Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Author: Giuliano Mori

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-02-15

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0198885938

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While humanists agreed on identifying the main requirement of the historical genre with truthfulness, they disagreed on their notions of historical truth. Some authors equated historical truth with verisimilitude, thus harmonizing the quest for truth with other ingredients of their histories, such as their political utility and rhetorical aptness. Others, instead, rejected the notion of verisimilitude, identifying historical truth with factuality. Accordingly, they sought to produce bare and exhaustive accounts of all the things that pertained to their historical explorations, often resorting to innovative disciplines, such as archeology, philology, and the history of institutions. The humanist historiographical debate is especially significant because the notion of verisimilitude encompassed crucial elements required for the development of methods of critical assessment. By perceiving verisimilitude and factuality as irreconcilable, Quattrocento humanists reached a critical impasseâ€"those who were interested in factual truth mostly lacked the means to ascertain it, while those that developed embryonic notions of historical criticism were not eminently concerned with the factual account of the past. This critical weakness exposed humanists to considerable risks, including that of accepting non-verisimilar historical forgeries passed off as factual. Such forgeries eventually served as a testing ground for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, who sought to restore factual truth by means of critical criteria grounded in verisimilitude, thus overcoming the humanist impasse. Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy addresses Renaissance history, philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence to shed light on how humanists conceptualized truth and, more specifically, historical truth.


Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy

Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy

Author: Michael Baxandall

Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 9780192821447

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An introduction to 15th century Italian painting and the social history behind it, arguing that the two are interlinked and that the conditions of the time helped fashion distinctive elements in the painter's style.


Touching Objects

Touching Objects

Author: Adrian W. B. Randolph

Publisher:

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780300204780

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This groundbreaking book spans the fields of art history, material culture, and gender studies in its examination of a range of objects from Italian Renaissance society. Addressing painted and sculpted portraits, marriage and betrothal gifts, and paxes, Adrian W. B. Randolph uses themes such as family and individual memory, windows, perspectival space, and touch to investigate how these items were experienced at the time, particularly by women. Rather than focusing on the social contexts of the objects, this original study deals with the objects themselves, asking how individuals lived with, looked at, and responded to complex things that at the time hovered between the nascent category of art and the everyday. Accompanied by beautiful and engaging accounts and illustrations of late-14th- and 15th-century Italian art, this compelling and thought-provoking argument makes the case for an alternate account of art and experience that challenges many conceptions about Renaissance art.


Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence

Author:

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published:

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780271048147

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To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.


The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy

The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Author: Amy R. Bloch

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-31

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9781108428842

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Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed sweeping innovations in the art of sculpture. Sculptors rediscovered new types of images from classical antiquity and invented new ones, devised novel ways to finish surfaces, and pushed the limits of their materials to new expressive extremes. The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy surveys the sculptural production created by a range of artists throughout the peninsula. It offers a comprehensive overview of Italian sculpture during a century of intense creativity and development. Here, nineteen historians of Quattrocento Italian sculpture chart the many competing forces that led makers, patrons, and viewers to invest sculpture with such heightened importance in this time and place. Methodologically wide-ranging, the essays, specially commissioned for this volume, explore the vast range of techniques and media (stone, metal, wood, terracotta, and stucco) used to fashion works of sculpture. They also examine how viewers encountered those objects, discuss varying approaches to narrative, and ponder the increasing contemporary interest in the relationship between sculpture and history.


Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Author: Giuliano Mori

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-01-22

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0198885954

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While humanists agreed on identifying the main requirement of the historical genre with truthfulness, they disagreed on their notions of historical truth. Some authors equated historical truth with verisimilitude, thus harmonizing the quest for truth with other ingredients of their histories, such as their political utility and rhetorical aptness. Others, instead, rejected the notion of verisimilitude, identifying historical truth with factuality. Accordingly, they sought to produce bare and exhaustive accounts of all the things that pertained to their historical explorations, often resorting to innovative disciplines, such as archeology, philology, and the history of institutions. The humanist historiographical debate is especially significant because the notion of verisimilitude encompassed crucial elements required for the development of methods of critical assessment. By perceiving verisimilitude and factuality as irreconcilable, Quattrocento humanists reached a critical impasse—those who were interested in factual truth mostly lacked the means to ascertain it, while those that developed embryonic notions of historical criticism were not eminently concerned with the factual account of the past. This critical weakness exposed humanists to considerable risks, including that of accepting non-verisimilar historical forgeries passed off as factual. Such forgeries eventually served as a testing ground for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, who sought to restore factual truth by means of critical criteria grounded in verisimilitude, thus overcoming the humanist impasse. Historical Truth in Fifteenth-Century Italy addresses Renaissance history, philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence to shed light on how humanists conceptualized truth and, more specifically, historical truth.


The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism

The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism

Author: Jill Kraye

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-02-23

Total Pages: 350

ISBN-13: 9780521436243

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From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, humanism played a key role in European culture. Beginning as a movement based on the recovery, interpretation and imitation of ancient Greek and Roman texts and the archaeological study of the physical remains of antiquity, humanism turned into a dynamic cultural programme, influencing almost every facet of Renaissance intellectual life. The fourteen essays in this 1996 volume deal with all aspects of the movement, from language learning to the development of science, from the effect of humanism on biblical study to its influence on art, from its Italian origins to its manifestations in the literature of More, Sidney and Shakespeare. A detailed biographical index, and a guide to further reading, are provided. Overall, The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism provides a comprehensive introduction to a major movement in the culture of early modern Europe.


Nuns' Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy

Nuns' Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy

Author: K. J. P. Lowe

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-12-04

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 9780521621915

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This well-illustrated and innovative book analyses convent culture in sixteenth-century Italy through the medium of three unpublished nuns' chronicles. It uses a comparative methodology of 'connected differences' to examine the intellectual and imaginative achievement of these nuns, and to investigate how they fashioned and preserved individual and convent identities by writing chronicles. The chronicles themselves reveal many examples of nuns' agency, especially with regard to cultural creativity, and show that convent traditions determined cultural priorities and specialisms, and dictated the contours of convent ceremonial life.