Oneof the pivotal figures in early sixteenth-century German art, Cranach the Elder was the Reformation artist par excellence. A close friend and follower of Martin Luther (they were godfathers to one another’s children), Cranach collaborated with Luther in producing numerous single-sheet woodcuts and book illustrations that were crucial for the spread of the new evangelical theology in the early years of the Reformation in Germany. The “Passional Christi et Antichristi” (Wittenberg, 1521), for example, contrasts the holy life of Christ with the decadent life of the pope and the venal customs of the Curia Romana in thirteen antithetical pairs of woodcuts, with brief texts from the Bible and papal decretals composed by Philipp Melanchthon and Johann Schwertfeger. The epilogue was perhaps written by Luther himself. In 1529 Cranach created the quintessential new Reformation image, the “Allegory of Law and Grace,” contrasting mankind’s damnation under the law of Moses with his hope of salvation under the New Testament’s offer of grace in Luther’s interpretation. The allegory was typically produced both as a woodcut (London, British Museum) and as a panel painting (Gotha, Schloßmuseum) and was often copied. Portraits by Cranach and his son, Lucas the Younger, of Luther (Weimar, Schloßmuseum), Melanchthon (Frankfurt am Main, Städel), and the other reformers (Toledo Museum of Art), as well as the many copies and variants made from them by workshop assistants, have determined our perception of the reformers to the present day.

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In 1556 Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–89), patron of Bembo and Vasari, commissioned Giacomo Vignola to build a villa at Caprarola, 55 kilometres (35 miles) north of Rome; the building was erected on the foundations of an earlier villa begun by Antonio Sangallo the Younger. The villa was finished in 1583, and is widely considered to be the finest in Italy. Villa Farnese is built on the scale of a palace, and so is sometimes called Palazzo Farnese; it is sometimes confused with the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, which was built by Sangallo for an earlier Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (later Pope Paul III).

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The Medici family had a suite of fourteen villas near Florence, of which the most important were situated in Careggi, Castello, Fiesole, and Poggio a Caiano; in the sixteenth century the family also acquired a villa in Rome.

The Villa Careggi, in what is now a northern suburb of Florence, is the creation of Cosimo de’Medici the Elder, who in 1457 commissioned Michelozzo di Bartolomeo to convert an old manor house that Cosimo’s brother Giovanni de’Bicci had bought in 1417. In rebuilding the fortified manor house as a contemporary villa, Michelozzo chose to leave much of the original exterior intact, but added a graceful double loggia which overlooked a garden. The garden was intended to revive the ancient Roman villa garden, and so was planted with bay, box, cypress, myrtle, pomegranates, quince, lavender, and scented herbs and flowers; the only post-classical plants were carnations from the Levant and orange and lemon trees from North Africa. One of the fountains added to the garden by Lorenzo de’Medici contained Verrocchio’s bronze Boy with a Dolphin (c.1480), which is now in the court of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.
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Fêtes and Triumphs, elaborate festivals organized by or for royalty, incorporated many forms of entertainment, including dance. The triumphs, named for the triumphal arches erected for the occasion by townspeople, welcomed the monarch to their city as the royal entourage traveled the realm to assert the monarch’s authority; the festivities were organized at court to demonstrate royal power, some were directed at impressing both rebellious lords and foreign rivals.
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The topic of the Reformation and art can claim a long history. The Protestant movement had scarcely got under way before observers noted implications for painting and sculpture. The Nuremberg artist Albrecht Dürer in 1525 uttered warnings concerning the futility of image destruction and the difficulty of reviving the arts once they were lost. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus also alluded to some of these problems. In a 1526 letter of introduction provided for Hans Holbein the Younger to take with him to the Netherlands, Erasmus explained the painter’s departure from Reformation Basel by stating that “here the arts are cold.” The Wittenberg reformer Martin Luther seems to have felt sensitive to accusations of responsibility for causing this frigid atmosphere. He once protested that he was not “of the opinion that the gospel should destroy and blight all the arts.”

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Italian painter, sculptor, architect, designer, theorist, engineer and scientist. He was the founding father of what is called the High Renaissance style and exercised an enormous influence on contemporary and later artists. His writings on art helped establish the ideals of representation and expression that were to dominate European academies for the next 400 years. The standards he set in figure draughtsmanship, handling of space, depiction of light and shade, representation of landscape, evocation of character and techniques of narrative radically transformed the range of art. A number of his inventions in architecture and in various fields of decoration entered the general currency of 16th-century design.

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