Paul Taylor

François Quiviger

Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern Art

In the 12th century the Book of the Soul by the philosopher Avicenna was translated from Arabic into Latin. It had an immense success among scholastic writers and deeply influenced the structure and content of many psychological works of the Middle Ages. The reception of Avicenna's book is the story of cultural contact at an imipressively high intellectural level.

This volume contains most of the papers given at a colloquium held at the Institute in 1997. It provides a study of the concept of composition in European art and art literature from the middle ages to the early 20th-century. Some authors are concerned to show the extent to which writers on art before 1880 would have been able to think of a work of art in the terms put forward by modernist theorists like Maurice Denis, Wassily Kandinsky and Clement Greenberg, as a flat surface, covered with colours, lines and forms arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. Other authors aim to show how artists and theorists conceived of composition before the modern period, by describing some of the implications and connotations of the concept within a broader field of political and religious meanings.

During the Renaissance, new ideas progressed alongside new ways of communicating them, and nowhere is this more visible than in the art of this period. In The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art, François Quiviger explores the ways in which the senses began to take on a new significance in the art of the sixteenth century. The book discusses the presence and function of sensation in Renaissance ideas and practices, investigating their link to mental imagery—namely, how Renaissance artists made touch, sound, and scent palpable to the minds of their audience. Quiviger points to the shifts in ideas and theories of representation, which were evolving throughout the sixteenth century, and explains how this shaped early modern notions of art, spectatorship, and artistic creation. Featuring many beautiful images by artists such as Dürer, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Pontormo, Michelangelo, and Brueghel, The Sensory World of Renaissance Art presents a comprehensive study of Renaissance theories of art in the context of the actual works they influenced. Beautifully illustrated and extensively researched, it will appeal to students and scholars of art history.

The Sensory World of Italian Renaissance Art

This incisive and illuminating biography follows the three themes that shaped the life of Leonardo da Vinci and, through him, forever changed Western art and imagination: nature, art, and self-fashioning. Nature and art helped form Leonardo. He spent his first twelve years in the Tuscan countryside before entering the most reputed artistic workshop of Florence. There he blossomed as one of the most promising painters of his time and promptly applied his skills to explore and question the world through science and invention. Leonardo was also self-fashioned: he received only a basic education and grew up around peasants and artisans. But from the 1480s onwards, he transformed himself into a court artist and became a familiar of kings and rulers. Following the chronology of Leonardo’s extraordinary life, this book examines Leonardo as artist, courtier, and thinker, and explores how these aspects found expression in his paintings, as well as in his work in sculpture, architecture, theater design, urban planning, engineering, anatomy, geology, and cartography. François Quiviger concludes with observations on Leonardo’s relevance today as a model of the multidisciplinary artist who combines imagination, art, and science—the original, and ultimate, Renaissance Man.

François Quiviger

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