Contemporary Celebrity Research Articles

Brahms among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion by Paul Berry (review)

COMPOSERS Brahms among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion. By Paul Berry. (AMS Studies in Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. [ix, 389 p. ISBN 9780199982646 (hardcover), $47.95; (e-book), various.] Music examples, tables, bibliography, index.Paul Berry's book puts forward two enticing propositions relating to works by Johannes Brahms. Firstly, that certain of Brahms's compositions were directed towards individuals within his social circle, carrying meanings they were uniquely situated to perceive, and secondly, that through musicological inquiry we might excavate these meanings today and imaginatively reconstruct the ways in which Brahms's intended audience experienced his music. Such propositions highlight the importance of Brahms's private social sphere to his compositional activity, something that has largely been overshadowed by the public reception of his music. Berry's ambitious project is to guide his readers towards historically informed understandings of selected lieder, piano and chamber works, compositions that span the duration of Brahms's creative life. To do this he engages an array of primary sources, offers analyses of musical pieces and poetry, and reflects on the physical and aural experiences of playing and hearing Brahms's music.Part I centers on three short works: two lullabies written in the 1860s, and the lied Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze dating from 1877. The composition of each of these pieces was triggered by events in the lives of couples close to Brahms. In the cases of the Geistliches Wiegenlied op. 91, no. 2, and the Wiegenlied op. 49, no. 4, this was the birth of children in the families of Amalie and Joseph Joachim and Bertha and Arthur Faber. Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze op. 71, no. 1, served as a gift for Clara and Julius Stockhausen on the occasion of the baptism of their third son. Berry examines each work and provides an engaging description of the friendship that occasioned it. The goal of these separate case studies is to deliver interpretative accounts of the individual pieces, showing how poetic texts, borrowed musical materials, and even the required performing forces might have been affectively charged for the works' recipients.In Part II Berry surveys a wider range of Brahms's music, but focuses on a single friendship, that which Brahms shared with the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg and his wife Elisabeth. Herzogenberg paid homage to his more famous contemporary in his op. 23 piano variations: the work uses an early song by Brahms as its theme and invites comparison with Brahms's variations of the same opus number. Interestingly, Berry suggests that Brahms also occasionally wrote pieces alluding to Herzogenberg's works. In the finale of the String Quintet op. 88 he finds a reference to material from one of Herzogenberg's string trios, while the variation movement within Brahms's op. 87 piano trio takes up the same theme that Herzogenberg had used some years earlier. Brahms's allusions, how- ever, come across as deliberate demonstrations of his more sophisticated compositional technique, and it is perhaps unsurprising that the Brahms-Herzogenberg relationship was put under strain through these musical exchanges. We see here how musical works served as agents of reconciliation and rupture within one of Brahms's most important friendships.Part III sheds new light on Brahms's much-studied relationship with Clara Schumann by considering her reception of a cluster of musical works written in the 1870s. Berry offers detailed interpretations of Brahms's songs Meine Liebe ist grun and Alte Liebe, published respectively in the collections opp. 63 and 72. He argues that both works would have had heighted significance for Clara because of allusions Brahms makes in them to music by himself and her husband Robert-allusions that only she was likely to appreciate. The final chapter of Part III presents a hermeneutic account of the op. …

An Examination of Contemporary Celebrity Endorsement in Fashion

This paper examines the contemporary relationship between fashion brands and celebrities. Noting the historic role of celebrities in fashion and their current prevalence in the industry, the paper moves beyond discussion of the motives and effectiveness of celebrity endorsement, and instead explores its nature and practice in the fashion sector. The paper proposes a new definition of celebrity endorsement in fashion, offers a classification of celebrities involved in fashion brand endorsement, and presents a typology examining the contemporary means by which a fashion brand may collaborate with celebrities. The typology is defined in context of the nature, length and cost to the brand of the relationship between it and the celebrity. The methodology uses secondary sources and qualitative primary research in an exploratory agenda in order to propose conclusions and suggest ideas for further research.

