies, and lexicology. Attention is given to the problematic questions of visual and textual representation of fish, and pre- and post-Linnean classification and taxonomy. This book also explores the transnational exchange of ichthyological knowledge and items in and outside Europe. Contributors: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.

The origin and evolution of cattle breeds was long explained only by historical sources, with questionable reliability. In recent years genetic and molecular data have become available that shed new light on this, revealing how, from neolithic times, breeds emerged by migratory movements and mutual influencing of gene pools. But while molecular breed characterization is now rapidly advancing, phenotypic characterization remains under-explored. This publication presents a classification of around 1,000 cattle breeds based on geographical and historical data and morphology. Males and females of every breed are portrayed by the author in water colour and to scale. The illustrations are positioned next to each breed's description, completing the overall image.

From Rome to Beijing: Sacred Spaces in Dialogue, edited by Daniel M. Greenberg and Mari Yoko Hara, explores the relationship between Jesuit enterprise and Ming-Qing China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Jesuit order's global corporation grew increasingly influential within the Chinese court after 1582, in no small part due to the two institutions shared interests in artistic and scientific matters. The paintings, astronomical instruments, spiritual texts and sacred buildings engendered through this encounter tell fascinating stories of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication. This volume approaches early modern East-West exchange as a site of cultural (rather than commercial) negotiations, where two sets of traditions and values intersected and diverged.

Edited with introduction and notes. With notes on the manuscripts by A.S. Korteweg.

This book explores for the first time the concept of synagonism (from “σύν”, “together” and “ἀγών”,'struggle”) for an analysis of the productive exchanges between early modern painting, sculpture, architecture, and other art forms in theory and practice. In doing so, it builds on current insights regarding the so-called paragone debate, seeing this, however, as only one, too narrow perspective on early modern artistic production. Synagonism, rather, implies a breaking up of the schematic connections between art forms and individual senses, drawing attention to the multimediality and intersensoriality of art, as well as the relationship between image and body.

By clothing the Word with her flesh, the Virgin Mary made God visible, manifesting Christ as a perfect “image” of the Father. By virtue of this archetypal “artistry” of Incarnation, Mary mediates the tradition of Christian image-making. This volume explores images of the Mother of God in early modern devotion, piety, and power. The book is divided into four sections, the first three of which link the subjects thematically and geographically in Europe, while the last one follows Mary's legacy. Contributors include: Elliott D. Wise, Anna Dlabačová, James Clifton, Kim Butler Wingfield, Barbara Baert, Steven Ostrow, Barbara Haeger, Shelley Perlove, Cristina Cruz González, and Mehreen Chida-Razvi.

The book examines the myth of Hercules and Omphale/Iole which became an important topic in the visual arts in the period 1500–1800. It offers an analysis of the iconography from the perspective of the history of emotions, classical and Neo-Latin philology, reception studies, and gender studies. The early modern inventions of the myth excel in a skilful display of mixed and compound emotions, such as the male character's psychopathology, and of the theatrical performance of emotions by the female character.

This collection of essays explores the role of gardens in early modern academies and, conversely, the place of what might be called'academic culture'in early modern gardens. While studies of botanical gardens have often focused on their association with a research institution, the intention of this book is deliberately broader, seeking to explore the interconnections between the built environment of the early modern garden and the more or less organised social and intellectual life it supported. As such, the book contributes to the intersection of several fields of research: garden history, literary history, architectural history and socio-political history, and considers the garden as a site of performance that requires an intermedial approach.

Listening to Confraternities offers new perspectives on the contribution of guild and devotional confraternities to the urban phonosphere based on original research and an interdisciplinary approach. Historians of art, architecture, culture, sound, music and the senses consider the ways in which, through their devotional practices, confraternities acted as patrons of music, created their identity through sound and were involved in the everyday musical experience of major cities in early modern Europe. Confraternities have been studied from many different angles, but only rarely as acoustic communities that communicated through sound and whose musical activities delimited the urban spaces in which they were active. Contributors: Nicholas Terpstra, Emanuela Vai, Ana López Suero, Henry Drummond, Ascensión Mazuela-Anguita, Ferrán Escrivà-Llorca, Noel O'Regan, Magnus Williamson, Xavier Torres Sans, Erika Honisch, Alexander Fisher, Konrad Eisenbichler, Daniele Filippi, Dylan Reid, Elisa Lessa, Antonio Ruiz Caballero, Juan Ruiz Jiménez, Sergi González González, and Tess Knighton.

