Venus And The Arts Of Love In Renaissance Florence

In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's divine attributes - her celestial splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. Venus's attributes, including her starlight, jewelry, and shells, enhance her seductive powers, attracting attention and arousing desire through the calculated manipulation of materials in ways that are similar to the sensory impact of the visual arts. Showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art, Compton examines the materials and techniques that artists used to fulfill and enhance the goddess's iconographic demands. Her book offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.

"Many famous artworks of the Italian Renaissance were made to celebrate love, marriage, and family. They were the pinnacles of a tradition, dating from early in the era, of commemorating betrothals, marriages, and the birth of children by commissioning extraordinary objects - maiolica, glassware, jewels, textiles, paintings - that were often also exchanged as gifts. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of artworks arising from Renaissance rituals of love and marriage and makes a major contribution to our understanding of Renaissance art in its broader cultural context. The impressive range of works gathered in these pages extends from birth trays painted in the early fifteenth century to large canvases on mythological themes that Titian painted in the mid-1500s. Each work of art would have been recognized by contemporary viewers for its prescribed function within the private, domestic domain."--BOOK JACKET.

Alessandra is not quite fifteen when her prosperous merchant father brings a young painter back with him from Holland to adorn the walls of the new family chapel. She is fascinated by his talents and envious of his abilities and opportunities to paint to the glory of God. Soon her love of art and her lively independence are luring her into closer involvement with all sorts of taboo areas of life. On excursions into the streets of night-time Florence she observes a terrible evil stalking the city and witnesses the rise of the fiery young priest, Savanarola, who has set out to rid the city of vice, richness, even art itself. Alessandra must make crucial decisions about the shape of her adult life, as Florence itself must choose between the old ways of the luxury-loving Medicis and the asceticism of Savanorola. And through it all, there is the painter, whose love will change everything.

"The Garden of Love is an important subject in secular art of the fifteenth century, both in Italy and in northern Europe. The chief Italian examples were all painted in Tuscany in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. They depict a landscape consisting of a flowery meadow, a grove, and a great marble fountain, where lovers gather to sing, dance, and make love. Allied to the Garden of Love are variations on a horticultural theme--gardens for lovers celebrated in history, fountains of love, hunts set in a forest that conclude alongside a fountain. Sometimes, too, the Garden of Love becomes the setting for narratives and romances. In all these instances the Garden is more than a pleasing tapestry like backdrop: it serves as a visible symbol of the nature of love itself. This book illustrated with 97 excellent photographs, attempts to do two things ; to chart the history of the Garden of Love, and explain the significance it once had." -- Book jacket.

The innovative city culture of Florence was the crucible within which Renaissance ideas first caught fire. With its soaring cathedral dome and its classically-inspired palaces and piazzas, it is perhaps the finest single expression of a society that is still at its heart an urban one. For, as Brian Jeffrey Maxson reveals, it is above all the city-state – the walled commune which became the chief driver of European commerce, culture, banking and art – that is medieval Italy's enduring legacy to the present. Charting the transition of Florence from an obscure Guelph republic to a regional superpower in which the glittering court of Lorenzo the Magnificent became the pride and envy of the continent, the author authoritatively discusses a city that looked to the past for ideas even as it articulated a novel creativity. Uncovering passionate dispute and intrigue, Maxson sheds fresh light too on seminal events like the fiery end of oratorical firebrand Savonarola and Giuliano de' Medici's brutal murder by the rival Pazzi family. This book shows why Florence, harbinger and heartland of the Renaissance, is and has always been unique.

"Widely acknowledged as a prime manifestation of Florentine humanist culture under Lorenzo de' Medici, Botticelli's Primavera cannot be fully interpreted without considering the poetics that expressed the Laurentian cultural program and, in turn, the Renaissance itself. In this analysis Charles Dempsey examines the poetry written by Lorenzo and his literary clients in order to give definition to the cultural context in which the Primavera was created. A celebration of Love, the painting is shown to incorporate both public and private imaginative realms while embracing the ideal and the actual experiences of the present. The Primavera, depicting Venus as the spirit of Love and springtime, is simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, rooted in International-Style vernacular conventions and evincing a nascent classical vocabulary. After describing the profoundly humanist classical foundation to the invention of the Primavera, Dempsey identifies its genre with rustic song, then relates the painting to the conventions of vernacular love poetry. A close reading of the painting in relation to works by Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, and other poets working to elevate vernacular expression by infusing native Tuscan with Latin forms suggests how the idea of Love portrayed by Botticelli in the figure of Venus incorporates not only the ancient springtime renovatio mundi but also the actual cultural renovation-- the Renaissance-- imagined and sponsored by Lorenzo the Magnificent"--Publisher's description.

This book examines a Renaissance Florentine family's art patronage, even for women, inspired by literature, music, love, loss, and religion.

This is the first book which gives a general overview of women as subject-matter in Italian Renaissance painting. It presents a view of the interaction between artist and patron, and also of the function of these paintings in Italian society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Using letters, poems, and treatises, it examines through the eyes of the contemporary viewer the way women were represented in paintings.