The Renaissance Imagination

At what point did machines and technology begin to have an impact on the cultural consciousness and imagination of Europe? How was this reflected through the art and literature of the time? Was technology a sign of the fall of humanity from its original state of innocence or a sign of human progress and mastery over the natural world? In his characteristically lucid and captivating style, Jonathan Sawday investigates these questions and more by engaging with the poetry, philosophy, art, and engineering of the period to find the lost world of the machine in the pre-industrial culture of the European Renaissance. The aesthetic and intellectual dimension of these machines appealed to familiar figures such as Shakespeare, Francis Bacon, Montaigne, and Leonardo da Vinci as well as to a host of lesser known writers and artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This intellectual engagement with machines in the European Renaissance gave rise to new attitudes towards gender, work and labour, and even fostered the new sciences of artificial life and reason which would be pursued by figures such as Descartes, Hobbes, and Leibniz in the seventeenth century. Writers, philosophers and artists had mixed and often conflicting reactions to technology, reflecting a paradoxical attitude between modern progress and traditional values. Underpinning the enthusiastic creation of a machine-driven world, then, were stories of loss and catastrophe. These contradictory attitudes are part of the legacy of the European Renaissance, just as much as the plays of Shakespeare or the poetry of John Milton. And this historical legacy helps to explain many of our own attitudes towards the technology that surrounds us, sustains us, and sometimes perplexes us in the modern world.

"It is clear that Renaissance artists and their patrons were interested in Ravenna's buildings and their decorations, both before Vasari's negative pronouncements and after them. Contemporary European travelers and diarists have left descriptions of the city's heritage, by then in ruinous condition. What happens if we reinsert this corpus of Ravenna's treasures and their multiple imbrications into our histories of Renaissance art? How can our narratives change if we trace and study an almost forgotten, albeit rich and articulated series of intersections between Ravenna's splendors and ambitious works of art and architecture from early modern Italy? These instances of creative imitations and recreations can best be recovered if we focus on the Renaissance production and humanists' accounts of the city's treasures, that is, works in various media and size, to map out an extended dimension of early modern visual culture."--Page 4 of printed paper wrapper.

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

In Power and Imagination, a noted historian rethinks the evolution of the city-state in Renaissance Italy and recasts the conventional distinction between "society" and "culture." Martines traces the growth of commerce and the evolution of governments; he describes the attitudes, pleasures, and rituals of the ruling elite; and he seeks to understand the period's towering works of the imagination in literature, painting, city planning, and philosophy-not simply as the creations of individual artists, but as the forman expression of the ambitions and egos of those in power.

This book focuses on the work of the great sixteenth-century traveller and map-maker Andre Thevat and explores the interrelations between representation and power in the age of discovery.