This book examines deployments of mixed emotion in the literary and pictorial arts of early modern Europe. It consists of two parts, the first focusing on portrayals of mixed emotion in theatre, poetry, and prose, the second on forms and functions of mixed emotion in spiritual exercises centering on pictorial images, and on the heuristic and/or restorative functions of portraying mixed emotion. Contributors: Stijn Bussels, Tom Conley, Wietse de Boer, Carolin A. Giere, Barbara A. Kaminska, Graham R. Lea, Walter S. Melion, Mitchell Merback, Ruth Sargent Noyes, Bram Van Oostveldt, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bart Ramakers, Lukas Reddemann, Ludovica Sasso, Aline Smeesters, Paul J. Smith, Anita Traninger, and Elliott D. Wise.

A classic contribution to the study of Renaissance emblematics. Anhang: Hieroglyphen und Embleme in den Drucker- und Verlegerzeichen.

Two allegorical ancient Greek stories about a young hero's career- defining choice are shown in this book to have later been appropriated to radically differing effects. E.g. a male's choice between female personifications can morph into a female's choice between the same, or between various male personifications. Never before have so many instances of this process from art, literature, music, even landscape gardening, been culled. Illustrations, mainly colour, many brought into this context for the first time, are conveniently incorporated into the text, thus mimetically mirroring a central theme of the book, the process of ‘visualising the verbal, verbalising the visual.'

What does'performance'mean in Christian culture? How is it connected to rituals, dramatic and visual arts, and the written word? Performing the Sacred: Christian Representation and the Arts explores both the meaning of re-presentation and the role of performance within the Christian tradition between arts and drama. The essays in this book demonstrate that the idea of performance was central to Christian theology and that—from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern era—it became a device through which people saw, prayed, preached, wrote, imagined, officiated rites, celebrated cults, and practiced devotions. Seen that performance is a habitus within Christianity, performing the sacred does not just mean representing it, but rather enacting it in a tangible, visible and involved way.

This book is about the Dominican church in Antwerp (today St Paul's). It is structured around three works of art, made or procured by Peter Paul Rubens: the Fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary cycle (in situ), Caravaggio's Rosary Madonna (Vienna) and the Wrath of Christ high altarpiece (Lyon). Within the artist's lifetime, the church and monastery were completely rebuilt, creating one of the most spectacular sacred spaces in Northern Europe. In this richly illustrated book, Adam Sammut reconceptualises early modern churches as theatres of political economy, advancing an original approach to cultural production in a time of war. Using methodologies at the cutting edge of the humanities, the place of St Paul's is restored to the crux of Antwerp's commercial, civic and religious life.

Uit de wereld van het boek is de titel van een vierdelige reeks, waarin opstellen van Prof. Herman de la Fontaine Verwey over boeken, schrijvers, drukkers, uitgevers, binders, bibliofielen, bibliotheken en verzamelaars in bijgewerkte vorm gepubliceerd zijn. Deze studies kan men beschouwen als hoofdstukken van de Nederlandse cultuurgeschiedenis. Aan de hand van de historie van een bepaald boek wordt de aandacht gevraagd voor geestelijke en artistieke stromingen, maar ook voor de auteurs, de drukkers, de illustratoren, de boekbinders enz.Dit vierde deel gaat o.a. in op de vermeende incunabeldrukker Frederik Corcellis, de berooide edelman Rchard Atkyns en de falsaris George Smith, de miraculeuze bloei van het boekenbedrijf tijdens de Republiek: het Hollands wonder, de prehistorie van de huidige Universiteitsbibliotheek van Amsterdam, de boekbanden van prins Willem van Oranje en Jean Frolier, de bibliotheek van Adriaan Pauw en Neerlands eerste antiquaar Pieter van Damme. Dit deel wordt gecompleteerd door uitvoerige registers op alle delen van de reeks.

