front cover of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance
The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance
Jacob Burckhardt
University of Chicago Press, 1984
"There may not be any book on architecture so delightful to dip into; one wishes there were a pocket edition to take on an Italian vacation—not only for its information and vision but for such pleasant reminders as that the citizens of Treviso carried Tullio Lombardo's friezes through the town in triumph before they were attached to a building."—D. J. R. Bruckner, New York Times Book Review
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front cover of Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance
Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance
Eric Cochrane
University of Chicago Press, 1981
Second edition. A comprehensive survey of historical literature produced in Italy during the Renaissance; a major contribution which discusses hundreds of authors who wrote in Latin or Italian in all parts of Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 
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I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 24 number 1 (Spring 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021

front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 24 number 2 (Fall 2021)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 24 number 2 (Fall 2021)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2021
This is volume 24 issue 2 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 1 (Spring 2022)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 1 (Spring 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 25 issue 1 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 2 (Fall 2022)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 25 number 2 (Fall 2022)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2022
This is volume 25 issue 2 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 26 number 1 (Spring 2023)
I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 26 number 1 (Spring 2023)
The University of Chicago Press
University of Chicago Press Journals, 2023
This is volume 26 issue 1 of I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance. Published twice a year, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance features groundbreaking work written in Italian and in English on every aspect of the literary, religious, artistic, historical, and scientific dimensions of Renaissance Italy. Articles offer pioneering work in a number of areas, ranging from Botticelli’s illustrations for Dante’s Commedia to Florentine sermons on the Dives and Lazarus story to images of Ottoman culture in Mantua. The journal regularly publishes clusters of essays and other special sections.
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front cover of In the Company of Demons
In the Company of Demons
Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance
Armando Maggi
University of Chicago Press, 2006
Who are the familiar spirits of classical culture and what is their relationship to Christian demons? In its interpretation of Latin and Greek culture, Christianity contends that Satan is behind all classical deities, semi-gods, and spiritual creatures, including the gods of the household, the lares and penates.But with In the Company of Demons, the world’s leading demonologist Armando Maggi argues that the great thinkers of the Italian Renaissance had a more nuanced and perhaps less sinister interpretation of these creatures or spiritual bodies.

Maggi leads us straight to the heart of what Italian Renaissance culture thought familiar spirits were. Through close readings of Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola, Strozzi Cigogna, Pompeo della Barba, Ludovico Sinistrari, and others, we find that these spirits or demons speak through their sudden and striking appearances—their very bodies seen as metaphors to be interpreted. The form of the body, Maggi explains, relies on the spirits’ knowledge of their human interlocutors’ pasts. But their core trait is compassion, and sometimes their odd, eerie arrivals are seen as harbingers or warnings to protect us. It comes as no surprise then that when spiritual beings distort the natural world to communicate, it is vital that we begin to listen.
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front cover of Influences
Influences
Art, Optics, and Astrology in the Italian Renaissance
Mary Quinlan-McGrath
University of Chicago Press, 2013
Today few would think of astronomy and astrology as fields related to theology. Fewer still would know that physically absorbing planetary rays was once considered to have medical and psychological effects. But this was the understanding of light radiation held by certain natural philosophers of early modern Europe, and that, argues Mary Quinlan-McGrath, was why educated people of the Renaissance commissioned artworks centered on astrological themes and practices.
 
Influences is the first book to reveal how important Renaissance artworks were designed to be not only beautiful but also—perhaps even primarily—functional. From the fresco cycles at Caprarola, to the Vatican’s Sala dei Pontefici, to the Villa Farnesina, these great works were commissioned to selectively capture and then transmit celestial radiation, influencing the bodies and minds of their audiences. Quinlan-McGrath examines the sophisticated logic behind these theories and practices and, along the way, sheds light on early creation theory; the relationship between astrology and natural theology; and the protochemistry, physics, and mathematics of rays.
 
An original and intellectually stimulating study, Influences adds a new dimension to the understanding of aesthetics among Renaissance patrons and a new meaning to the seductive powers of art.  
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front cover of The Italian Renaissance of Machines
The Italian Renaissance of Machines
Paolo Galluzzi
Harvard University Press, 2019

The Renaissance was not just a rebirth of the mind. It was also a new dawn for the machine.

When we celebrate the achievements of the Renaissance, we instinctively refer, above all, to its artistic and literary masterpieces. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the Italian peninsula was the stage of a no-less-impressive revival of technical knowledge and practice. In this rich and lavishly illustrated volume, Paolo Galluzzi guides readers through a singularly inventive period, capturing the fusion of artistry and engineering that spurred some of the Renaissance’s greatest technological breakthroughs.

Galluzzi traces the emergence of a new and important historical figure: the artist-engineer. In the medieval world, innovators remained anonymous. By the height of the fifteenth century, artist-engineers like Leonardo da Vinci were sought after by powerful patrons, generously remunerated, and exhibited in royal and noble courts. In an age that witnessed continuous wars, the robust expansion of trade and industry, and intense urbanization, these practitioners—with their multiple skills refined in the laboratory that was the Renaissance workshop—became catalysts for change. Renaissance masters were not only astoundingly creative but also championed a new concept of learning, characterized by observation, technical know-how, growing mathematical competence, and prowess at the draftsman’s table.

The Italian Renaissance of Machines enriches our appreciation for Taccola, Giovanni Fontana, and other masters of the quattrocento and reveals how da Vinci’s ambitious achievements paved the way for Galileo’s revolutionary mathematical science of mechanics.

