The Italian Renaissance In The German Historical Imagination

Explores German engagement with the Italian Renaissance in the decades from German unification to the Weimar republic.

The great Italian city-states: Venice, Florence, Milan, and the others. The particular nature of their history and culture through the five centuries of their emergence, magnificent flowering, and twilight is brilliantly explored in terms of the internal shifts of economic, social, and political power—by violence, by manipulation, by the gradual pressures of changing circumstance. And here are the life and culture and works of imagination that were created as the merchants and guilds wrested dominion from the ancient nobility, from the first struggles against the Holy Roman Empire in the twelfth century through the rich cultural blaze and political exhaustion of the sixteenth. Lauro Martines, Professor of History at UCLA, has drawn together and chronicled in a single fluent narrative all the explosive energies, the social strife, the civil disorder, the political violence, the economic transformations, the crises of control, the religious fervor and corruption, and the spectacular achievements of art and intellect that made and defined the city-states.

Smuggling the Renaissance: The Illicit Export of Artworks Out of Italy, 1861-1909 offers an account of the dynamics and protagonists of the Post-Unification art spoliation crisis in Italy, focusing on the intertwinement of the art trade, scholarship and protection policies.

Offers a penetrating, contextual interpretation of German philosopher and social thinker Georg Simmel's ideas on modernity and modern civilisation.

Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany, edited by Efraim Podoksik, examines the ways in which the humanities were practised by German thinkers and scholars in the long nineteenth century and the relevance of those practices for the humanities today.

By analyzing the Arthaśāstra's early history, Mark McClish overturns prevailing beliefs that ancient India was governed by religion, not politics.

The Italian Renaissance has come to occupy an almost mythical place in the popular imagination. The outsized reputations of the best-known figures from the period—Michelangelo, Niccolo Machiavelli, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Pope Julius II, Isabella d'Este, and so many others—engender a kind of wonder. How could so many geniuses or exceptional characters be produced by one small territory near the extreme south of Europe at a moment when much of the rest of the continent still labored under the restrictions of the Middle Ages? How did so many of the driving principles behind Western civilization emerge during this period—and how were they defined and developed? And why is it that geniuses such as Leonardo, Raphael, Petrarch, Brunelleschi, Bramante, and Palladio all sustain their towering authority to this day? To answer these questions, Kenneth Bartlett delves into the lives and works of the artists, patrons, and intellectuals—the privileged, educated, influential elites—who created a rarefied world of power, money, and sophisticated talent in which individual curiosity and skill were prized above all else. The result is a dynamic, highly readable, copiously illustrated history of the Renaissance in Italy—and of the artists that gave birth to some of the most enduring ideas and artifacts of Western civilization.