Melville in his own time: a biographical chronicle of his life, drawn from recollections, interviews, and memoirs by family, friends, and associates

Owing to the decline of his contemporary fame and to decades of posthumous neglect, Herman Melville remains enigmatic to readers despite his status as one of AmericaAEs most securely canonical authors. Born into patrician wealth but plunged into poverty as a child, in 1840 he signed aboard the whaleship Acushnet in the midst of a nationwide depression and sailed to the South Pacific. At the Marquesas Islands, he deserted and lived for a time among one of the groupAEs last unsubjugated tribes. Upon his return home, he achieved overnight success with a book based on his experiences, Typee (1846). MelvilleAEs mastery of the English language and heterodox views made him a source of both controversy and fascination to western readers, until his increasing commitment to artistry and contempt for artificial conventions led him to write Moby-Dick (1851) and its successor Pierre (1852). Although the former is considered his masterwork today, the books offended mid-nineteenth-century cultural sensibilities and alienated Melville from the American literary marketplace. The resulting eclipse of his popular reputation was deepened by his voluntary withdrawal from society, so that obituaries written after his death in 1891 frequently expressed surprise that he hadnAEt died long before. With most of his personal papers and letters lost or destroyed, his library of marked and annotated books dispersed, and first-hand accounts of him scattered, brief, and frequently conflicting, MelvilleAEs place in American literary scholarship illustrates the importance of accurately edited documents and the value of new information to our understanding of his life and thought. As a chronologically organized collection of surviving testimonials about the author, Melville in His Own Time continues the tradition of documentary research well-exemplified over the past half-century by the work of Jay Leyda, Merton M. Sealts, and Hershel Parker. Combining recently discovered evidence with new transcriptions of long-known but rarely consulted testimony, this collection offers the most up-to-date and correct record of commentary on Melville by individuals who knew him.

The iconicity of celebrity and the spiritual impulse

ABSTRACTCelebrity has a powerful material presence in contemporary consumer culture but its surface aesthetic resonates with the promise of deeper meanings. This Marketplace Icon contribution speculates on the iconicity of celebrity from a spiritual perspective. The social value or authenticity of contemporary celebrity, and the social processes through which it emerges, are matters of debate amongst researchers and competing approaches include field theory, functionalism, and anthropologically inflected accounts of the latent need for ritual, myth and spiritual fulfillment evinced by celebrity “worship.” We focus on the latter area as a partial explanation of the phenomenon whereby so many consumers seem so enchanted by images of, and stories about, individuals with whom they, or we, often have little in common. We speculate that the powerful presence of celebrity in Western consumer culture to some extent reflects and exploits a latent need for myths of redemption through the iconic character of many, though by no means all, manifestations of celebrity consumption.

Introduction: intersections of fame, politics and power in the contemporary celebrity mediascape

The timely offerings to this, the final Celebrity Studies Forum of volume 6, and thus of 2015, each enable us to differently take stock of some of the key events, dominant discourses and scholarly ...

The new Victorians? Celebrity charity and the demise of the welfare state

This article asks whether the expansion of celebrity involvement in charitable and humanitarian issues in Northern Europe and the US might be a comparable historical phenomenon with the philanthropic endeavours of prominent nineteenth-century persons. The article notes that the conspicuous nature of star philanthropy in both Victorian times and the present is fairly dramatic in comparison with that of the mid twentieth century, when the welfare state and the New Deal were at their peak: a welfare-oriented era which, to some, now increasingly looks like a ‘historical blip’. It asks whether the rise of contemporary celebrity involvement in charity can therefore be explained in terms of the contemporary political conjuncture, inasmuch as celebrities could be understood as individuals with large amounts of private capital seeking to intervene in – and gain forms of power through – involvement in humanitarian and charitable causes that might have formerly been the job of the state. Can celebrity involvement in charity be explained in these terms? Does the marriage of celebrity and charity today take a neoliberal form, one that parallels the liberal form of nineteenth-century interventions, bequests and donations? What might the key differences between forms of spectacular ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in these eras (particularly the contemporary insistence on the confessional and intimate modes of address) reveal about its workings, its internal traditions and about the specificity of our own age? This article draws on contemporary media discourse, debate in the voluntary sector, historical scholarship and Foucault’s distinctions between liberalism and neoliberalism to argue that whereas ‘celanthropy’ in the Victorian period eventually came to contribute to the welfare state, today it is more involved in privatising and dismantling it.

Quetelet and the emergence of the behavioral sciences.