Customised Books in Early Modern Europe and the Americas, 1400‒1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of alterations made by users to the physical structure of their book, through insertion or interpolation, subtraction or deletion, adjustments in the ordering of folios or quires, amendments of image or text. Although our primary interest is in printed books and print series bound like books, we also consider selected manuscripts since meaningful alterations made to incunabula and early printed books often followed the patterns such changes took in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century codices. Throughout Customised Books the emphasis falls on the hermeneutic functions of the modifications made by makers and users to their manuscripts and books. Contributors: B. Boler Hunter, T. Cummins, A. Dlabačova, K.A.E. Enenkel, C.D. Fletcher, P.F. Gehl, P. Germano Leal, J. Kiliańczyk-Zięba, J. Koguciuk, A. van Leerdam, S. Leitch, S. McKeown, W.S. Melion, K. Michael, S. Midanik, B. Purkaple, J. Rosenholtz-Witt, B.L. Rothstein, M.R. Wade, and G. Warnar.

Watermarks 1450–1850 offers a concise history of the production of paper in Western Europe from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. The research is based on watermarks collected from various sources in combination with other elements from the trade, such as decorated paper and ream wrappers. This book includes reproductions of ca. seven hundred watermarks. Frans and Theo Laurentius have published two more books on the topic in this same book series: Italian Watermarks 1750–1860 (2016), and Watermarks in Paper from the South-West of France, 1560–1860 (2018). In 2007/2008 they published Watermarks (1600–1650) Found in the Zeeland Archives and Watermarks (1650–1700) Found in the Zeeland Archives.

Originally published as catalogue 100 of Antiquariaat FORUM in 10 issues between 1994-2002. With an extra issue with extensive indices. The impressive Catalogue, developed into a unique reference work on Children's books, is now available in three extensive and richly illustrated volumes: a milestone in the history of Children's book production. The work illustrates and mirrors the entire history of West-European education. Besides historical schoolbooks on spelling and reading exercises, on teaching methods, arithmetic, drawing, children's literature, fairy-tales, fable books, and so on, you can find your way in popular literature and chapbooks, books on sports, games and pastimes etc. All titles are expertly described, annotated and placed in their cultural-historical context. The print edition is available as a set of three volumes (9789061941392).

Originally published as catalogue 100 of Antiquariaat FORUM in 10 issues between 1994-2002. With an extra issue with extensive indices. The impressive Catalogue, developed into a unique reference work on Children's books, is now available in three extensive and richly illustrated volumes: a milestone in the history of Children's book production. The work illustrates and mirrors the entire history of West-European education. Besides historical schoolbooks on spelling and reading exercises, on teaching methods, arithmetic, drawing, children's literature, fairy-tales, fable books, and so on, you can find your way in popular literature and chapbooks, books on sports, games and pastimes etc. All titles are expertly described, annotated and placed in their cultural-historical context. The print edition is available as a set of three volumes (9789061941392).

In Painting Flanders Abroad: Flemish Art and Artists in Seventeenth-Century Madrid, Flemish immigrants and imported Flemish paintings cross the paths of Spanish kings, collectors, dealers, and artists in the Spanish court city, transforming the development and nature of seventeenth-century Spanish painting. Examining these Flemish transplants and the traces their interactions left in archival documents, collection inventories, art treatises, and most saliently Spanish “Golden Age” paintings, this book portrays Spanish society grappling with a long tradition of importing its favorite paintings while struggling to reimagine its own visual idiom. In the process, the book historicizes questions of style, quality, immigration, mobility, identity, and cultural exchange to define what the evolving and amorphous visual concept of “Flemishness” meant to Spanish viewers in an era long before the emergence of nationalism.

