After Raphael is an essential overview of sixteenth-century Italian painting. The book evaluates the paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Bronzino, and their followers and presents a new interpretation for the stylistic shifts that occurred after 1520. By taking into account the social, cultural, political, theological, and patronage issues that affected taste and stylistic developments, Marcia B. Hall demonstrates how the revival of interest in antique Roman sculpture relief affected Mannerist painters. She also examines the repercussions of the Reformation, which changed forever the Church's view of the function of images.

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"This book would make an excellent addition to art history curricula, especially those built to expand students’ interest and knowledge into materials and process. . . . The extensive notes and bibliography will provide specialists with avenues for additional and deeper research."—L. L. Kriner, Berea College

This expansive study of color illuminates the substance, context, and meaning of five centuries of European painting. Between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the materials of painting remained remarkably unchanged, but innovations in their use flourished. Technical discoveries facilitated new visual effects, political conditions prompted innovations, and economic changes shaped artists’ strategies, especially as trade became global.

Marcia Hall explores how Michelangelo radically broke with his contemporaries’ harmonizing use of color in favor of a highly saturated approach; how the robust art market and demand for affordable pictures in seventeenth-century Netherlands helped popularize subtly colored landscape paintings; how politics and color became entangled during the French Revolution; and how modern artists liberated color from representation as their own role transformed from manipulators of pigments to visionaries celebrated for their individual expression. Using insights from recent conservation studies, Hall captivates readers with fascinating details and developments in magnificent examples—from Botticelli and Titian to Van Gogh and Kandinsky—to weave an engaging analysis. Her insistence on the importance of examining technique and material to understand artistic meaning gives readers the tools to look at these paintings with fresh eyes.

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Underlying the religious art of the Renaissance is a tension between the needs of the Church and the impulse to create great works. This book presents sacred images from the 15th and 16th centuries, leading up to two pivotal events in 1563. The Council of Trent, which signified the beginning of the Counter-Reformation, defined requirements that curtailed the freedom of painters and patrons in creating art for churches, while the founding of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence symbolically acknowledged that artists had achieved the status of creators not craftsmen. Marcia B. Hall takes a fresh look at some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance not typically associated with sacred imagery and shows how they navigated their way through the paradox of "limited freedom" to forge a new kind of religious art.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*