Adolphe Quetelet was one of the most prominent figures of the second half of the nineteenth century, yet in present-day histories of several social sciences the impact of his ideas is widely ignored. The first part consists of a sketch of his life and work. Astronomer and statistician, he sought to apply the mathematical tools of astronomy to create was has been called a ‘mathematics of society’. In particular he demonstrated regularities in the incidence of various social phenomena, notably crime, whose implications were widely debated. In the second part the influence he exerted on some key figures in the then emerging social sciences is traced in some detail; these figures include Durkheim, Galton, Marx, and Tylor. He also advocated the wider use of statistics and his call had a powerful impact on the then emerging fields such as administration, economics, sociology and psychology. He influenced some of his most famous contemporaries, including Florence Nightingale, Karl Marx and Francis Galton.

‘Inaccurate but Truthful’: Q&A with Screenwriter Peter Morgan

In the spring of 2014, the University of Vienna in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann institute for the history and Theory of Biography in Vienna organised an interdisciplinary lecture series “The Many faces of Biography”. This lecture series brought together scholars and practitioners of various historical and recent biographical forms, focusing on the specificities and challenges posed by different biographical media. One of them was Peter Morgan, a major name in contemporary biographical film-making (and playwriting), noted for his characteristic dual-structure approach to writing lives for the screen. During one of the sessions of the lecture series he was interviewed by Julia Novak and Werner Huber about some of his most famous work, such as The Deal (2003), The Queen (2006), Frost/Nixon (2008), The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), and Rush (2013). In this Q&A he shed light on the principles guiding the screenwriter-biographer’s work, his conflicting responsibilities towards biographee and audience, and the biopic’s potential to impact on the fame and after-fame of historical and contemporary celebrities.
 This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on 28 Februay 2015 and published on 6 July 2015. A second version of this article was uploaded, with one minor alteration, on 12 August 2015.

Masked men: hacktivism, celebrity and anonymity

In her 1991 article ‘Signs of Melodrama’ Christine Gledhill provocatively claimed that the Hollywood star system descended from the stage melodrama’s ‘drive to realise in personal terms social and ethical forces’. The disguise is a melodramatic convention, concealing the true personality revealed in the narrative, as the melodrama reveals hidden moral truths. Approaching contemporary celebrity through this dramatic mode, this article considers the unmasking of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden in three recent films, We Steal Secrets, The Fifth Estate and Citizenfour. In true melodramatic style, the films’ presentation of state violence and surveillance is rapidly displaced by moral studies of these three ‘hacktivists’. Drawing on melodrama and genre studies as a methodological approach to studying these films, I trace the mask back to Alan Moore’s anti-melodrama V for Vendetta. This article proposes celebrity studies would be well served by paying closer attention to the political efficacy of celebrity’s opposite: anonymity.

Authorial self-fashioning in Jörn Donner’s Portraits of Women

Abstract In his films of the late 1960s and the early 1970s, Jörn Donner, a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, critic and film director, employed his body and popular media image as a contemporary celebrity for narrative and marketing purposes. Focusing on the film Naisenkuvia/Portraits of Women (1970), a metanarrative about the alliance of art cinema and pornography in the 1960s and a parody of Donner’s public persona, this article investigates Donner’s ‘authoring practices’ and gestures of authorial ‘self-projection’ amidst the mediatized sexual revolution of the 1960s. Portraits of Women reveals Donner’s appropriation and analysis of a newly sexualized public sphere, but the film also reads as a crisis point. While capitalizing on his public persona by casting himself as the male lead, Donner was forced to acknowledge that self-fashioning in the sphere of public sex escapes authorial control.

