Ambition Art And Image Making In An Early Quattrocento Court

This study provides new interpretations of the little-known but fascinating Palazzo Trinci frescoes, relating them for the first time both to their physical context and to their social, political, and cultural environment. Chapters show how a humanist agenda subverted the historical and mythical associations more frequently used to promote powerful families, to point the Trinci family in new directions. It also shows how the artists involved adapted established civic, religious, and chivalric imagery in support of these ideas. The book argues that the resulting decorations are highly unusual for the period, in their serious political and social purpose. Positioning the Trinci as bringers of peace, not war, the family is now associated with culture and education and presented as willing to encourage debate about the character of the virtuous ruler and the nature of good government. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history and Renaissance studies.

"Many famous artworks of the Italian Renaissance were made to celebrate love, marriage, and family. They were the pinnacles of a tradition, dating from early in the era, of commemorating betrothals, marriages, and the birth of children by commissioning extraordinary objects - maiolica, glassware, jewels, textiles, paintings - that were often also exchanged as gifts. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of artworks arising from Renaissance rituals of love and marriage and makes a major contribution to our understanding of Renaissance art in its broader cultural context. The impressive range of works gathered in these pages extends from birth trays painted in the early fifteenth century to large canvases on mythological themes that Titian painted in the mid-1500s. Each work of art would have been recognized by contemporary viewers for its prescribed function within the private, domestic domain."--BOOK JACKET.

Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo’s David, the pugnacious, passionate, and—crucially—important story of Renaissance manhood. Making the Renaissance Man explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt—all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.

Includes contributions on European knowledge of Arabic texts referring to music and the motets of Philippe de Vitry and the fourteenth-century renaissance

Verrocchio worked in an extraordinarily wide array of media and used unusual practices of making to express ideas.

Poetry and Identity in Quattrocento Naples approaches poems as acts of cultural identity and investigates how a group of authors used poetry to develop a poetic style, while also displaying their position toward the culture of others. Starting from an analysis of Giovanni Pontano’s Parthenopeus and De amore coniugali, followed by a discussion of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, Matteo Soranzo links the genesis and themes of these texts to the social, political and intellectual vicissitudes of Naples under the domination of Kings Alfonso and Ferrante. Delving further into Pontano’s literary and astrological production, Soranzo illustrates the consolidation and eventual dispersion of this author’s legacy by looking at the symbolic value attached to his masterpiece Urania, and at the genesis of Sannazaro’s De partu Virginis. Poetic works written in neo-Latin and the vernacular during the Aragonese domination, in this way, are examined not only as literary texts, but also as the building blocks of their authors’ careers.

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.