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The extraordinary cultural Renaissance in the northern Italian courts of the late 15th and early 16th centuries is the subject of this volume. It starts with Baldessar Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528) which encapsulates this sense of renewal: his experiences at court and their subsequent rewriting form the backbone of the work. The author then addresses questions of biography, gender, genre, and the varied roles of the courtier, expanding the perspective of Castiglione's text to include the lives and writings of other courtiers and patrons. What was it like to be a courtier? What were the problems associated with such a lifestyle? The importance of women in court circles is also highlighted in studies of one of the most notable of female patrons Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) and of the theoretical developments in writing about gender, stimulated by such women. Stephen Kolsky's analysis of both well-known and comparatively obscure texts brings out the diversity of practices that constituted court society and their centrality to our understanding of the Renaissance.
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A cultural and social history of art collecting, art history, and the art market In The Rare Art Traditions, Joseph Alsop offers a wide-ranging cultural and social history of art collecting, art history, and the art market. He argues that art collecting is the basic element in a remarkably complex and historically rare behavioral system, which includes the historical study of art, the market for buying and selling art, museums, forgery, and the astonishing prices commanded by some works of art. The Rare Art Traditions tells the story of three important traditions of art collecting: the classical tradition that began in Greece, the Chinese tradition, and the Western tradition. The result is a major original contribution to art history.
The focus of this study is court literature in early sixteenth-century England and Scotland. Author Jon Robinson examines courtly poetry and drama in the context of a complex system of entertainment, education, self-fashioning, dissimulation, propaganda and patronage. He places selected works under close critical scrutiny to explore the symbiotic relationship that existed between court literature and important socio-political, economic and national contexts of the period 1500 to 1540.
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From the primates to the ancient world all the way to Hollywood, "You're Too Kind" presents a primer on flattery--where it originated, its development through the ages, and its myriad uses in contemporary culture.