Praise And Blame In Renaissance Rome

From the middle of the fifteenth century a distinctively Roman Renaissance occurred. A shared outlook, a persistent set of intellectual concerns, similar cultural assumptions and a commitment to common ideological aims bound Roman humanists and artists to a uniquely Roman world, different from Florence, Venice, and other Italian and European centers.This book provides the first comprehensive portrait of the Roman Renaissance world. Charles Stinger probes the basic attitudes, the underlying values and the core convictions that Rome's intellectuals and artists experienced, lived for, and believed in from Pope Eugenius IV's reign to the Eternal City in 1443 to the sacking of 1527. He demonstrates that the Roman Renaissance was not the creation of one towering intellectual leader, or of a single identifiable group; rather, it embodied the aspirations of dozens of figures, active over an eighty-year period.Stinger illuminates the general aims and character of the Roman Renaissance. Remaining mindful of the economic, social, and political context--Rome's retarded economic growth, the papacy's increasing entanglement in Italian politics, papal preoccupation with the crusade against the Ottomans, and the effects of papal fiscal and administrative practices--Stinger nevertheless maintains that these developments recede in importance before the cultural history of the period. Only in the context of the ideological and cultural commitments of Roman humanists, artists, and architects can one fully understand the motivation for papal policies. Reality for Renaissance Romans was intricately bound up with the notion of Rome's mythic destiny.The Renaissance in Rome is cultural history at its best. It evokes the moods, myths, images, and symbols of the Eternal City, as they are manifested in the Liturgy, ceremony, festivals, oratory, art, and architecture of Renaissance Rome. Throughout, Stinger focuses on a persistent constellation of fundamental themes: the image of the city of Rome, the restoration of the Roman Church, the renewal of the Roman Empire, and the fullness of time. He describes and analyzes the content, meaning, origin, and implications of these central ideas of Roman Renaissance.This book will prove interesting to both Renaissance and Reformation scholars, as well as to general readers, who may have visited (or plan to visit) Rome and have become fascinated and affected by this extraordinary city. "There is no other book like it in any language," says Renaissance historian John O'Malley. "It presents a coherent view of Roman culture....collects and presents a vast amount of information never before housed under one roof. Anyone who teaches the Italian Renaissance," O'Malley stresses, "will have to know this book."

Vittoria Colonna was one of the best known and most highly celebrated female poets of the Italian Renaissance. Her work went through many editions during her lifetime, and she was widely considered by her contemporaries to be highly skilled in the art of constructing tightly controlled and beautifully modulated Petrarchan sonnets. In addition to her literary contacts, Colonna was also deeply involved with groups of reformers in Italy before the Council of Trent, an involvement which was to have a profound effect on her literary production. In this study, Abigail Brundin examines the manner in which Colonna's poetry came to fulfil, in a groundbreaking and unprecedented way, a reformed spiritual imperative, disseminating an evangelical message to a wide audience reading vernacular literature, and providing a model of spiritual verse which was to be adopted by later poets across the peninsula. She shows how, through careful management of an appropriate literary persona, Colonna's poetry was able to harness the power of print culture to extend its appeal to a much broader audience. In so doing this book manages to provide the vital link between the two central facets of Vittoria Colonna's production: her poetic evangelism, and her careful construction of a gendered identity within the literary culture of her age. The first full length study of Vittoria Colonna in English for a century, this book will be essential reading for scholars interested in issues of gender, literature, religious reform or the dynamics of cultural transmission in sixteenth-century Italy. It also provides an excellent background and contextualisation to anyone wishing to read Colonna's writings or to know more about her role as a mediator between the worlds of courtly Petrachism and religious reform.

Probes the basic attitudes, the underlying values and the core convictions that Rome's intellectuals and artists experienced, lived for, and believed in from Pope Eugenius IV's reign to the Eternal City in 1443 to the sacking of 1527.

A revisionist view of Renaissance architectural design as a dialectical process engaging word and image in the creation of Raphael's masterwork.

This collection of essays offers a thorough study of the patron-artist relationship through the lens of one of early modern Italy’s most powerful and influential historical families. Contributors present a longitudinal study of the della Rovere family’s ascent into Italian nobility. The della Rovere was a family of popes, cardinals, and powerful dukes who financed some of the world’s best-known and greatest artwork. The essays explore the issue of identity and its maintenance, of carving a permanent spot for a family name in a rapidly changing atmosphere. Although these studies depart from art patronage, they uncover how the popes, cardinals, dukes, and signore of the della Rovere family constituted their identity. Originally a nouveau-riche creation of papal nepotism, the della Rovere first populated the ranks of cardinals under the powerful popes Sixtus IV and Julius II. Within the framework of later papal relations, the family negotiated its position within the economy of Italian nobles.

In early modern Europe, music – particularly singing – was the arena where body and soul came together, embodied in the notion of musica humana. Kim uses this concept to examine the framework within which music and song were used to promote moral education and addresses Renaissance ideas of religion, education and music.

Groundbreaking case studies mapping the rhetoric inherent in acts of presentation and concealment Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together a distinguished group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasive form of rhetorical activity. Editor Lawrence J. Prelli notes in his introduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. The volume provides an integrated, comprehensive study of the processes of selecting what to reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Surveying major historical transformations in the relationship between rhetoric and display, this book also identifies the leading themes in relevant scholarship of the past three decades. Seventeen case studies canvass a representative and diverse range of displays—from body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in gambling casinos—and examine the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences. Collectively the contributors shed light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.