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future, by Iain McDaniel

Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe's Future, by Iain McDaniel. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2013. xii, 276 pp. $45.00 US (doth). Along with his highly celebrated colleagues and friends Adam Smith and David Hume, Adam Ferguson was one of the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment. Possessed of talented, agile mind and taste for active life, he served as chaplain to the recently formed highland regiment, the Black Watch; and played key roles in many of the cause celebre of his day, including the militia issue and both the Douglas and Ossian affairs. He succeeded Hume, as head of the Advocate's Library, before being named Professor of Pneumatics, then moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He went on to become one of the most unique and prominent political and historical philosophers of the eighteenth century. Despite all this Ferguson has only recently begun to attract the scholarly attention he deserves. This book represents welcome addition to the literature, focusing on important but neglected aspects of Ferguson's thought. Given the study's main title, Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment, it should be said that this reviewer was struck by what it does not contain. There is little examination of Ferguson as person or the Scottish Enlightenment as broader intellectual and cultural movement. In important ways, this is less book about Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment, than it is study in the history of ideas and late eighteenth-century political thought. This clarification will hopefully focus expectations and highlight its contributions to the field. Ferguson's standing as philosopher and social theorist has undergone rather dramatic rehabilitation in recent years. Yet, as this study shows, much of the precise content of his reforming politics, along with the broader character of his thought, has remained hidden from view, buried under an Enlightened narrative constructed predominantly around the contrasting theories of Hume and Smith. Ferguson's political ideas which resonated so deeply in the eighteenth century, failed to do so among subsequent generations and soon fell into obscurity, eclipsed by those of his more famous contemporaries. For instance, unable to accept some of his criticisms of the modem state and commercial society, many in the Victorian era dismissed Ferguson. In the book History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, celebrated literary scholar Sir Leslie Stephen depicted Ferguson as nothing more than a facile and dexterous declaimer (p. 215). Meanwhile Marx's Capital was, tellingly, one of the few works that cited him with approval (p. 474). Such contrasting responses were typical through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, and underscored the difficulty later generations had in translating his ideas, as well as the violence and misrepresentation they often suffered as result. McDaniel presents Ferguson's political thought by carefully reconstructing it within its eighteenth-century context. He does so by concentrating his analysis on one of the central preoccupations and great intellectual problems of the century: how to read and make sense of the history and politics of the later Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. …

Introduction: feminism and contemporary celebrity culture

In November 2014 TIME magazine nominated ‘feminist’ in its annual ‘word banishment poll’ to identify and denounce the most overused words, phrases, diminutives and acronyms of the year; thereby pla...

"Plagued in Art": The fashioning of an aesthetics of sacrifice in the Duchess of Malfi

This article offers a reading of John Webster‟s masterpiece, The Duchess of Malfi (1614), as an exemplification of an „aesthetics of sacrifice‟ in which human agency is first presented – in the character of the widowed Duchess – and then radically undermined. The reader/receiver of the text, it is argued, rather than encountering the ultimately positive, secular humanism that many critics have discerned in the play, is left with an impression of the dramatic world as devoid of purpose, its central character denied subjectivity as the playwright traces the tight arc of the Duchess‟s trajectory from the laughing decider of her own destiny in Act 1, to her abjection and death at the instigation of her murderous, controlling brothers in Act 4. In support of this reading of Webster‟s vision, the paper draws on the work of the phenomenologist Roman Ingarden‟s insights into the construction of the literary work of art, adapting his constructionist view of such works to the drama. Close textual analysis – augmented by the experience of two exceptional recent productions of the play – offers a rationale for a reading of The Duchess of Malfi as the depiction of a world ultimately devoid of meaning. While this chimes with early modern theorists‟ notions of „the‟ Jacobean world-view as nihilist, what is offered here is an explication of the underlying (dramatological) mechanisms that infuse and construct the reader/receiver‟s response to a work in which the central character retains a fascination for audiences, arguably equal to that usually reserved for the best of Webster‟s more famous contemporary, Shakespeare.

Giseliniana. De quelques poèmes de l'humaniste flamand Victor Ghyselinck (1539-1591)

After a survey of the career of Flemish humanist Victor Ghyselinck (1539-1591), friend of Janus Dousa and Justus Lipsius, N. Istasse proposes his translated edition of some of his various unpublished poems. The forty-four hendecasyllabic verses of his De usu epithetorum are to be found at the end of the Plantin edition (1564) of the Epithetorum epitome of Ravisius Textor. The second piece is consists of eight elegiac distichs poem addressed to his friend, the Flemish philologist Theodoor Poelman (Pulmannus). Finally, the author underscores four epigrams taken from the manuscript collection Manes Catulli and dedicated to famous contemporaries such as Justus Lipsius or Abraham Ortelius.

