"Sixteen essays by an international group of scholars that examine the role of noble women as patrons of architecture and music in early modern Italy and that explore the behavior of woman art patrons and artists involved in the creation of art and architecture"--
This book examines the sociocultural networks between the courts of early modern Italy and Europe, focusing on the Florentine Medici court, and the cultural patronage and international gendered networks developed by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere. Adelina Modesti uses Grand Duchess Vittoria as an exemplar of pan-European 'matronage' and proposes a new matrilineal model of patronage in the early modern period, one in which women become not only the mediators but also the architects of public taste and the transmitters of cultural capital. The book will be the first comprehensive monographic study of this important cultural figure. This study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, Renaissance studies and seventeenth-century Italy.
While most of the projects discussed are consistent with the period's male-sanctioned concept of female patronage as an expression of conjugal devotion or dynastic promotion, at the same time the women involved devised strategies that circumvented these rules, allowing them to explore the potential or art as a means of proclaiming their own identity and taste.
This anthology reflects a larger impulse to recover women's involvement in the creation of an aesthetic culture from the late medieval through the early modern periods. By asking how the perspectives and experiences of female patrons contributed to the invention of particular styles or iconographies, or how they shaped taste, or how they influenced demand, these twelve original essays introduce significant new information about specific women patrons while raising theoretical issues for patronage studies more generally. While most of the projects discussed are consistent with the period's male-sanctioned concept of female patronage as an expression of conjugal devotion or dynastic promotion, at the same time the women involved devised strategies that circumvented these rules, allowing them to explore the potential or art as a means of proclaiming their own identity and taste.
This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
Analyzing the artistic patronage of famous and lesser known women of Renaissance Mantua, and introducing new patronage paradigms that existed among those women, this study sheds new light the social, cultural and religious impact of the cult of female mystics of that city in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. Author Sally Hickson combines primary archival research, contextual analysis of the climate of female mysticism, and a re-examination of a number of visual objects (particularly altarpieces devoted to local beatae, saints and female founders of religious orders) to delineate ties between women both outside and inside the convent walls. The study contests the accepted perception of Isabella d'Este as a purely secular patron, exposing her role as a religious patron as well. Hickson introduces the figure of Margherita Cantelma and documents concerning the building and decoration of her monastery on the part of Isabella d'Este; and draws attention to the cultural and political activities of nuns of the Gonzaga family, particularly Isabella's daughter Livia Gonzaga who became a powerful agent in Mantuan civic life. Women, Art and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Mantua provides insight into a complex and fluid world of sacred patronage, devotional practices and religious roles of secular women as well as nuns in Renaissance Mantua.
Examines sixty-eight women artists in early modern Bologna, revealing how they obtained public commissions and expanded beyond the portrait subjects to which women were traditionally confined. Uses new methodological models for considering gender and art in early modern Italy.
Drawing on rich archival research and focusing on works by leading artists including Guido Reni and Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Karen J. Lloyd demonstrates that cardinal nephews in seventeenth-century Rome – those nephews who were raised to the cardinalate as princes of the Church – used the arts to cultivate more than splendid social status. Through politically savvy frescos and emotionally evocative displays of paintings, sculptures, and curiosities, cardinal nephews aimed to define nepotism as good Catholic rule. Their commissions took advantage of their unique position close to the pope, embedding the defense of their role into the physical fabric of authority, from the storied vaults of the Vatican Palace to the sensuous garden villas that fused business and pleasure in the Eternal City. This book uncovers how cardinal nephews crafted a seductively potent dialogue on the nature of power, fuelling the development of innovative visual forms that championed themselves as the indispensable heart of papal politics. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, early modern studies, religious history, and political history.
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.