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Between 1512 and 1570, Florence underwent dramatic political transformations. As citizens jockeyed for prominence, portraits became an essential means not only of recording a likeness but also of conveying a sitter’s character, social position, and cultural ambitions. This fascinating book explores the ways that painters (including Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Francesco Salviati), sculptors (such as Benvenuto Cellini), and artists in other media endowed their works with an erudite and self-consciously stylish character that made Florentine portraiture distinctive. The Medici family had ruled Florence without interruption between 1434 and 1494. Following their return to power in 15...
Reflecting on the relationship between artists and their audiences, this book examines how artists have presented themselves publicly through interviews and sought to establish a critical voice for themselves. Considering the interview as a form of cultural production, contributors explore the criteria for determining the artist interview as a distinct field of research in relation to other cultural fields. Structured in four parts, ‘History and Historiography’, ‘Subverting the Biographical Model’, ‘Interviews as Practice’ and ‘Materiality and Technology’, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses the fields of art history, fine art, oral history, curating, media studies and museum conservation. By theorising the artist interview as a form of cultural production and embracing it as a co-constructed critical practice, this volume aims to show and encourage an approach to art history which dismantles old hierarchies in favour of valuing dialogue and collaboration. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, oral history and historiography.
Combining cultural, religious, political, military, and economic topics in a grand narrative, The Crucible of Europe gives a vibrant history of Renaissance Italy and the crucial role it played in the emergence of the Western World.
This collection of essays explores hybridity in early modern art through two primary lenses: hybrid media and hybrid time. The varied approaches in the volume to theories of hybridity reflect the increased presence in art historical scholarship of interdisciplinary frameworks that extend art historical inquiry beyond the single time or material. The essays engage with what happens when an object is considered beyond the point of origin or as a legend of information, the implications of the juxtaposition of disparate media, how the meaning of an object alters over time, and what the conspicuous use of out-of-date styles means for the patron, artist, and/or viewer. Essays examine both canonical and lesser-known works produced by European artists in Italy, northern Europe, and colonial Peru, ca. 1400–1600. The book will be of interest to art historians, visual culture historians, and early modern historians.
An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources, of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance who, charged with a scandalous crime, renounced his faith and converted to Catholicism. In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy’s ruling elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone’s behavior, scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was s...
From the master of "micro-history" a reconstruction of two contrasting early-modern thinkers Nevertheless comprises essays on Machiavelli and on Pascal. The ambivalent connection between the two parts is embodied by the comma (,) in the subtitle: Machiavelli, Pascal. Is this comma a conjunction or a disjunction? In fact, both. Ginzburg approaches Machiavelli's work from the perspective of casuistry, or case-based ethical reasoning. For as Machiavelli indicated through his repeated use of the adverb nondimanco ("nevertheless"), there is an exception to every rule. Such a perspective may seem to echo the traditional image of Machiavelli as a cynical, "machiavellian" thinker. But a close analys...
A thought-provoking study of how knowledge of provenance was not transferred with enslaved people and goods from the Portuguese trading empire to Renaissance Italy In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of "goods" from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that this imperial "opening up" of the world transformed the way Europeans understood the global. In this book, K.J.P. Lowe challenges such an assumption, showing that Italians of this era cared more about the possession than the provenance of their newly acquired global goods. With three detailed case st...
An unprecedented art-historical account of practices of image ingestion from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century Eating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose so as to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated—taken into the body—as solids or liquids. How can we explain such behavior? Why take an image into one’s own bo...
The twenty years since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty have been marked by an integration paradox: although the scope of European Union (EU) activity has increased at an unprecedented pace, this increase has largely taken place in the absence of significant new transfers of power to supranational institutions along traditional lines. Conventional theories of European integration struggle to explain this paradox because they equate integration with the empowerment of specific supranational institutions under the traditional Community method. New governance scholars, meanwhile, have not filled this intellectual void, preferring instead to focus on specific deviations from the Community me...
A collection of essays that span many regions and cultures, by an award-winning historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam is becoming well known for the same sort of reasons that attach to Fernand Braudel and Carlo Ginzburg, as the proponent of a new kind of history - in his case, not longue durée or micro-history, but 'connected history': connected cross-culturally, and spanning regions, subjects and archives that are conventionally treated alone. Not a research paradigm, he insists, it is more of an oppositionswissenschaft, a way of trying to constantly break the moulds of historical objects. The essays collected here, some quite polemical - as in the lead text on the notion of India-as-civilization,...