Dynasty: central concern for ruling families, aristocratic lineage
Painted portraits were a way of documenting ancestry, dynastic records.
Rogier van der Weyden: House of Burgundy portrait painter
Durer: Maximillian I woodblock and paper prints, ancestral arch , evoking the prestige of ancient Roman emperors. Magnificence was clearly one of the motives for this arch, and the other, his dynastic claims.
Wide distribution of 700 sets of prints, publicity.
Margaret of Austria - Habsberg, Michael Sittow, portrait painter
Virtuous conduct: Elias - '‘taming and preserving the nobility',  Ideals of noble conduct were promoted at court through medieval chivalric notions of the ideal knight, and the heroic exploits of ancient Greeks and Romans. The two were often conveniently fused in illuminated manuscripts and tapestries.
Hercules - classical theme fused with chivalry, used as propaganda, display of heroic behaviour.
Order of the Golden Fleece: military group dedicated to the crusades, gold collar indicated membership.
tapestries - portable and expensive, befitting of such a prestigious group.
Hercules Initiating the Olympic Games, displayed military prowess and power, inspire heroic behaviour.
Virtuous conduct,  ‘cardinal’ virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.
Etiquette: Book on court etiquette, Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) by Baldassare Castiglione. Painting aided judgement of other visual arts such as buildings, coins, cameos, table ware and s similar works of visual culture that constituted the treasured possessions of a court.
Nef - Salt cellar - In addition to its practical function, the salt cellar was the traditional marker of favour at court. The most highly favoured were placed ‘above the salt’; that is, they were seated between the salt cellar and the host at the head of the dinner table, while those who sat ‘below the salt’ and further removed from the host were less favoured. Associated with etiquette and social hierarchy.
Cellini's salt cellar:  Its prestige lies in the kind of references that it makes.  The small temple on the
other side, designed to hold the pepper, has the round headed arches, straight entablature and Ionic columns of classical architecture which by the 1540s was the new fashion at European courts.The pepper temple takes the form of an ancient Roman triumphal arch, examples of which, as we have seen, were erected to commemorate imperial military victories and hence were potentially flattering to Francis I. On its side is the tiny figure of Hercules with whom Francis, like Philip the Good, identified. Between the salt c container and the pepper temple, Cellini fashioned nude personifications of land and sea – their legs intertwined, Cellini explains, ‘just as some branches of the sea run into the land and the land juts into the sea’.47 Sea was represented by Neptune, mythological god of the sea, holding his attribute the trident and accompanied by seahorses. Land is the Roman earth goddess Tellus or Terra. The salt cellar was personalised to include the emblems of Francis: the elephant and salamander under Land, and fleurs-de-lis just visible on the cloth under Sea; it perhaps also alluded to Francis I’s own attempts to exploit the salt and pepper trade in order to augment French wealth.
Nude allegorical figures are copies of Michelangelo works, Cellini enhances not only his own credentials but also those of Francis himself. Through the salt cellar, Francis has Michelangelo in miniature. Elitist intellectual pretensions, dividing those who understood from those who did not.
Prestige Consumption: Norbert Elias - Magnificence and Prestige Consumption, closely allied. The private expenditure of accumulated wealth as an essential means of reinforcing status. Construct a social image.
Tapestry, embroidery, precious metalwork and illuminated manuscripts. All were arts of material as well as artistic value, and as such were appropriate expressions of the wealth and status of the highest echelons of society. Artistic virtuoso reflected well on the ruler/patron.
Wilton Diptych - panel painting, prestige, private devotion.
Cultivation:  private room or suite of rooms dedicated to the contemplation of scholarly literature and esteemed art and artefacts, and to which only privileged guests were admitted.  ‘closet’, ‘cabinet’, ‘study’ or ‘studiolo’.
Humanist writer and architect Leon Battista Alberti
Margaret of Austria: petit cabinet, private collection in a suite of rooms, with some works allowed to be seen by he public and some more private works for her own contemplation - bust of husband, Conrad Meit, Philibert of Savoy.
The formal collections of art and artefacts passed down was known as a Kunstkammer.
Kunstkammer:  needed to contain antique and contemporary sculpture, medals and coins, paintings, phenomena of the natural world and the deliberate products of the ingenuity of man such as tools, utensils and other artefacts.
Exotic artefacts - artefacts from Africa or the New World were trophies of successful voyages of discovery, colonisation or missionary activity and their inclusion in the Kunstkammer reflected the expanding reach of sovereign power on the one hand, and the status of the Kunstkammer as a microcosm of the world on the other.
Jan van Eyck (active 1425–41), the court painter of Philip the Good of Burgundy and the Netherlands, prestige of the artist. The Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin
Titian - portrait of Charles, riding horse victoriously in battle.
Conclusion: the use of art for its persuasive potential, its rhetorical power and its capacity to create and convey cultural and social identity.
Most European courts relied for their prestige and magnificence on the Italian Renaissance style, firmly rooted in the ideal forms and mythological and allegorical references of ancient Rome.

	Created by Dearbhla Dunne almost 10 years ago

Book 1 Part 2: The shifting contexts of Renaissance art Note on Notes - Chapter 5 B1, created by Dearbhla Dunne on 21/05/2014.

Notes - Chapter 5 B1