L’art italien de la Renaissance a longtemps été assimilé à la seule recherche de la beauté et de l’harmonie. Cet ouvrage fait pièce à cette légende dorée. En effet, les théoriciens et les artistes ...parviennent progressivement, selon un processus historique qui se déroule tout au long du xvie siècle et se parachève à l’époque baroque, à penser la laideur en art autrement que comme un simple écart volontaire (transgression) ou involontaire (raté) par rapport à des normes de beauté de référence. Ils cherchent à articuler la beauté et la laideur qui, depuis la philosophie et l’esthétique antiques, se voyaient la plupart du temps opposées. On passe alors de la classique antithèse entre le beau et le laid à une belle laideur révélant une contiguïté, voire, avec la théorisation de la caricature et de la laideur idéale au xviie siècle, une coïncidence de ces deux notions contraires. Cette belle laideur est d’abord pensée, à la fin de la Renaissance, sur le mode du paradoxe (le laid se voyant alors conférer des qualités traditionnellement attribuées au beau), puis, avec l’avènement de l’esthétique baroque, comme un oxymore (la laideur, voire l’horreur du contenu de l’imitation venant souligner le pouvoir transfigurateur de l’art et le talent de l’artiste).
"During the Italian Wars of 1494 to 1559, with innovations in military technology and tactics, armour began to disappear from the battlefield. Yet as field armour was retired, parade and ceremonial ...armour grew increasingly flamboyant. Displaced from its utilitarian function of defense but retained for symbolic uses, armour evolved in a new direction as a medium of artistic expression."
"Luxury armour became a chief accessory in the performance of elite male identity, coded with messages regarding the owner's social status, genealogy, and political alliances. Carolyn Springer decodes Renaissance armour as three-dimensional portraits through the case studies of three patrons of luxury armourers, Guidobaldo II della Rovere (1514-75), Charles V Habsburg (1500-58 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1519-56), and Cosimo I de'Medici (1519-74). A fascinating exposition of male self-representation, Armour and Masculinity in the Italian Renaissance explores the significance of armour in early modern Italy as both cultural artefact and symbolic form."--pub. desc.
The first full-length study of the impact of the discovery of the Americas on Italian Renaissance art and culture, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence demonstrates that the Medici grand dukes ...of Florence were not only great patrons of artists but also early conservators of American culture.
In collecting New World objects such as featherwork, codices, turquoise, and live plants and animals, the Medici grand dukes undertook a “vicarious conquest” of the Americas. As a result of their efforts, Renaissance Florence boasted one of the largest collections of objects from the New World as well as representations of the Americas in a variety of media. Through a close examination of archival sources, including inventories and Medici letters, Lia Markey uncovers the provenance, history, and meaning of goods from and images of the Americas in Medici collections, and she shows how these novelties were incorporated into the culture of the Florentine court.
More than just a study of the discoveries themselves, this volume is a vivid exploration of the New World as it existed in the minds of the Medici and their contemporaries. Scholars of Italian and American art history will especially welcome and benefit from Markey’s insight.
Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. ...This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and reimagining landscape as a mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, the internal and the external. The lens of the “unruly” reveals the latent landscapes that undergirded their conception, the elemental resources that resurfaced from the bowels of the earth, the staged topographies that unsettled the boundaries between nature and technology, and the fragile ecologies that undermined the status quo of human environs. Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature argues for an art history attentive to the vicissitudes of circumstance and attributes the regrounding of representation during a transitional age to the unquiet landscape.
In his 1987 work Paratexts, the theorist Gérard Genette established physical form as crucial to the production of meaning. Here, experts in early modern book history, materiality and rhetorical ...culture present a series of compelling explorations of the architecture of early modern books. The essays challenge and extend Genette's taxonomy, exploring the paratext as both a material and a conceptual category. Renaissance Paratexts takes a fresh look at neglected sites, from imprints to endings, and from running titles to printers' flowers. Contributors' accounts of the making and circulation of books open up questions of the marking of gender, the politics of translation, geographies of the text and the interplay between reading and seeing. As much a history of misreading as of interpretation, the collection provides novel perspectives on the technologies of reading and exposes the complexity of the playful, proliferating and self-aware paratexts of English Renaissance books.
The Fonte Gaia from Renaissance to Modern Times' examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth ...century (and the modern fate of both). The book explores how both the Risorgimento and the Symbolist movements have shaped our perceptions of the Italian Renaissance, as the Quattrocento was filtered through the lens of contemporary art and politics.
How Divine Images Became Art tells the story of the parallel ‘discovery’ of Russian medieval art and of the Italian ‘primitives’ at the beginning of the twentieth century. While these two ...developments are well-known, they are usually studied in isolation. Tarasov’s study has the great merit of showing the connection between the art world in Russia and the West, and its impact in the cultural history of the continent in the pre-war period. Drawing on a profound familiarity with Russian sources, some of which are little known to Western scholars, and on equally expert knowledge of Western material and scholarship, Oleg Tarasov presents a fresh perspective on early twentieth-century Russian and Western art. The author demonstrates that during the Belle Époque, the interest in medieval Russian icons and Italian ‘primitives’ lead to the recognition of both as distinctive art forms conveying a powerful spiritual message. Formalist art theory and its influence on art collecting played a major role in this recognition of aesthetic and moral value of ‘primitive’ paintings, and was instrumental in reshaping the perception of divine images as artworks. Ultimately, this monograph represents a significant contribution to our understanding of early twentieth-century art; it will be of interest to art scholars, students and anyone interested in the spiritual and aesthetic revival of religious paintings in the Belle Époque.
The Italian scholar and poet Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) is best remembered today for vibrant and impassioned love poetry that helped to establish Italian as a literary language. Petrarch inspired ...later Renaissance writers, who produced an extraordinary body of work regarded today as perhaps the high-water mark of poetic productivity in the European West. These "Petrarchan" poets were self-consciously aware of themselves as poets-as craftsmen, revisers, and professionals. As William J. Kennedy shows inPetrarchism at Work, this commitment to professionalism and the mastery of poetic craft is essential to understanding Petrarch's legacy.
Petrarchism at Workcontributes to recent scholarship that explores relationships between poetics and economic history in early-modern European literature. Kennedy traces the development of a Renaissance aesthetics from one based upon Platonic intuition and visionary furor to one grounded in Aristotelian craftsmanship and technique. Their polarities harbor economic consequences, the first privileging the poet's divinely endowed talent, rewarded by the autocratic largess of patrons, the other emphasizing the poet's acquired skill and hard work. Petrarch was the first to exploit the tensions between these polarities, followed by his poetic successors. These include Gaspara Stampa in the emergent salon society of Venice, Michelangelo Buonarroti in the "gift" economy of Medici Florence and papal Rome, Pierre de Ronsard and the poets of his Pléiade brigade in the fluctuant Valois court, and William Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the commercial world of Elizabethan and early Stuart London. As Kennedy shows, the poetic practices of revision and redaction by Petrarch and his successors exemplify the transition from a premodern economy of patronage to an early modern economy dominated by unstable market forces.
