Download or read book The Cultural Politics of Duke Cosimo I de Medici written by Konrad Eisenbichler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he suddenly came to power in Italy in 1537, the young Duke Cosimo I de' Medici amazed friends and foes alike with his ability to extricate himself from mortal danger, affirm his authority and revive a dying state. He doubled the size of his duchy and established a dynasty that ruled unchallenged for 200 years. This volume is the first book-length study in any language to approach the figure of Duke Cosimo I from the point of view of his cultural agenda. The contributors examine the political, economic, cultural and linguistic strategies that made Cosimo a successful leader, and in the process illuminate the cultural world of mid-sixteenth-century Tuscany.
Download or read book A Companion to Cosimo I de Medici written by Alessio Assonitis and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.
Download or read book The Medicean Succession written by Gregory Murry and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-10 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosimo dei Medici stabilized ducal finances, secured his borders, doubled his territory, attracted scholars and artists to his court, academy, and universities, and dissipated fractious Florentine politics. These triumphs were far from a foregone conclusion, as Gregory Murry shows in this study of how Cosimo crafted his image as a sacral monarch.
Download or read book The Medici Portraits and Politics 1512 1570 written by Keith Christiansen and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 1512, Cosimo I de’ Medici, who became the second Duke of Florence in 1537, demonstrated a particularly shrewd ability to wield culture as a political tool in order to transform Florence into a dynastic duchy and give Florentine art the central position it has held ever since. Featuring more than ninety remarkable paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and medals, this volume is written by a team of leading international authors and presents a sweeping, penetrating exploration of a crucial and vibrant period in Italian art.
Download or read book The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo written by Konrad Eisenbichler and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eleonora di Toledo was a powerful and influential woman who, over the course of nearly a quarter century (1539-62), contributed profoundly to the cultural flowering of ducal Florence. Her patronage of some of the leading artists of the time, her support of newly arrived Jesuit preachers, her involvement in charitable activities, her unfailing devotion to her husband and his policies, not to mention her successful farming and business ventures are only some of the areas where her influence was unambiguously exercised and felt. She also provided the House of Medici with a full stable of children to re-invigorate the failing family line, ensure male succession even in the face of unexpected calamities, and provide enough females to establish marriage connections with a variety of noble and ruling houses in Italy. In spite of all these contributions, Eleonora has attracted little attention from scholars. This apparent disinterest may be a factor of Eleonora's personal style, or of the bad press that, as a Spanish noblewoman, she quickly received from her Florentine subjects, or of modern antipathy for some of the basic characteristics of ducal Florence. An examination of her impact on Tuscany is long overdue. In fact, a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the duchess can shed a more profound light not only on her as a person, or on her impact on Tuscan culture in the sixteenth century, but also on the contribution of female consorts to the vitality of a successful early-modern state. The essays collected here bring together a variety of scholars working in various disciplines. While many of the articles take their cue from art history (a natural reflection of the innovative research recent art historians have carried out on the duchess), they also reach out towards other disciplines - political history, literature, spectacle, and religion to mention just a few. In so doing, they expand our understanding of Eleonora's place in her society and reveal a very complex,
Download or read book The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music written by Brian E. Power and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experience of music performance is always far more than the sum of its sounds, and evidence for playing and singing techniques is not only inscribed in music notation but can also be found in many other types of documents and materials. This volume of essays presents a cross-section of new research on performance issues in medieval and renaissance music. The subject is approached from a broad perspective, drawing on complementary disciplines such as dance history, art history, music iconography and performance traditions from beyond western Europe. In doing so, the volume continues some of the many lines of enquiry pursued by its dedicatee, Timothy J. McGee, over a lifetime of scholarship devoted to practical questions of playing and singing early music.
Download or read book Forms of Faith in Sixteenth century Italy written by Abigail Brundin and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2009 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This interdisciplinary volume gathers essays by leading international scholars in the fields of Italian Renaissance literature, music, history and history of art to address the fertile question of the relationship between religious change and shifting cultural forms in sixteenth-century Italy. Each contribution examines the effects of the profound religious changes that took place in the period on cultural forms, seeking to establish an 'aesthetics of reform' for the sixteenth century.
Download or read book Cosimo I De Medici as Collector written by Andrea Gáldy and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This study increases the sum of knowledge about a major Italian collection of antiquities of the sixteenth century. It also shows that Cosimo's antiquities were objects of study to Cinquecento artists and scholars. As such the collection exercised a significant influence on the history and development of archaeology in early modern Florence."--Introduction, page xxv.
Download or read book Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power 1532 1621 written by Kathleen Comerford and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-11-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesuit Foundations and Medici Power, 1532–1621 focuses on the cooperation between two new foundations, the last Medici state and the Society of Jesus, spanning nearly a century, concentrating on the Jesuit foundations in Florence, Siena, and Montepulciano. As the Medici built and centralized their power in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, they sought to control both the civic and religious behavior of their citizens. They found partners in the Jesuits, whose educational program helped establish social order and maintain religious orthodoxy. Via a detailed investigation of both minor and major Italian Jesuit colleges, and of multiple Medici rulers, Kathleen M. Comerford provides insight into church/state cooperation in an age in which both institutions underwent significant changes.
