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This book focuses on the aesthetic, symbolic, and cultural concepts of radiance and beauty in stained glass in modern art; global exchanges between stained-glass artists in Europe and the Americas; and the transformation of stained glass from religious decoration to secular material culture. Unique features of the book include its geographic breadth, encompassing England, France, Italy, USA, and Mexico, and its inclusion of American female glassmakers. Essays consider how stained glass became an art form during this time, and show how the narrative for the figurative design drew from the Bible, mythology, history, literature, and the symbolism of the time, including popular culture such as ecology and materiality. Written for students and the general public interested in the humanities, literature, history, art history, and new media and popular culture, this book examines the visual beauty and symbolism of stained-glass windows in Europe and American cultures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - the modern era.

In 1862, Myles Birket Foster commissioned Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company to design ceramic tiles for his new house in Witley. Under William Morris’s guidance and with Edward Burne-Jones’s artistry, they composed nine sets of drawings for a Sleeping Beauty cycle to be transformed into ceramic tiles. Burne-Jones designed scenes for the children’s legend, Lucy Faulkner Orrinsmith painted the tiles, and Morris decorated the background and borders. After the success of this project, Burne-Jones composed several additional cycles of paintings on this theme between 1873 and 1894: the ‘Small Briar Rose Cycle’, the ‘Large Briar Rose Cycle’, the ‘Dispersed Briar Rose Cycle’, and solo paintings on the Sleeping Princess. In the Sleeping Beauty cycles, Burne-Jones and William Morris were inspired by fairy tales from Giambattista Basile’s Sun, Moon, and Talia, Charles Perrault’s La Belle au Bois Dormant, the early nineteenth-century German version of the tale by the Brothers Grimm, and the poems by Alfred Tennyson (The Day-Dream, 1830/1842), Algernon Charles Swinburne (The Ballad of Life, 1866), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (The Day Dream, 1880), and William Morris (The Briar Wood, 1888 and 1891). The three parts of this essay each elucidate a different aspect of the imagery of these cycles: Burne-Jones’s literary sources for his illustrations; a brief historiography and iconography of this theme; and the program of the cycles for Burne-Jones’s Legend of the Briar Rose, including an iconological interpretation of dormancy. Burne-Jones’s color palette, languid lines, and spatial illusions unite the narrative scenes that make up these cycles and also create an imagery of suspension for the viewer. Within this unusual aesthetic moment, he expressed his reflections on art, beauty, and love through fantasy.

Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was a Bolognese \"nobil donna,\" an educated and accomplished female artist as well as a loving mother. Her fruitful creativity led her to create 135 paintings, including representations of single and group portraits, religious paintings for church altarpieces or private chapels, and historical paintings, as well as self-portraits. However, she further excelled in composing a new theme for female painters of her time to follow, that it, the depiction of mythological subjects, in particular the portrayal of nude female figures, as seen in her nude Minervas and Venuses. Fontana's new genre paved the way for Artemisia Gentileschi's depictions of female nudes in the 17th century. [Publication Abstract]

Giulia Lama (1681–1747), a Venetian painter and poetess, was born in the parish of Santa Maria Formosa. At an early age, her father, Agostino Lama, trained her as a painter. Her close friendship with the Venetian painter Piazzetta has mislead scholars in thinking that she was his pupil. However, records show that they were fellow painters. Since the eighteenth century critics have been paralleling Lama's physical unattractiveness of a harelip, snub nose and plainness, with her artistic talents, thus making negative statements about her natural appearance. At the same time she was highly regarded for her multiple artistic and intellectual talents in embroidering and painting as well as in mathematics and poetry. Abbot Antonio Conti (1677–1749) commented in a letter of 1 May 1728 that 'Giulia Lama excels much in poetry as in painting, and I find in her poems the turn of phrase of Petrarch'. This essay focuses on two aspects of Lama's accomplishments: as painter, examining some of her self-portraits and martyrdom paintings, and as a poet, analyzing an eulogy honoring and lamenting the death of her friend and poet Antonio Sforza (1700–1735). She also composed three poems and two songs translated for the first time in this essay. Her painterly brushstrokes of tenebrism, somber shadows, and dramatic coloratura are also reflected in her somber poetry. Lama epitomizes a nobil donna of the eighteenth century – the educated woman of the Enlightenment, who is accomplished in making lace, creating drawings and paintings, and composing philosophical poems.

This essay examines the iconography of one of Giorgio Vasari's first paintings The Carrying of the Body of Christ of 1532. The study consists of three parts: (1) the reconstruction of the history of this painting; (2) an artistic analysis of the classical and Mannerist influences employed by Vasari in the painting; and (3) a suggested iconological interpretation of the image. In The Carrying of the Body of Christ, Vasari depicts through the mediation of Christ's death a visual testimony of salvation for the Christian devotee. In the creative realm, Vasari composes a new artistic fusion: the imitation of antiquity with Mannerist aesthetic. This artistic mutation creates a new invention in the depiction of the istoria of the passion of Christ. In the spiritual realm, the istoria of the carrying of the holy body is a transitory time from the descent from the cross to the deposition, and His interment. In depicting this theme, Vasari invites the viewer to also reflect on the transformation of the Christian church after the Sack of Rome in 1527. The selected moment in the painting is of great significance. It is a pause before burying the precious body of Christ. For the carrying of the body to its resting place, Vasari composes a visual silence and a spiritual suspended movement for viewers to meditate on mortality, but with the hope of salvation through Christ's death.

In his Notebooks, Leonardo da Vinci explains how our knowledge has its formation in our perceptions. \"The eyes, which are called the windows of the soul, are the chief mean whereby the understanding may most full and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of nature\". Leonardo continues: \"all true sciences are the result of experiences which has passed through our senses\". He invites the observer to first experience nature and then with reason investigates the causes and effects of the experience. The presentation focuses on an aspect of creativity, the similarity between artistic and scientific creativity as espoused in Leonardo's Notebooks and, in particular, visualized in his Annunciation of 1472 at the Galleria degli Uffizi. In analyzing Leonardo's Annunciation, one is able to reflect on Leonardo's concept of creativity as well as on his theory on painting. This earlier painting in Leonardo's artistic career is fundamental and serves as a fulcrum in the history of art and science in Italian Renaissance art. In the Annunciation, the young Leonardo begins to conceptualize his theories on optics and perception, fusing natural phenomena with spiritual signification. For all that Leonardo wrote it is to his visual explorations that he entrusts the primary task of representing nature. Because for Leonardo art is an instrument of discovery, a form of knowing and not merely an illustration of what is already known, the application of color and tone reveal a process of visual reasoning, a science of painting.