Magnificence And The Sublime In Medieval Aesthetics

These essays recover the lively discussions on the topics of 'magnificence' and 'the sublime' in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following, and apply them to the Middle Ages to draw exciting new conlcusions.

Is the Sublime Sustainable? introduces the key points of debate around the sublime while opening new avenues for future inquiry, especially through its comparative aesthetics approach. In it, you will discover how thinking on the sublime emerged historically and then engage with the recent critical scholarship on the topic, including from the fields of theology, philosophy, and literature. The critiques of the sublime are then expanded in dialogue with perspectives from Japanese aesthetics and art, shaping the argument that what is needed today is a sublime that enriches human lives by cultivating profound, participative relationships.

In Faces of Charisma: Image, Text, Object in Byzantium and the Medieval West, a multi-disciplinary group of scholars advances the theory that charisma may be a quality of art as well as of person.

Linking ecstasy with art and liberty, the book advances understanding of Renaissance literature as a field in the humanities today.

This volume explores the concept of magnificence as a social construction in seventeenth-century Europe.

During the long thirteenth century, the cities of northern Italy engendered a vital and distinctive civic culture despite constant political upheaval. In The Italian Piazza Transformed, Areli Marina examines the radical transformation of Parma’s urban center in this tumultuous period by reconstructing the city’s two most significant public spaces: its cathedral and communal squares. Treating the space of these piazzas as attentively as the buildings that shape their perimeters, she documents and discusses the evolution of each site from 1196, tracing their construction by opposing political factions within the city’s ruling elite. By the early fourteenth century, Parma’s patrons and builders had imposed strict geometric order on formerly inchoate sites, achieving a formal coherence attained by few other cities. Moreover, Marina establishes that the piazzas’ orderly contours, dramatic open spaces, and monumental buildings were more than grand backdrops to civic ritual. Parma’s squares were also agents in the production of the city-state’s mechanisms of control. They deployed brick, marble, and mortar according to both ancient Roman and contemporary courtly modes to create a physical embodiment of the modern, syncretic authority of the city’s leaders. By weaving together traditional formal and iconographic approaches with newer concepts of the symbolic, social, and political meanings of urban space, Marina reframes the complex relationship between late medieval Italy’s civic culture and the carefully crafted piazzas from which it emerged.

Contrary to what Kant believed about the Dutch (and their visual culture) as “being of an orderly and diligent position” and thus having no feeling for the sublime, this book argues that the sublime played an important role in seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture. By looking at different visualizations of exceptional heights, divine presence, political grandeur, extreme violence, and extraordinary artifacts, the authors demonstrate how viewers were confronted with the sublime, which evoked in them a combination of contrasting feelings of awe and fear, attraction and repulsion. In studying seventeenth-century Dutch visual culture through the lens of notions of the sublime, we can move beyond the traditional and still widespread views on Dutch art as the ultimate representation of everyday life and the expression of a prosperous society in terms of calmness, neatness, and order. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, architectural history, and cultural history.

Despite the fact that Gaspara Stampa (1523?-1554) has been recognized as one of the greatest and most creative poets and musicians of the Italian Renaissance, scholarship on her work has been surprisingly scarce and uncoordinated. In recent years, critical attention towards her work has increased, but until now there have been no anthologies dedicated solely to Stampa. Rethinking Gaspara Stampa in the Canon of Renaissance Poetry aims to set a foundation for further Stampa studies by accounting for her contributions to literature, music history, gender studies, the history of ideas, philosophy, and other areas of critical thought. This volume brings together an international group of interdisciplinary scholars who employ varied methodologies to explore multiple aspects of Stampa’s work in dialogue with the most recent scholarship in the field. The chapters emphasize the many ways in which Stampa’s poetry engages with multiple cultural movements of early modern Italy and Europe, including: Ficinian and Renaissance Neoplatonism, male-authored writing about women, Longinus’s theory of the sublime, the formation of writing communities, the rediscovery of Aristotle’s writings, and the reimagined relation between human and natural worlds. Taken as a whole, this volume presents a rich introduction to, and interdisciplinary investigation of, Gaspara Stampa’s impact on Renaissance culture.