Download or read book Culture and Power written by Jonathan Davies and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally grand ducal Tuscany and its cultural politics have been viewed through the lens of absolutism. Based on a wide range of newly found sources and building on recent revisionist scholarship, this study uses the universities of Pisa and Siena to expose the contradictions and the tensions which characterised the grand duchy. Setting the universities against the diplomatic, military, administrative, economic, ecclesiastical, and cultural development of the grand duchy, it shows how innovation mixed with tradition and local privileges were not only upheld but extended significantly.
Download or read book Cosimo I De Medici and His Self Representation in Florentine Art and Culture written by Hendrik Thijs van Veen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-21 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study, Henk Th. van Veen reassesses how Cosimo de' Medici represented himself in images during the course of his rule. The text examines not only art and architecture, but also literature, historiography, religion, and festive culture.
Download or read book A Short History of Florence and the Florentine Republic written by Brian Jeffrey Maxson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Cultural Role of Architecture written by Paul Emmons and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the ambiguities of how we define the word ‘culture’ in our global society, this book identifies its imprint on architectural ideas. It examines the historical role of the cultural in architectural production and expression, looking at meaning and communication, tracing the formations of cultural identities. Chapters written by international academics in history, theory and philosophy of architecture, examine how different modes of representation throughout history have drawn profound meanings from cultural practices and beliefs. These are as diverse as the designs they inspire and include religious, mythic, poetic, political, and philosophical references.
Download or read book Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy written by DianaBullen Presciutti and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The social problem of infant abandonment captured the public?s imagination in Italy during the fifteenth century, a critical period of innovation and development in charitable discourses. As charity toward foundlings became a political priority, the patrons and supporters of foundling hospitals turned to visual culture to help them make their charitable work understandable to a wide audience. Focusing on four institutions in central Italy that possess significant surviving visual and archival material, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy examines the discursive processes through which foundling care was identified, conceptualized, and promoted. The first book to consider the visual culture of foundling hospitals in Renaissance Italy, this study looks beyond the textual evidence to demonstrate that the institutional identities of foundling hospitals were articulated by means of a wide variety of visual forms, including book illumination, altarpieces, fresco cycles, institutional insignia, processional standards, prints, and reliquaries. The author draws on fields as diverse as art history, childhood studies, the history of charity, Renaissance studies, gender studies, sociology, and the history of religion to elucidate the pivotal role played by visual culture in framing and promoting the charitable succor of foundlings.
Download or read book The Italian Academies 1525 1700 written by Jane E. Everson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-14 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual societies known as Academies played a vital role in the development of culture, and scholarly debate throughout Italy between 1525-1700. They were fundamental in establishing the intellectual networks later defined as the ‘République des Lettres’, and in the dissemination of ideas in early modern Europe, through print, manuscript, oral debate and performance. This volume surveys the social and cultural role of Academies, challenging received ideas and incorporating recent archival findings on individuals, networks and texts. Ranging over Academies in both major and smaller or peripheral centres, these collected studies explore the interrelationships of Academies with other cultural forums. Individual essays examine the fluid nature of academies and their changing relationships to the political authorities; their role in the promotion of literature, the visual arts and theatre; and the diverse membership recorded for many academies, which included scientists, writers, printers, artists, political and religious thinkers, and, unusually, a number of talented women. Contributions by established international scholars together with studies by younger scholars active in this developing field of research map out new perspectives on the dynamic place of the Academies in early modern Italy. The publication results from the research collaboration ‘The Italian Academies 1525-1700: the first intellectual networks of early modern Europe’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is edited by the senior investigators.
Download or read book Remembering Masculinity in Early Modern Florence written by Allison Mary Levy and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book nuances our understanding of commemorative portraiture in early modern Florence. The author argues that male and female portraiture, complexly generated within a discourse of male anxiety and pre-mortuary mourning, could pictorially console the subject against his own potentially unmourned death. Merging early modern visual culture and critical theories of the body, this book raises new questions about Renaissance portraiture and re-configures our understanding of masculinity and mourning.
Download or read book The Medici Women written by Natalie R. Tomas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Medici Women is a study of the women of the famous Medici family of republican Florence in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Natalie Tomas here examines critically the changing contribution of the women in the Medici family to the eventual success of the Medici regime and their exercise of power within it; and contributes to our historical understanding of how women were able to wield power in late medieval and early modern Italy and Europe. Tomas takes a feminist approach that examines the experience of the Medici women within a critical framework of gender analysis, rather than biography. Keeping the historiography to a minimum and explaining all unfamiliar Italian terms, Tomas makes her narrative clear and accessible to non-specialists; thus The Medici Women appeals to scholars of women's studies across disciplines and geographical boundaries.