Imaginário midiático: um estudo de caso da reciclagem simbólica das celebridades

The present research has aimed to understand the recycling of olympian archetype by contemporary celebrities. To achieve this goal we decided to carry out an exploratory research, through the case study of mediatic trajectory of Geisy Arruda (former student of Uniban’s tourism science, known for being kicked out of college after cause a tumult by wearing a short dress at Uniban). The research is based on the theories of mass culture, proposed by Edgar Morin, and on the concepts of celebrity, described by Chris Rojek. Above all, we think this discussion from the contemporary symbols that feed the myths and archetypes, which underpin and composes the imaginary. For facts and patterns identified along the trajectory of Geisy, we can infer that the former does not reach the top of the fame, the Olympus. She survives through a relationship of symbiosis with celebrities already consolidated, a superficial representation (Meme) and highlighting, midiaticamente, his private life, especially that which concerns the eroticism.

Walt Whitman's Vision of the Inferno, or Dante in Drum-Taps

(ProQuest: ... denotes strike-through in the original text omitted.)Mark, I say, his economy of words-perhaps no other writer ever equal to him.- One simple trail of idea, epical, makes the poem-all else resolutely ignored. ... This alone shows the master. In this respect is the most perfect in all literature. A great study for diffuse moderns.-- Walt Whitman, 1859, from his notes on Dante and the Inferno1IN DECEMBER Walt Whitman witnessed Civil War soldier camps and army hospitals for the first time, when he visited a Union camp in Falmouth, Virginia, to look for his wounded brother George. His experiences at Falmouth helped spawn some of his Drum- Taps poems and wartime journalism, and several critics have considered this trip to be a turning-point in Whitman's views of the war and in his poetic envisioning of it.2 Yet Whitman prepared himself mentally and poetically for this trip in a seemingly unusual way for him: he studied Dante's Inferno. His copy of John Carlyle's 1849 prose translation of the Inferno contains the date July 1862, which indicates when Whitman purchased and probably read this book.3 As well, his 1862 notebook, in which he documented his trip to Falmouth and drafted many Drum- Taps poems, contains extensive notes on Dante and the publishing history of the Inferno. He recorded that he looked carefully over Gustave Dore's illustrations of the Inferno in September which were new and popular then on both sides of the Atlantic (LC 187).4 It seems that Whitman had Dante on his mind in the few months prior to his important trip to Falmouth. Why, then, was Whitman reading and studying Dante at this point during the war, and what might Dante-the medieval Roman Catholic poet so seemingly dissimilar from Whitman-have to do with Drum-Taps?5There were many personal and cultural reasons for Whitman's multiple readings of Dante in the early 1860s. For one, Whitman had already studied and admired the Inferno in 1859, and thus he was quite familiar with the significance of its contents when he turned to it in 1862. Also, just as Whitman was re-reading the Inferno and critically engaged with Dore's illustrations in September he and his family were enduring a difficult month, as Ted Genoways has shown. In that month the Whitmans grew anxious about George Washington Whit- man, who was a soldier in the 51st New York regiment. During the many weeks in which they waited to hear from George, the Whitmans heard reports of battlefield carnage, read of the Union defeat at Second Bull Run, and mourned the deaths of friends. In the span of two days in September, Whitman learned of the deaths of two of his friends, Bill Giggie and Elanson Fargo, both of whom were in the same regiment as George, their deaths a possible sign of George's own fate.6 During this personally difficult time, Whitman found it appropriate to study both Dante's career and read the Inferno, just as his more famous contemporary, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, found it appropriate to translate the Divine Comedy during those very same months.For Whitman-as the entire Divine Comedy was for Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and other northern intellectuals7-the Inferno was a poem for the times, an epic that seemed to anticipate the terrible intramural American war. Gradually introduced into the United States in English translations during the early 1800s, the Comedy gained much currency there as an epic poem that welded late-medieval theology and imperial politics into a unified cosmos experienced by a pilgrim-poet, a vision that supposedly anticipated the rise of the modern (Protestant) world and the global triumph of republican nationalism. As read by politically-minded critics on both sides of the Atlantic, whose transatlantic exchanges reinforced each other's interpretations, Dante's poem was anti-clerical and proto-republican, and it was definitely in favor of national union. Many transatlantic readers believed that the Comedy predicted the Risorgimento's successful revolution to unify Italy as a nation-state in 1860-1861. …