One of the most noticeable features of the Renaissance is what Jacob Burckhardt called the rise of the individual - in politics and religion, in its social life and in the arts, and in the mentality of Renaissance man, with his inclination to explore, to invent and to make new discoveries. Yet this characteristic is also very puzzling to modern people, who see that although the categories of art which depict particular people increased to a spectacular degree in a period when biography and portrait painting were among the most popular genres, and autobiography began to emerge as a genre in itself and painters began to produce self-portraits, an interest individuals is not necessarily the same thing as the more recent interest in the purely personal aspects of individuals. Literary and artistic traditions, social and ideological backgrounds, and the motives for the production of literature have changed profoundly: Renaissance biography and autobiography, portraiture and self-portraiture have little to do with their modern counterparts. Therefore this book stresses that the Renaissance is not predominantly a mirror of modernity, but rather a period of stimulating difference or alterity. The contributors to this collection of essays aim to create a better understanding of Renaissance biographies and portraits through the analysis and reconstruction of the traditions, contexts, backgrounds and circumstances of their production.

Images of Miraculous Healing in the Early Modern Netherlands explores the ways in which paintings and prints of biblical miracles shaped viewers'approaches to physical and sensory impairments and bolstered their belief in supernatural healing and charitable behavior. Drawing upon a vast range of sources, Barbara Kaminska demonstrates that visual imagery held a central place in premodern disability discourses, and that the exegesis of New Testament miracle stories determined key attitudes toward the sick and the poor. Addressed to middle-class collectors, many of the images analyzed in this study have hitherto been neglected by art historians. Link to book presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79jHEmTOKnU

This volume is dedicated to a specific kind of Renaissance publications - to books with portraits of famous people. Illustrium Imagines has become a phrase denoting the very tenet of early modern individualism as well as the phenomenon of the widespread individual popularity acquired through book illustration and prints. The first part of the study deals with major characteristics of portrait books from the very beginnings in the biographies of classical antiquity to their new role as a medium of information, representation and propaganda in the early modern world. The second part of the study consists of a bibliographical list of publications that correspond to criteria of portrait books. The catalogue contains 173 major units, most of them illustrated by one typical portrait.

A wide-ranging study of Prévert's promethean imagination and creativity in the interwoven realms of theatre, film, poetry, art, photography, and song, Michael Bishop's Jacques Prévert seeks to demonstrate the originality of a genial fabricator of image and word whose essential focus, unpretentious yet urgently felt, unintellectualised yet buoyantly and wittily intelligent, ever remains the quality of our daily being-in-the-world, the possibility of our self-transformation, the stunning availability – should we truly will it, and despite all that can weigh upon existence, above all ideologically – of joy and love and freedom.

Emotions, Art, and Christianity in the Transatlantic World, 1450–1800 is a collection of studies variously exploring the role of visual and material culture in shaping early modern emotional experiences. The volume's transatlantic framework moves from The Netherlands, Spain, and Italy to Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and the Philippines, and centers on visual culture as a means to explore how emotions differ in their local and global “contexts” amidst the many shifts occurring c. 1450–1800. These themes are examined through the lens of art informed by religious ideas, especially Catholicism, with each essay probing how religiously inflected art stimulated, molded, and encoded emotions. Contributors: Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, Alison C. Fleming, Natalia Keller, Walter S. Melion, Olaya Sanfuentes, Patricia Simons, Dario Velandia Onofre, and Charles M. Rosenberg.

Sculpture in Print, 1480–1600 is the first in-depth study dedicated to the intriguing history of the translation of statues and reliefs into print. The multitude of engravings, woodcuts and etchings show a highly creative handling of the ‘original'antique or contemporary work of art. The essays in this volume reflect these various approaches to and challenges of translating sculpture in print. They analyze foremost the beginnings of the phenomenon in Italian and Northern Renaissance prints and they highlight by means of case studies amongst many other topics the interrelated terminology between sculpture and print, lost models in print, the inventive handling of fragments, as well as the transformation of statues into narrative contexts.

This collection of sixteen essays deals with the role of magic, religion and witchcraft in European culture, 1450-1650, and the critical role of the visual in that culture. It covers the relationship of humanism and magic; the intersection of religious ritual, orthodoxy and power; the discursive links between the visual language of witchcraft and contemporary anxieties about sexuality and savagery. The introductory chapter urges us to exorcise our tendency to reduce historical experiences of the demonic to forms of unreason created in a distant past. Only then can we understand the role of the demonic in our historical definition of the self and the other. Richly illustrated with 112 images, the book will interest historians and art historians.

