Renaissance Bodies

The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660

Lucy Gent, Nigel Llewellyn, Nigel Llewellyn, Lucy Gent

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780948462085
  9780948462092
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861896780
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

With essays by John Peacock, Elizabeth Honig, Andrew and Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Sawday, Susan Wiseman, Ellen Chirelstein, Tamsyn Williams, Anna Bryson, Maurice Howard and Nigel Llewellyn.

Renaissance Bodies is a unique collection of views on the ways in which the human image has been represented in the arts and literature of English Renaissance society. The subjects discussed range from high art to popular culture - from portraits of Elizabeth I to polemical prints mocking religious fanaticism - and include miniatures, manners, anatomy, drama and architectural patronage. The authors, art historians and literary critics, reflect diverse critical viewpoints, and the 78 illustrations present a fascinating exhibition of the often strange and haunting images of the period.

Table of contents

• Renaissance Bodies Cover
• Imprint page
• Contents
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Editors and Contributors
• Introduction
• 1: Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I
• 2: Lady Elizabeth Pope: The Heraldic Body
• 3: In Memory: Lady Dacre and Pairing by Hans Eworth
• 4: 'Magnetic Figures': Polemical Prints of the English Revolution
• 5: The Fate of Marsyas: Dissecting the Renaissance Body
• 6: The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England
• 7: Iniga lanes as a Figurative Artist
• 8: 'Tis Pity She's a Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body
• 9: Self-Fashioning and the Classical Momentin Mid-Sixteenth-Century English Architecture
• 10: The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, For the Living
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Index