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front cover of Leon Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti
Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance
Anthony Grafton
Harvard University Press, 2000

Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) was one of the most exciting figures of the Italian Renaissance. He wrote the first modern treatise on painting, the first modern manual of classical architecture, and a powerful set of "dialogues" about the princely families of Florence. But Alberti also made his own spectacular advances in the art of painting and in engineering, and was responsible for some of the most exciting architectural designs in Italy.

In this volume, one of our most distinguished Renaissance scholars offers the superlative biography and cultural history that Alberti has long deserved. It is a compelling portrait of a mysterious and original intellectual.

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front cover of The Manly Masquerade
The Manly Masquerade
Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance
Valeria Finucci
Duke University Press, 2003
The Manly Masquerade unravels the complex ways men were defined as men in Renaissance Italy through readings of a vast array of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence: medical and travel literature; theology; law; myth; conduct books; and plays, chivalric romances, and novellas by authors including Machiavelli, Tasso, and Ariosto. Valeria Finucci shows how ideas of masculinity were formed in the midst of acute anxiety about paternity by highlighting the beliefs—widely held at the time—that conception could occur without a paternal imprimatur or through a woman’s encounter with an animal, or even that a pregnant woman’s imagination could erase the father’s "signature" from the fetus. Against these visions of reproduction gone awry, Finucci looks at how concepts of masculinity were tied to issues of paternity through social standing, legal matters, and inheritance practices.

Highlighting the fissures running through Italian Renaissance ideas of manliness, Finucci describes how, alongside pervasive images of the virile, sexually active man, early modern Italian culture recognized the existence of hermaphrodites and started to experiment with a new kind of sexuality by manufacturing a non-man: the castrato. Following the creation of castrati, the Church forbade the marriage of all non-procreative men, and, in this move, Finucci identifies a powerful legitimation of the view that what makes men is not the possession of male organs or the ability to have sex, but the capability to father. Through analysis, anecdote, and rich cultural description, The Manly Masquerade exposes the "real" early modern man: the paterfamilias.

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Master Drawings of the Italian Renaissance
Claire Van Cleave
Harvard University Press, 2007

A beautifully designed selection of the finest Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections, giving remarkable insight into the creative processes of some of the greatest artists in history.

This book features masterpieces of Italian Renaissance drawings from the British Museum, the Louvre and other French public collections in Lille, Rennes and Chantilly.

Beginning with an examination of drawing as part of the creative process, and showing how it reveals the artist's mind at work, the author explains in detail the materials and techniques used in Renaissance drawings. It also considers how drawings were used, how they changed stylistically through the period and how they varied in different regions of Italy. It concludes with a brief look at connoisseurship and collecting.

The main body of the book showcases 112 of the finest drawings by more than 40 Italian Renaissance masters, including Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, accompanied by a concise sketch of the life and work of each artist. Arranged chronologically, they reveal stylistic and geographical trends as well as personal interactions between the artists themselves, and provide an extraordinary insight in to the artistic world of Renaissance Italy.

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front cover of Pagan Virtue in a Christian World
Pagan Virtue in a Christian World
Sigismondo Malatesta and the Italian Renaissance
Anthony F. D'Elia
Harvard University Press, 2016

In 1462 Pope Pius II performed the only reverse canonization in history, publicly damning a living man. The target was Sigismondo Malatesta, Lord of Rimini and a patron of the arts with ties to the Florentine Renaissance. Condemned to an afterlife of torment, he was burned in effigy in several places in Rome. What had this cultivated nobleman done to merit such a fate?

Pagan Virtue in a Christian World examines anew the contributions and contradictions of the Italian Renaissance, and in particular how the recovery of Greek and Roman literature and art led to a revival of pagan culture and morality in fifteenth-century Italy. The court of Sigismondo Malatesta (1417–1468), Anthony D’Elia shows, provides a case study in the Renaissance clash of pagan and Christian values, for Sigismondo was nothing if not flagrant in his embrace of the classical past. Poets likened him to Odysseus, hailed him as a new Jupiter, and proclaimed his immortal destiny. Sigismondo incorporated into a Christian church an unprecedented number of zodiac symbols and images of the Olympian gods and goddesses and had the body of the Greek pagan theologian Plethon buried there.

In the literature and art that Sigismondo commissioned, pagan virtues conflicted directly with Christian doctrine. Ambition was celebrated over humility, sexual pleasure over chastity, muscular athleticism over saintly asceticism, and astrological fortune over providence. In the pagan themes so prominent in Sigismondo’s court, D’Elia reveals new fault lines in the domains of culture, life, and religion in Renaissance Italy.

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front cover of Transregional Lordship and the Italian Renaissance
Transregional Lordship and the Italian Renaissance
René de Challant, 1504-1565
Matthew Vester
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
René de Challant, whose holdings ranged from northwestern Italy to the Alps and over the mountains into what is today western Switzerland and eastern France, was an Italian and transregional dynast. The spatially-dispersed kind of lordship that he practiced and his lifetime of service to the house of Savoy, especially in the context of the Italian Wars, show how the Sabaudian lands, neighboring Alpine states, and even regions further afield were tied to the history of the Italian Renaissance. Situating René de Challant on the edge of the Italian Renaissance helps us to understand noble kin relations, political networks, finances, and lordship with more precision. A spatially inflected analysis of René's life brings to light several themes related to transregional lordship that have been obscured due to the traditional tendencies of Renaissance studies. It uncovers an 'Italy' whose boundaries extend not just into the Mediterranean, but into regions beyond the Alps.
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