The Art and Language of Power in Renaissance Florence

The Art and Language of Power in Renaissance Florence

Author: Amy R. Bloch

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 9780772756596

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"This volume celebrates the scholarship of Alison Brown, emeritus professor in the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London. A pre-eminent historian of the Renaissance, Professor Brown has, over a long and ongoing career, produced a stream of books and essays on the intellectual, cultural, and political history of Renaissance Florence and Italy. Her innovative and wide-ranging studies have made her the most authoritative interpreter of Florence's evolution from fifteenth-century republic to sixteenth-century principate. At the centre of her re-evaluation of this complex and dramatic story are her many studies of the Medici and their own evolution over several generations from citizen bankers to skillful patrons, manipulators of factional networks, "masters of the shop," and quasi-princes. Her research has brought new perspectives not only to politics and the nature of the Florentine state, but also to the period's intellectual and religious history--in particular the impact of the rediscovery of Lucretius--and the great ferment of political thought from the humanists to Savonarola, Machiavelli, and Guicciardini. Professor Brown's vibrant and original inquiries, grounded both in Florence's archival treasures and in the rich intellectual and artistic traditions of Renaissance Italy, deftly interweave politics, culture, and ideas to yield novel and eye-opening interpretations. The essays in this book by Professor Brown's friends and colleagues find inspiration in the themes she has explored and in her dedication to the highest aims and most exacting standards of historical research. The contributions focus on a wide variety of topics, including politics and political thought, family life, art, philosophy, law, and humanism. In providing a portrait of Renaissance studies today as a dynamic field influenced in myriad ways by Professor Brown's insights and methods, the volume is a tribute to the far-reaching influence of her scholarship."--


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 Medici, Michelangelo, & the Art of Late Renaissance Florence

The Medici, Michelangelo, & the Art of Late Renaissance Florence

Author: Cristina Acidini

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 9780300094954

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"Publisdhed in conjuntion with the exhibition: Magnificenza! the Medici, Michelangelo, & the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (In Italy, L'Ombra del genio: Michelangelo e l'arte a Firenze, 1538-1631) ..."--Title page verso.


Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence

Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence

Author: William J. Connell

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2002-09-10

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13: 9780520232549

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Essays illustrate the ways Renaissance Florentines expressed or shaped their identities as they interacted with their society.


Art of Renaissance Florence

Art of Renaissance Florence

Author: Scott Nethersole

Publisher: Laurence King Publishing

Published: 2019-01-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781786273420

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In this vivid account Scott Nethersole examines the remarkable period of cultural, artistic, and intellectual blossoming in Florence from 1400 to 1520—the period traditionally known as the Early and High Renaissance. He looks at the city and its art with fresh eyes, presenting the well-known within a wider context of cultural reference. Key works of art—from painting, sculpture, and architecture to illuminated manuscripts—by artists such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi are showcased alongside the unexpected and less familiar.


Languages of Power in Italy (1300-1600)

Languages of Power in Italy (1300-1600)

Author: Daniel Bornstein

Publisher: Early European Research

Published: 2017-11-21

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 9782503540382

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The essays in this collection explore the languages - artistic, symbolic, and ritual, as well as written and spoken - in which power was articulated, challenged, contested, and defended in Italian cities and courts, villages, and countryside, between 1300 and 1600. Topics addressed include court ceremonial, gossip and insult, the performance of sanctity and public devotions, the appropriation and reuse of imagery, and the calculated invocation (and sometimes undermining) of authoritative models and figures. The collection balances a broad geographic and chronological range with a tight thematic focus, allowing the individual contributions to engage in vigorous and fruitful debate with one another even as they speak to some of the central issues in current scholarship. The authors recognize that every institutional action is, in its context, a political act, and that no institution operates disinterestedly. At the same time, they insist on the inadequacy of traditional models, whether Marxian or Weberian, as the complex realities of the early modern state pose tough problems for any narrative of modernization, rationalization, and centralization. The contributors to this volume trained and teach in various countries - Italy, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia - but share a common interest in cultural expressions of power.


Piero de Medici and the Crisis of Renaissance Italy

Piero de Medici and the Crisis of Renaissance Italy

Author: Alison Brown

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-16

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 110848946X

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Uses Piero de' Medici's life as a prism to throw new light on the crisis in Renaissance Italy that revolutionised culture and political thinking.


The Noisy Renaissance

The Noisy Renaissance

Author: Niall Atkinson

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0271077832

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From the strictly regimented church bells to the freewheeling chatter of civic life, Renaissance Florence was a city built not just of stone but of sound as well. An evocative alternative to the dominant visual understanding of urban spaces, The Noisy Renaissance examines the premodern city as an acoustic phenomenon in which citizens used sound to navigate space and society. Analyzing a range of documentary and literary evidence, art and architectural historian Niall Atkinson creates an “acoustic topography” of Florence. The dissemination of official messages, the rhythm of prayer, and the murmur of rumor and gossip combined to form a soundscape that became a foundation in the creation and maintenance of the urban community just as much as the city’s physical buildings. Sound in this space triggered a wide variety of social behaviors and spatial relations: hierarchical, personal, communal, political, domestic, sexual, spiritual, and religious. By exploring these rarely studied soundscapes, Atkinson shows Florence to be both an exceptional and an exemplary case study of urban conditions in the early modern period.


The Pucci of Florence

The Pucci of Florence

Author: Carla D'Arista

Publisher: Harvey Miller

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781912554256

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Shrewd and ruthless, the Pucci were Medici loyalists whose political and cultural alignment with the most powerful family in Renaissance Florence was rewarded with wealth and influence. The Pucci family's martial support for the Medici in the ugly business of ruling Tuscany drove their transformation from a clan of minor guildsmen to a noble dynasty with three cardinals to its name. Over the next centuries, they showcased their exalted status with art and architecture that mirrored Medici tastes and reflected the values of civic humanism. The political and religious turmoil of the High Renaissance is writ large in this vivid portrait of the Pucci cardinals and their artistic patronage, a cultural biography inflected by the expulsion of the Medici from Florence, the Sack of Rome, the Reformation, and the occupation of Italy by Emperor Charles V. New archival evidence documents the chapels, palaces, and villas that were built, expanded, and decorated by the Pucci family in Rome, Tuscany, and Umbria. These celebrated projects were carried out by luminaries of Renaissance art and architecture: Michelozzo, the Pollaiuolo brothers, the Sangallo family, Baccio d'Agnolo, the Montelupo workshop, and others. A remarkable body of inventories reveals how the family's trials and tribulations shaped the fate of their estates and illustrates the role luxury goods played in the social ambitions of this newly-arrived family. Finally, a previously unknown catalogue of Palazzo Pucci tells the tale of the nineteenth-century dispersal of the family's priceless Renaissance artworks, a collection that once paralleled the splendor of the Medici court.


Italian Renaissance Courts

Italian Renaissance Courts

Author: Alison Cole

Publisher: Laurence King Publishing

Published: 2016-02-02

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9781780677408

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In this fascinating study, Alison Cole explores the distinctive uses of art at the five great secular courts of Naples, Urbino, Ferrara, Mantua, and Milan. The princes who ruled these city-states, vying with each other and with the great European courts, relied on artistic patronage to promote their legitimacy and authority. Major artists and architects, from Mantegna and Pisanello to Bramante and Leonardo da Vinci, were commissioned to design, paint, and sculpt, but also to oversee the court's building projects and entertainments. The courtly styles that emerged from this intricate landscape are examined in detail, as are the complex motivations of ruling lords, consorts, nobles, and their artists. Drawing on the most recent scholarship, Cole presents a vivid picture of the art of this extraordinary period.