Cellini's Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi: Configurations of the Body of State explores the role that maternal influence played in the formation of Cosimo I de' Medici's absolutist state.
Introduction In a recent contribution (Pozzilli & Nicolai, 2021) it has been postulated that Cosimo I de' Medici (1519-1574), the second Duke of Florence, was affected by an endocrinological ...condition (Pozzilli & Nicolai, 2021); the authors maintain to have identified a case of severe Graves' disease (untreated hyperthyroidism, atrial fibrillation and thyroid eye disease) in the bronze statue of Cosimo I de' Medici forged by Benv-enuto Cellini in between 1545 and 1547. Materials and Methods A careful examination of the artistic sources, the medical primary sources and the paleopathological findings was performed with the aim of assessing the likelihood of Cosimo I de' Medici's diagnosis of severe Graves' disease, following recent guidelines on the integration of non-osteological sources in retrospective paleopathological analyses (Ruhli et al., 2016; Mitchell, 2017; Nerlich et al., 2021; Varotto et al., 2022). Discussion From a medical point of view, it shall be underlined that Cosimo I's adult life was plagued by obesity (Arba et al., 2014); this condition is incompatible with a diagnosis of Graves' disease since severe hyperthyroidism accelerates the body's metabolism and causes an unintentional weight loss independently from the food intake. Piero the Gouty Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano all had thick-necks and an Adam's Apple; these can be appreciated both in Lorenzo the Magnificent's life-like terracotta by Verrocchio and Benintendi (ca. 1478, National Museum of Art, Washington, USA) (Figure li), in his portrait in The Confirmation of the Franciscan Rule, one of Domenico Ghirlandaio's frescoes in the Sassetti Chapel in S. Trinita (Florence)) (Figure lj) and by his posthumous portrait by
Nell’ottobre 1940, nel bel mezzo della Seconda Guerra Mondiale, uscì il primo numero del nuovo periodico «Cellini». Il sottotitolo, rivista dell’artigianato italiano, chiariva come essa non fosse ...dedicata univocamente all’arte orafa, ma che nel nome di questo personaggio d’eccezione si volesse far cadere la distinzione gerarchica tra arte e artigianato. A pubblicarla erano la Federazione nazionale fascista degli artigiani e l’Ente nazionale fascista per l’artigianato e le piccole industrie (E.N.F.A.P.I.), istituzione quest’ultima che portava quindi a porre l’accento anche su un necessario rapporto con la produzione industriale.
In 1843, the Groningen classicist Petrus van Limburg Brouwer (father of P.A.S. van Limburg Brouwer, the author of the orientalist novel Akbar) published a candid translation of the autobiography of ...the Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini; the translation does not shy away from references to homosexuality. A study of the applicability of concepts taken from queer studies and conceptual history studies of the nature of artistry and genius points towards a classicist concept of beauty with which Van Limburg Brouwer took a stand against the romantic concept of morality.
Eric Hobsbawm's epithets capture aspects of two great New Orleans musicians: the long, impassioned melodies of Sidney Bechet ('pulsating ropes of beautiful sound') and the picaresque story-telling of ...Jelly Roll Morton ('more readable than many such works').1Both jazzmen knew how to spin a yarn, in their words and in their music. In an age when public music-making, domestic performance and recordings (either public or private) co-existed, opportunities to hear and make operatic music were many; excerpts such as Trovatore's 'Miserere', along with its still-more-famous 'Anvil Chorus', were versioned for everything from solo singers to military bands.6At the same time, European music continued to convey social standing - especially in a city in which (whisper it) class mattered almost as much as race. 'My folks', he said, 'always had it in their minds that a musician was a tramp, trying to duck work, with the exception of the French opera house players.'11As he sought to recover his position in history, this most composerly of early jazz musicians enlisted the same discourses of race, class and, indeed, gender that had held him back in an effort to unlock the respect - and the revenue - he was due. The most vocal of instrumentalists, Bechet enjoyed visits to the opera with his mother and played Caruso records at home.13In Treat It Gentle, he tells how an uncle with operatic ambitions was arrested for disturbing the peace with his singing, but released when the police captain turned out to be a fan.14Although Bechet was captured in a private recording playing 'Vesti la giubba' from Pagliacci, no such record is known to exist of the 'Miserere'.
Almost everyKunstkammerin sixteenth-century Europe contained small reptiles or plants cast from life in a variety of media. This widespread technique, which used small, recently killed animals as a ...pattern to create lifelike sculptures, was often prized more highly than works sculpted with the hand. An unstudied, late sixteenth-century French technical manuscript records a practitioner's experiments in casting from life, among many other subjects. This article investigates both the techniques and the significance of life-casting on the basis of this treatise, incorporating the examination of surviving sixteenth-century European life casts and the reconstruction of the manuscript's recipes and technical instructions, arguing that life-casting in the sixteenth century was viewed in part as a means to the knowledge of nature.
Ever since Baldassar Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, sprezzatura, or the art of concealing one’s effort, had become a dominant aesthetic code of comportment in Renaissance court culture. Recent ...scholars have noted how this same discourse about the projection of ease also came to permeate writings about science and the mechanical arts. In this article, I argue that Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita offered an alternative to this aesthetic, highlighting, rather than concealing, the physical toil and energetic expenditure required to produce artistic form out of raw matter. This alternative is significant, I contend, especially when considered in the context of the writings of sixteenth-century engineers like Georgius Agricola, who were beginning to think in terms of the tradeoffs between ore extraction, agricultural production, and human well-being. Tradeoffs imply effort and difficult choices rather than ease, hence, writers like Cellini and Agricola, by offering an alternative manner of describing costs and energy expenditures, also allowed for a greater degree of awareness of employed resources.
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