Research Guides: CSTS & COML 202: Bawdy Bodies: Comedies of the Grotesque in Antiquity and the Renaissance(HC): Visual Sources

Visual Sources - All Time Periods

ARTstor
A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design. Coverage varies.

British Museum Collection Online
Search over 3 million objects in the museum's collections. Use the standard search and enter keywords.
Example: renaissance france [Sorted by date]
Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection Search
Explore art at the Metropolitan. Searching Greek Erotic* results in vases, mirrors, and jewelry as well as some Aubrey Beardsley illustrations from Lysistrata.

Visual Sources - Classical Period

Art and Archaeology Artifact Browser
The online resource Perseus provides this specialized search interface for visual resources.
Gods and Myths
This part of the Warburg Institute's Iconographic Database provides images of classical themes both from antiquity and later time periods.
Pottery Database
The Beazley Archive at the University of Oxford maintains this extensive database (over 130, 000 images) on ancient Greek vases. It is searchable by theme, type of vase, inscription, painter, technique (e.g., white ground), and collection.
The Beazley Archive's Classical Art Research Centre has many other resources included the digitized Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum and a merged database that draws on 22 separate files including the Pottery Database.

Visual Sources - Renaissance

Francois Rabelais
Multiple webpages from the University of Virginia Library include digitized pages from early Rabelais texts along with French web sources.
The Drolatic Dreams of Pantagruel. Paris, 1565
The publisher, Richard Breton, brought out this book of odd and grotesque illustrations that he credited to Rabelais as a marketing ploy. Scholars believe the artist was François Desprez.
Gustave Doré. Oeuvres de Rabelais. Paris, 1854
The lively and detailed illustrations by Doré in this digitized book capture the exuberance and scale of Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Albert Robida. Oeuvres de Rabelais. Paris, around 1885
Robida illustrated this cheaper edition with a humorous touch. It was intended for a larger audience than the more deluxe volumes illustrated by Doré.
Andre Derain. Pantagruel. Skira, 1943
This digitized version of the book presents all of Derain's lively, woodcut illustrations that draw on historical and folklore motifs.
Les truculentes aventures de Rabelais. I, Salade de spadassins à la Léonard by Jean-Yves Mitton and Michel Rodrigue
Publication Date: 2001
French language comic book that imagines a swashbuckling adventure for the medical student Rabelais involving King Francis, Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa and his larger than life characters, Panurge, Gargantua, and Pantagruel.
Les truculentes aventures de Rabelais. 2, Fricassée de fripouilles à la Gargantua by Jean-Yves Mitton and Michel Rodrigue
The comic book adventures continue with Rabelais, his characters and historical figures.

Selected Books and Articles on Art

Bruegel's Peasants:Art and Audience in the Northern Renaissance by Margaret A. Sullivan
ISBN: 0521441501
Publication Date: 1994-02-25
The artist's Northern audience saw his paintings within a framework conditioned by a knowledge of the ancients. These provided models for the ungainly and grotesque imagery of everyday life, in such ancient genres as satire in which the didactic and the amusing coexist. As "earnest jests", Bruegel's depictions of peasants present philosophical problems humorously.
A Companion to Greek Art by Tyler Jo Smith (Editor); Dimitris Plantzos (Editor)
ISBN: 1118273311
Publication Date: 2012-04-02
A comprehensive overview of the development of Greek art through the 1st millennium BC. It deals with forms of art as well as the meaning of imagery. If you prefer a paper copy, please check Tripod.
A Companion to Renaissance and Baroque Art by Babette Bohn; James M. Saslow
ISBN: 9781444337266
Publication Date: 2013-03-12
Addresses key issues for European art produced between 1300 and 1700. Features essays on the arts of domestic life, sexuality and gender, religion and popular imagery.
Sex on Show by Caroline Vout
Publication Date: 2013-11-06
Caroline Vout examines the abundance of sexual imagery in Greek and Roman culture. Meanings connect to ancient attitudes toward religion, politics, sex, gender, and the body. They also reveal how the ancients saw themselves and their world, and how subsequent centuries have seen them.
"Twentieth-Century Illustrators' Interpretations of the Works of Rabelais" by Margaret Harp
Publication Date: Quidditas 28 (2007): 107-130.
The author analyzes the Rabelais illustrations done by Jean Chieze for the 1935 edition and by Andre Derain in 1943. The article begins on page 107.