Princes and artists
Subtitle: patronage and ideology at four Habsburg courts, 1517-1633
By: Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Edition: 1st U.S. ed. --
Publisher: Harper & Row
Published: 1976
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 176
Subjects: Habsburg, House of -- Art patronage; Art, Renaissance -- Austria; Art, Modern -- 17th-18th centuries -- Austria; Art -- Austria
Description: "The relationship between artists and their patrons has always been a complex and fascinating one. In the case of the Habsburg rules of the sixteenth and seventh centuries, this is especially true, not only because those rulers are themselves of intrinsic interest, but because the artists whom they encouraged or employed – Durer, Titian, El Grego, Rubens – were among the greatest of all times. In Princes and Artists Professor Trevor-Roper explores the relationship between art and patronage through the careers of the Emperor Charles V (1500-58), his son Philip II of Spain (1527-98), the Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) and ‘the arch-dukes” – Albert and Isabella – who ruled the southern Netherlands from 1598 to 1633. In the context of their personal lives, their several courts, their political activities, and the ideological conflicts of the era, art played an immensely important role - partly as propaganda, partly for the sheer aesthetic pleasure it gave. The author argues that the distinctive characteristics of patronage in this period, which spanned the transition from the High Renaissance to the Baroque in art, from the Reformation to the Counter-Reformation in ideology, are to be explained by the ‘world picture’ of the age: "Art symbolised a whole view of life, of which politics were a part, and which the court had a duty to advertise and sustain.” -- Book jacket.
Notes: "Lectures ... delivered at the State University of New York College at Purchase, New York, in October 1974, being the first of the annual Yaseen Lectures."

Bibliography: p. 165-167.

Includes index.