Product Description: In The Patron's Payoff, Jonathan Nelson and Richard Zeckhauser apply the innovative methods of information economics to the study of art. Their findings, written in highly accessible prose, are surprising and important. Building on three economic concepts--signaling, signposting, and stretching--the book develops the first systematic methodology for assessing the meaning of art patronage and provides a broad and useful framework for understanding how works of art functioned in Renaissance Italy...read more

Product Description: In The Patron's Payoff, Jonathan Nelson and Richard Zeckhauser apply the innovative methods of information economics to the study of art. Their findings, written in highly accessible prose, are surprising and important. Building on three economic concepts--signaling, signposting, and stretching--the book develops the first systematic methodology for assessing the meaning of art patronage and provides a broad and useful framework for understanding how works of art functioned in Renaissance Italy...read more

In this newly revised edition of his widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions that existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and he analyzes the ways of thinking and seeing that characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive approach, the author is concerned not only with the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, and others, but also with the social background, patterns of recruitment, and means of subsistence of this "cultural elite." He thus makes a major contribution both to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance and to our comprehension of the complex relations between culture and society. An excellent social history of the lives and culture of the artists and artisans which made it possible for the arts to flourish.

Product Description: As historians delve increasingly into the issues of political propaganda and visual art, Marla Stone provides a penetrating explanation of Italian Fascist arts patronage, one that explores the model of cultural consensus that set the Italian experience apart from that of Nazi Germany...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This work describes art patronage in 16th-century Italy. For example, it was the time when Julius II and Bramante embarked upon rebuilding St Peter's; Paul III commissioned Michelangelo to paint the "Last Judgement"; and Sixtus V and Domenico Fontana transformed the urban fabric of Rome...read more

Product Description: Bram Kempers presents the period of the Renaissance as a process of the developing professionalization of the artist, with a line of patronage stretching from the mendicant orders and city states, through merchant families, princely and ducal rulers, to the great papal courts of Rome...read more

Looks at three of the greatest artists in history, the competition among them, and their best works

Examines the relationship between the painter and his public and relates the Renaissance styles and techniques to contemporary culture

Product Description: Patronage, in its broadest sense, has been established as one of the dominant social processes of pre-industrial Europe. While it has been traditionally viewed simply as the context for extraordinary artistic creativity, patronage has more recently been examined by historians and art historians alike as a comprehensive system of patron-client structures which permeated society and social relations...read more