The Mapping Of Power In Renaissance Italy

This well-illustrated study investigates the symbolic dimensions of painted maps as products of ambitious early modern European courts.

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.

"Art, Power, and Patronage in Renaissance Italy has a freshness and breadth of approach that sets the art in its context, exploring why it was created and who commissioned the palaces, cathedrals, paintings, and sculptures. For, as the authors claim, Italian Renaissance artists were no more solitary geniuses than are most architects and commercial artists today." "This book covers not only the foremost artistic centers of Rome and Florence. Here too are Venice and the Veneto, Assisi, Siena, Milan, Pavia, Genoa, Padua, Mantua, Verona, Ferrara, Urbino, and Naples - each city revealing unique political and social structures that influenced its artistic styles." "The book includes genealogies of influential families, listings of popes and doges, plans of cities, a time chart, a bibliography, a glossary, and an index."--BOOK JACKET.

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This book focuses on how inexpensive maps, produced for the masses, accrued cultural value for everyday consumers in Renaissance Italy, who wanted to own and display maps in their homes as works of artnot for practical use, but for their cultural capital as commodities. Genevieve Carlton considers how and why maps took on this new identity, as coveted and revered material objects and symbols of status and power, which in turn elevated or reinforced the public personae of their owners. She reconstructs the market for maps by examining household inventories as well as the ways in which maps were displayed in the interiors of Renaissance homes. Her survey shows that consumers from every level of society owned and displayed maps and used them for personal gain, to reinforce a particular identity."

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived