Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance

Zorach, Rebecca

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Hardcover. Half tan boards with gray cloth spine, silver spine lettering; color illustrated dust jacket; xvi, 314 pp, 16 unnumbered pages of plates; illustrated in bw and color. VG/VG. Item #180164
ISBN: 9780226989372

"With a wide-ranging yet richly detailed interdisciplinary approach, Rebecca Zorach examines the visual culture of the French Renaissance, where depictions of sacrifice, luxury, fertility, violence, metamorphosis, and sexual excess are central. Zorach looks at the cultural, political, and individual roles that played out in these artistic themes and how eventually, these aesthetics of exuberant abundance disintegrated amidst perceptions of decadent excess."--Jacket. Contents include: Preface: Figures of Excess; xiii --; Chapter 1; Incomprehensible Abundance? An Introduction; 1 --; Chapter 2; Blood; 33 --; Sacrifice and Generation at Fontainebleau; 33 --; The Galerie Francois Premier; 38 --; Iconology; 43 --; Fontainebleau Nova Pandora; 48 --; Death and Rebirth; 53 --; The Death of Adonis; 59 --; The Aesthetics of Sacrifice; 66 --; Impossible Bodies; 77 --; Chapter 3; Milk; 83 --; Visual Rhetorics; 83 --; Nature/France; 88 --; Cybele and Artemis; 90 --; Fertile Gaul's Fat Breasts; 103 --; Charles and Elizabeth; 107 --; The Lust of the Earth; 120 --; Natural Antiquity; 126 --; Chapter 4; Ink; 135 --; Goods, Design, Desire; 135 --; Ornament and the "School of Fontainebleau"; 140 --; Copia and Curiosity; 158 --; The Golden Fleece; 164 --; Inanimate Reproduction; 177 --; Problems of Number; 184 --; Chapter 5; Gold; 189 --; The Other Side of Increase; 189 --; Living Gold; 190 --; Mutability; 196 --; Royal Responses; 203 --; The New World; 208 --; Inflation and the Hubris of Kings; 212 --; The Golden Age; 214 --; Circe's Golden Rod; 220 --; Counterfeit Bodies; 226 --; Epilogue: Animation and De-animation; 237.