Dealing with dervish headcoverings (tac) in the Ottoman Empire and interpreting them in a broad sense this book is based on a late 18th century treatise of the Naqshbandi scholar Müstaqim-zade Süleyman Sadeddin (d. 1788) from Istanbul.The introduction interprets the meaning of headcoverings in both the Ottoman society as well as in a dervish's private world and it discusses the terminology used in the dervish literature.The second chapter is the critical transliteration of Müstaqim-zade's treatise. Müstaqim-zade does not only tell the history and meaning of headcoverings in Islam but also examines precisely the differences of the headcoverings in different tariqats.Nine different indices conclude the book. Some of these are commented. The index on dressing terminology is especially important and serves as a reference. The book is illustrated with partly non-published hand drawings from Ottoman manuscripts as well as prints and photographs

As one of the most frequently commentated on biblical books during antiquity and the middle ages, the Song of Songs has played a central role in the history of Christian spirituality. At a time of heightened interest in the Song of Songs among biblical scholars, historians, and students of spirituality, this Companion to the Song of Songs in the History of Spirituality provides a state-of-the art overview of its history, challenges some conventional wisdom, and presents innovative studies of some lesser-known aspects of the Song's reception. The essays in this volume—including a chapter on Jewish interpretation—present the diverse forms of spirituality inspired by the Song since the beginning of the Christian era. Contributors: Ann W. Astell, Mark S. Burrows, Emily Cain, Catherine Cavadini, Rabia Gregory, Arthur Holder, Jason Kalman, Suzanne LaVere, Hannah Matis, Bernard McGinn, Timothy H. Robinson, and Karl Shuve.

This volume examines the image-based methods of interpretation that pictorial and literary landscapists employed between 1500 and 1700. The seventeen essays ask how landscape, construed as the description of place in image and/or text, more than merely inviting close viewing, was often seen to call for interpretation or, better, for the application of a method or principle of interpretation. Contributors: Boudewijn Bakker, William M. Barton, Stijn Bussels, Reindert Falkenburg, Margaret Goehring, Andrew Hui, Sarah McPhee, Luke Morgan, Shelley Perlove, Kathleen P. Long, Lukas Reddemann, Denis Ribouillault, Paul J. Smith, Troy Tower, and Michel Weemans.

In epideictic oratory, ekphrasis is typically identified as an advanced rhetorical exercise that verbally reproduces the experience of viewing a person, place, or thing; more specifically, it often purports to replicate the experience of viewing a work of art. Not only what was seen, but also how it was beheld, and the emotions attendant upon first viewing it, are implicitly construed as recoverable, indeed reproducible. This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures operate in an ekphrastic mode: such pictures claim to reconstitute works of art that solely survived in the textual form of an ekphrasis; or they invite the beholder to respond to a picture in the way s/he responds to a stirring verbal image; or they call attention to their status as an image, in the way that ekphrasis, as a rhetorical figure, makes one conscious of the process of image-making; or finally, they foreground the artist's or the viewer's agency, in the way that the rhetor or auditor is adduced as agent of the image being verbally produced. Contributors: Carol Elaine Barbour, Ivana Bičak, Letha Ch'ien, James Clifton, Teresa Clifton, Karl Enenkel, Arthur DiFuria, Christopher Heuer, Barbara Kaminska, Annie Maloney, Annie McEwen, Walter Melion, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Dawn Odell, April Oettinger, Shelley Perlove, Stephanie Porras, Femke Speelberg, Caecilie Weissert, Elliott Wise, and Steffen Zierholz.

The list has about 280 author entries covering at least 1800 editions of more than 365 titles. Included are all architectural books known by the compilers that were written between 1460 and 1640 regardless of when they were first published. Dubious editions are identified, and'ghosts'avoided or described as much. Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of the De Architectura of Vitruvius as an essential component of the period covered. The book is a quick-reference guide for all scholars, collectors, booksellers and librarians who have any dealings with or interest in early literature of architecture.

