Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master

(Hardback)

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Description

Michelangelo was one of the biggest international art stars of his time, but being Michelangelo was no easy thing: he was stalked by fans, lauded and lambasted by critics, and depicted in unauthorized portraits. Still Lives traces the process by which artists such as Michelangelo, Durer, and Titian became early modern celebrities. Artists had been

Reviews

Shortlisted for the 2016 Art Book Prize, Authors' Club "In this fascinating publication, Loh (Univ. College London) employs a variety of strategies and material (20th-century French deconstruction; 21st-century vernacular and digital terms; cross-period parallels among artists and works; primary sources; the close study of paintings, drawings, prints, books, letters, medals, and sculpture) to make early modern artist self-portraits and their portraits painted by other artists accessible to contemporary readers... Loh's immersive readings of these works of art are original, detailed, nuanced, and often quite passionate, frequently emphasizing the vulnerability of artists and the difficulty of their work."--Choice "[A] powerful and sometimes troubling book."--Giles Waterfield, Burlington Magazine "[An] impressive book... In the world of social media saturated with Facebook and selfies, we may think that in 'managing our profile' we are shaping our portrait. After reading Maria Loh's engaging new study, one will never look at a portrait in the same way, much less believe that we exercise control over the potency and malleability of our image."--William E. Wallace, Renaissance Quarterly

Author Bio

Maria H. Loh teaches art history at University College London. She is the author of Titian Remade: Repetition and the Transformation of Early Modern Italian Art.