Architecture and Memory
Architecture and Memory

Author: Robert Kirkbride

Publisher:

Published: 2008-11-11

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13:

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The studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio, Italy, demonstrate architecture's capacity to transact between the mental and physical realms of human experience. Constructed between 1474 and 1483 for the military captain Federico da Montefeltro and his young motherless son, the studioli may be described as treasuries of emblems: they contain not things but images of things, rendered with remarkable perspectival exactitude. These small, image-filled chambers reflect how architecture and its ornament equipped a quattrocento mind with metaphors for wisdom and methods for statecraft and intellectual activity. Drawing on the densely layered imagery in the studioli and text sources readily available to the Urbino court, Robert Kirkbride examines the position of the studioli in the Western tradition of the memory arts, considering how architecture bridged the mathematical arts, which lent themselves to mechanical pursuits, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline central to memory and eloquence. As subtle ramifications of material and mental craft, the studioli provided ideal methods for education and prudent governance, extending an ancient legacy of open-ended models that were conceived to activate the imagination and exercise the memory. At the time of their construction, the studioli represented the leading edge of technologies of visual representation and offer a case study of how contemporary advances in interactive technologies reactivate and transform ancient metaphors for thought and learning.

Solitudo
Solitudo

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2018-05-23

Total Pages: 602

ISBN-13: 9004367438

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This book explores the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of solitude in the late medieval and early modern periods, a hitherto largely neglected topic. Its focus is on the dynamic qualities of “space” and “place”, which are here understood as being shaped, structured, and imbued with meaning through both social and discursive solitary practices such as reading, writing, studying, meditating, and praying. Individual chapters investigate the imageries and imaginaries of outdoor and indoor spaces and places associated with solitude and its practices and examine the ways in which the space of solitude was conceived of, imagined, and represented in the arts and in literature, from about 1300 to about 1800. Contributors include Oskar Bätschmann, Carla Benzan, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Dominic E. Delarue, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Christine Göttler, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christiane J. Hessler, Walter S. Melion, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bernd Roling, Paul Smith, Marie Theres Stauffer, Arnold A. Witte, and Steffen Zierholz.

The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy
The Art Collector in Early Modern Italy

Author: Monika Schmitter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-09-23

Total Pages: 943

ISBN-13: 1108934439

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Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Andrea Odoni is one of the most famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Son of an immigrant and a member of the non-noble citizen class, Odoni understood how the power of art could make a name for himself and his family in his adopted homeland. Far from emulating Venetian patricians, however, he set himself apart through the works he collected and the way he displayed them. In this book, Monika Schmitter imaginatively reconstructs Odoni's house – essentially a 'portrait' of Odoni through his surroundings and possessions. Schmitter's detailed analysis of Odoni's life and portrait reveals how sixteenth-century individuals drew on contemporary ideas about spirituality, history, and science to forge their own theories about the power of things and the agency of object. She shows how Lotto's painting served as a meta-commentary on the practice of collecting and on the ability of material things to transform the self.

The Court Cities of Northern Italy
The Court Cities of Northern Italy

Author: Charles M. Rosenberg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2010-06-21

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 0521792487

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The Court Cities of Northern Italy examines painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture produced within the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

A Marvelous Solitude
A Marvelous Solitude

Author: Lina Bolzoni

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0674660234

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The sense of reading as an intimate act of self-discovery--and of communion between authors and book lovers--has a long history. Lina Bolzoni returns to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso, exploring how Renaissance humanists began to represent reading as a private encounter and a dialogue across barriers of time and space.

Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art
Transformations of Time and Temporality in Medieval and Renaissance Art

Author: Simona Cohen

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-03-10

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 9004267867

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Although studies of specific time concepts, expressed in Renaissance philosophy and literature, have not been lacking, few art-historians have endeavored to meet the challenge in the visual arts. This book presents a multifaceted picture of the dynamic concepts of time and temporality in medieval and Renaissance art, adopted in speculative, ecclesiastical, socio-political, propagandist, moralistic, and poetic contexts. It has been assumed that time was conceived in a different way by those living in the Renaissance as compared to their medieval predecessors. Changing perceptions of time, an increasingly secular approach, the sense of self-determination rooted in the practical use and control of time, and the perception of time as a threat to human existence and achievements are demonstrated through artistic media. Chapters dealing with time in classical and medieval philosophy and art are followed by studies that focus on innovative aspects of Renaissance iconography.

The Scholar in His Study
The Scholar in His Study

Author: Curator of Renaissance Collections Department of Medieval and Modern Europe Dora Thornton

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0300073895

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In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, many leading citizens constructed and furnished distinctive studies for themselves. The study was an individually designed room for private and social use - as an office, library, a family archive or treasury, as the nucleus of an art collection, or as a space for contemplation. This book is an account of the Renaissance Italian study and its contents. Illustrated with depictions of studies and the precious and unusual objects they contained, the book examines the significance of the study to its owner and visitors, its structure and location, and the prized possessions that might fill such a special room.