Sontag’s late lesbianism: sexuality, photography, celebrity

This essay is concerned with two public figures whose intimate relationship complicates their established independent celebrity – on the one hand, Susan Sontag, an intellectual star whose authorial persona kept in play the open secret of her bisexuality; and, on the other, Annie Leibovitz, a photographer whose reputation derives from her capacity to capture the celebrity of others. As many specialist and non-specialist commentators note, Sontag always operated with a keen eye to the forms of celebrity sustained across the expanded literary marketplace and the middlebrow print-media of the 1960s–1980s. Across her career the celebrity-effect Sontag cultivated drew on the modernist ideal of a literary and cultural original, hence the significance she placed on the holograph documentation deposited at UCLA that now comprises the Sontag Papers, an extensive collection of manuscripts, journals, lecture notes and correspondence. But from the late 1980s onwards, Sontag’s celebrity avatar was increasingly drawn into the image-driven circuits associated with Leibovitz’s rising fame as the premiere photographer of contemporary celebrity. Occurring primarily at the level of image, Sontag’s photographic entanglement with Leibovitz reveals how lesbian celebrity, even in its most reflexive iterations, derives its charge from the volatile relations between privacy and publicity that continue to manifest in the vicinity of homosexuality.

Martin Luther: ‘Confessional’ Theologian

The contemporary fame of Martin Luther (1483-1546) rested at least as much on his popular devotional writings as on his public defiance of Pope and Emperor. By re-considering his early struggles and later work in the light of this reputation, he emerges more clearly as a ‘confessional’ theologian, that is, a theologian of the confessional and of spiritual direction. It is argued that this approach provides a healthy corrective to some one-sided views of Luther, and offers a useful complementary approach in its own right for biography and historical theology.

Finding Common Grounds: Shared Patterns in Pakistani and Indian Religious Rituals

For more than two thousand years, Pakistanis and Indians shared a rich history and culture. However, since the Partition of 1947, a lack of open and direct communication between the two countries has made that common history and culture largely invisible to the people. This paper will demonstrate that the shared South Asian cultural heritage is still clearly manifest in common patterns in contemporary Muslim rituals and cultural celebrations practiced in Pakistan and also Hindu ceremonies and beliefs in India. These clear “common patterns” in both countries have hardly been emphasized, which adds to the differentiation among the people. The background for this paper is the unique opportunity I was given in August 2003, as the first Indian student in 57 years to be allowed to study in a Pakistani university. During my study and stay in Pakistan, I experienced Muslim festivals such as Shab-e-Barat and visited numerous shrines in Lahore. As I observed this Muslim “getting-rid-of sins” celebration, I noted numerous commonalities of the reasons and rituals the festival holds with those of Diwali, a Hindu festival in India. I also realized that similar beliefs were manifested in their ceremonies, such as the concept of God or an angel keeping a record of good and bad deeds in peoples’ lives. The paper will document these and other clear similarities.To interpret these data, the paper will draw on the work of anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz to demonstrate that Islam and Hinduism, as practiced in particular contexts, are indeed shaped by shared cultures. In addition, respectful participation in the rituals of each other religion among people who share a cultural heritage is common. The paper will conclude with suggestions for how this awareness of the shared Pakistani-Hindu cultural heritage, evident in the distinct Islamic and Hindu traditions, might be disseminated among the young people of the two countries in order to help them move beyond the biases and prejudices that have grown up since Partition to a deeper mutual respect and understanding.

Francesco Vanni: art in late Renaissance Siena

Francesco Vanni (1563/64-1610) was the most important artist in Siena at the turn of the 17th century. His works combine dazzling technical virtuosity and brilliant coloring with the naturalistic approach employed by his more famous contemporaries Annibale Carracci and Caravaggio. He painted altarpieces for every significant church in Siena, as well as for Saint Peter's and other churches in Rome. Beautifully illustrated and featuring new research, Francesco Vanni: Art in Late Renaissance Siena is the definitive resource on the artist. John Marciari investigates Vanni's career, including his connections with patrons and his adaptation of traditional subject matter to serve the Counter-Reformation. Suzanne Boorsch explores Vanni's engagement with printmakers and the dissemination of his compositions through prints. The catalogue examines more than 80 paintings, drawings, and prints, including the Madonna della Pappa, one of Vanni's masterpieces, acquired by the Yale University Art Gallery in 2003.