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A brilliant postmodern critique of Renaissance subjectivity, Cultural Aesthetics explores the simultaneous formation and fragmentation of aristocratic "selfhood" in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Patricia Fumerton situates the self within its sumptuous array of "trivial" arts—including the court literatures of chivalric romance, sonnet, and masque and the arts of architecture, miniature painting, stage design, and cuisine. Her integration of historicist and aesthetic perspectives makes this a provocative contribution to the vigorous field of Renaissance cultural studies.
With the rise of naturalism in the art of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance there developed an extensive and diverse literature about art which helped to explain, justify and shape its new aims. In this book, David Summers provides an investigation of the philosophical and psychological notions invoked in this new theory and criticism. From a thorough examination of the sources, he shows how the medieval language of mental discourse derived from an understanding of classical thought.
The rediscovery of some of the most famous artworks of all time--statues lying underground beneath Rome--launched a thrilling archaeological adventure in the 15th century. In this remarkable book, Barkan probes the impact of these magnificent finds on Renaissance consciousness. 206 illustrations.
In this incisive study, Hellmut Wohl redefines style in the Italian Renaissance in light of contemporary testimony and close rereadings of seminal works. Through analysis of visual and textual evidence, he posits that Renaissance artists and their viewers conceived of art as decoration of surfaces. Offering a new approach to the issue of style, Wohl suggests that the scientific dimensions of early modern art works were less important to contemporaries than their function as ornamentation.
In this Volume, published in1998, Fifteen scholars reveal the ways of preserving, conceiving and creating beauty were as diverse as the cultural influenced at work at the time, deriving from antique, medieval and more recent literature and philosophy, and from contemporary notions of morality and courtly behaviour. Approaches include discussion of contemporary critical terms and how these determined writers’ appreciation of paintings, sculpture, architecture and costume; studies of the quest to create beauty in the work of artists such as Botticeli, Leonardo, Raphael, Parmigianino and Vasari; and the investigation of changes functioning of the eye and brain, or to technical innovations like those found in Venetian glass.
Focusing on what he calls 'the performative gaze', the author explores the artistic world of the Urbino painter Federico Barocci (1535-1612) in the context of Renaissance culture. Through analysis of Barocci's works, Gillgren also sheds new light on Renaissance aesthetic communication generally. The first part of the book discusses the poetics of Early Modern painting, based on contemporary theories of Reception Aesthetics, hermeneutics and phenomenology, but grounded in Renaissance culture itself through numerous examples from Early Modern painting. The author discusses works by such artists as Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Vel?uez and Poussin from the point of view of their spectator status...
Introduction -- Subjectivity and the antiquarian object: Petrarch among the ruins of Rome -- Here comes objectivity: Spenser's 1590 the Faerie Queene, book 3 -- Playing with things: reification in Marlowe's Hero and Leander -- Feeling like a fragment: Shakespeare's the Rape of Lucrece -- Coda: make me not object
Explores why some early modern writers put their masculine literary authority at risk by writing from the perspective of femininity and effeminacy. The text argues that such work promoted alternatives to the dominant patriarchal aesthetics by celebrating unruly female and effeminate male bodies.
The paradigmatic moment of the opposition between the verbal and the visual arts may be seen in Lessing's treatise on the Laocoön sculptural group, written in 1766; a moment that is identified within a historical framework of modern aesthetics that begins
This engrossing volume studies the poetics of evil in early modern English culture, reconciling the Renaissance belief that literature should uphold morality with the compelling and attractive representations of evil throughout the period’s literature. The chapters explore a variety of texts, including Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Richard III, broadside ballads, and sermons, culminating in a new reading of Paradise Lost and a novel understanding of the dynamic interaction between aesthetics and theology in shaping seventeenth century Protestant piety. Through these discussions, the book introduces the concept of “sinister aesthetics”: artistic conventions that can make representations of the villainous, monstrous, or hellish pleasurable.