The sixteenth-century French poets Pierre de Ronsard and Guillaume Du Bartas enjoyed a wide, immediate and long-lasting, but varied and mixed reception throughout early modern Europe. Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe is the first book-length volume to explore the transnational reception histories of both poets in conjunction with each other. It takes into account the great variety of their readerships, including translators, imitating poets, poetical theorists, illustrators and painters, both male and female (Marie de Gournay, Anne Bradstreet), some of them illustrious (Tasso, King James VI and I of Scotland and England, Opitz…), others less known, even obscure, but worth to be saved from oblivion (such as the French Marc-Antoine Chalon, the English Mary Roper, and the Dutch poet Philibert van Borsselen). This volume offers a fascinating insight into the different reception modes in Europe and their underlying political, religious and literary identities. Contributors include: Peter Auger, Denis Bjaï, Karel Bostoen †, Philippe Chométy, Paola Cosentino, Violaine Giacomotto-Charra, Alisa van de Haar, Pádraic Lamb, Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou, Elisabeth Rothmund, Paul J. Smith, and Caroline Trotot.

Japan on the Jesuit Stage offers a comprehensive overview of the representations of Japan in early modern European Neo-Latin school theater. The chapters in the volume catalog and analyze representative plays which were produced in the hundreds all over Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to present-day Croatia and Poland. Taking full account of existing scholarship, but also introducing a large amount of previously unknown primary material, the contributions by European and Japanese researchers significantly expand the horizon of investigation on early modern European theatrical reception of East Asian elements and will be of particular interest to students of global history, Neo-Latin, and theater studies.

In Episodes in the Life of the Early Modern Learned Book, Ian Maclean investigates intellectual life through the prism of the history of publishing, academic institutions, journals, and the German book fairs whose evolution is mapped over the long seventeenth century. After a study of the activities of Italian book merchants up to 1621, the passage into print, both locally and internationally, of English and Italian medicine and ‘new'science comes under scrutiny. The fate of humanist publishing is next illustrated in the figure of the Dutch merchant Andreas Frisius (1630–1675). The work ends with an analysis of the two monuments of the last phase of legal humanism: the Thesauruses of Otto (1725–44) and Gerard Meerman (1751–80).

Rembrandt: Studies in his Varied Approaches to Italian Art explores his engagement with imagery by Italian masters. His references fall into three categories: pragmatic adaptations, critical commentary, and conceptual rivalry. These are not mutually exclusive but provide a strategy for discussion. This study also discusses Dutch artists'attitudes toward traveling south, surveys contemporary literature praising and/or criticizing Rembrandt, and examines his art collection and how he used it. It includes an examination of the vocabulary used by Italians to describe Rembrandt's art, with a focus on the patron Don Antonio Ruffo, and closes by considering the reception of his works by Italian artists.

The Exemplary Hercules explores the reception of the ancient Greek hero Herakles – the Roman Hercules – in European culture from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and beyond. Each chapter considers a particular work or theme in detail, raising questions about the hero's role as model of the princely ruler, and examining how the worthiness of this exemplary type came, in time, to be subverted. The volume is one of four to be published in the Metaforms series examining the extraordinarily persistent figuring of Herakles-Hercules in western culture up to the present day, drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines to offer a unique insight into the hero's perennial, but changingly problematic, appeal.

Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Secrets in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 is the companion volume to Intersections 65.1, Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700. Whereas the latter volume focused on sacramental mysteries, the current one examines a wider range of secret subjects. The book examines how secret knowledge was represented visually in ways that both revealed and concealed the true nature of that knowledge, giving and yet impeding access to it. In the early modern period, the discursive and symbolical sites for the representation of secrets were closely related to epistemic changes that transformed conceptions of the transmissibility of knowledge. Contributors: Monika Biel, Alicja Bielak, C. Jean Campbell, Tom Conley, Ralph Dekoninck, Peter G.F. Eversmann, Ingrid Falque, Agnès Guiderdoni, Koenraad Jonckheere, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Stephanie Leitch, Carme López Calderón, Mark A. Meadow, Walter S. Melion, Eelco Nagelsmit, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Alexandra Onuf, Bret L. Rothstein, Xavier Vert, Madeleine C. Viljoen, Mara R. Wade, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Caecilie Weissert.