Society for Renaissance Studies National Conference
University of Edinburgh, 6-8 July 2006
Links to the conference booking forms are now online at
http://www2.sas.ac.uk/srs/SRSNationalConferencePage.html - a very
reasonable £35 (or £57 with lunch) if booking before 15 June.
Delegates or participants who are not already members of the Society for
Renaissance Studies must join by 15 June.
The same page contains links to the programme; there is much which
should interest members of this list.
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Title: Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting. A Study in Material Culture
Author: DUITS, REMBRANDT
ISBN: 1904597424
Description: London: Pindar Press, 2006. 24cm., cloth, ca. 484pp., 290
illus. ^Available Autumn 2006^. ("Gold Brocade and Renaissance Painting
discusses the representation of Italian Renaissance patterned silks in
paintings from Italy and the Southern Netherlands , from the 14th to the
16th century. It is the first study to approach this subject from the
perspective of material culture, attempting to answer such questions as
why the subject of luxury textiles gained so great a popularity in
Renaissance painting, how artists catered for an audience that desired
to have gold brocades depicted but did not always possess the financial
means to own the actual fabrics, and what the skills artists developed
in this field contributed to the rising social status of the medium of
painting. The material culture of the grand courts at which real gold
brocade played an essential role in the display of wealth and status is
compared to that of the socially ambitious but less affluent middle
class for whom paintings were often the only affordable substitute for
courtly splendour. Thus, the book also addresses the problem of the
distinction between fact and fiction, imagination and reality in the
account of contemporary social history presented in paintings")
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