Download or read book Venice s Most Loyal City written by Stephen D. Bowd and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-15 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the second decade of the fifteenth century Venice had established an empire in Italy extending from its lagoon base to the lakes, mountains, and valleys of the northwestern part of the peninsula. The wealthiest and most populous part of this empire was the city of Brescia which, together with its surrounding territory, lay in a key frontier zone between the politically powerful Milanese and the economically important Germans. Venetian governance there involved political compromise and some sensitivity to local concerns, and Brescians forged their distinctive civic identity alongside a strong Venetian cultural presence. Based on archival, artistic, and architectural evidence, Stephen Bowd presents an innovative microhistory of a fascinating, yet historically neglected city. He shows how Brescian loyalty to Venice was repeatedly tested by a succession of disasters: assault by Milanese forces, economic downturn, demographic collapse, and occupation by French and Spanish armies intent on dismembering the Venetian empire. In spite of all these troubles the city experienced a cultural revival and a dramatic political transformation under Venetian rule, which Bowd describes and uses to illuminate the process of state formation in one of the most powerful regions of Renaissance Italy.
Download or read book Venice s Most Loyal City written by Stephen D. Bowd and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-11 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This innovative microhistory of a fascinating yet neglected city shows how its loyalty to Venice was tested by military attack, economic downturn, and demographic collapse. Despite these trials, Brescia experienced cultural revival and political transformation, which Bowd uses to explain state formation in a powerful region of Renaissance Italy.
Download or read book The Endless Periphery written by Stephen J. Campbell and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance are usually associated with Italy’s historical seats of power, some of the era’s most characteristic works are to be found in places other than Florence, Rome, and Venice. They are the product of the diversity of regions and cultures that makes up the country. In Endless Periphery, Stephen J. Campbell examines a range of iconic works in order to unlock a rich series of local references in Renaissance art that include regional rulers, patron saints, and miracles, demonstrating, for example, that the works of Titian spoke to beholders differently in Naples, Brescia, or Milan than in his native Venice. More than a series of regional microhistories, Endless Periphery tracks the geographic mobility of Italian Renaissance art and artists, revealing a series of exchanges between artists and their patrons, as well as the power dynamics that fueled these exchanges. A counter history of one of the greatest epochs of art production, this richly illustrated book will bring new insight to our understanding of classic works of Italian art.
Download or read book Machiavelli written by Alexander Lee and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A wonderfully assured and utterly riveting biography that captures not only the much-maligned Machiavelli, but also the spirit of his time and place. A monumental achievement.' – Jessie Childs, author of God's Traitors. ‘A notorious fiend’, ‘generally odious’, ‘he seems hideous, and so he is.’ Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? Might he not have been an infinitely more sympathetic figure, prone to political missteps, professional failures and personal dramas? Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father’s penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher’s hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile. In doing so, Lee uncovers hitherto unobserved connections between Machiavelli’s life and thought. He also reveals the world through which Machiavelli moved: from the great halls of Renaissance Florence to the court of the Borgia pope, Alexander VI, from the dungeons of the Stinche prison to the Rucellai gardens, where he would begin work on some of his last great works. As much a portrait of an age as of a uniquely engaging man, Lee’s gripping and definitive biography takes the reader into Machiavelli’s world – and his work – more completely than ever before.
Download or read book Venice as the Polity of Mercy written by Richard MacKenney and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study re-examines Venice’s political economy from the viewpoint of its ordinary people or popolani who, despite the commonly held view that they were excluded from political life by the nobility or nobili, actually organized and ran for themselves hundreds of corporations within the city-state. Mercy was central to this popolani’s Christian values and those who offered mercy to their fellow men and women in temporary hardship were investing in the expectation of reciprocity in their own time of need. Beginning by tracing a formative linking of religion, economy, and polity from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, Venice as the Polity of Mercy then chronicles the collapse of this triad during the struggles between church and state in the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, followed by a revitalizing reconnection of economy and polity within a different religious climate after the plague of 1630. As such, Richard Mackenney’s book offers up a revitalized image of Renaissance Venetian society as dynamic rather than static, as well as a new understanding of the city’s significance through a reconfiguration of its history and artwork.
Download or read book Renaissance Mass Murder written by Stephen D. Bowd and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence - histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects - which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis, Renaissance Mass Murder reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of battle. This volume also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.
Download or read book Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome written by Piers Baker-Bates and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sebastiano del Piombo (c.1485-1547) was a close associate and rival of the central artistic figures of the High Renaissance, notably Michelangelo and Raphael. After the death of Raphael and the departure of Michelangelo from Rome, Sebastiano became the dominant artistic personality in the city. Despite being one of most significant artistic figures of the period, he remains the last artist of major importance in the western canon about whom no recent work has been published in English. In this study, Piers Baker-Bates approaches Sebastiano?s career through analysis of the patrons he attracted following his arrival at Rome. The first half of the book concentrates on Sebastiano?s network of patrons, predominantly Italian, who had strong factional ties to the Imperial camp; the second half discusses Sebastiano?s relationship with his principal Spanish patrons. Sebastiano is a leading example of a transcultural artist in the sixteenth century and his relationship with Spain was fundamental to the development of his careerThe author investigates the domination of Sebastiano?s career by patrons who had geographically different origins, but who were all were members of a wider network of Imperial loyalties. Thus Baker-Bates removes Sebastiano from the shadow of his contemporaries, bringing him to life for the reader as an artistic personality in his own right. Baker-Bates? characterization of the Rome in which Sebastiano made his career differs from previous scholarly accounts, and he describes how Sebastiano was ideally suited to flourish in the environment he depicts.Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome thus re-appraises not only Sebastiano?s place in the canon of Renaissance art but, using him as a lens, also the cultural worlds of Early Modern Italy and Spain in which he operated.
Download or read book Italy and the Islamic World written by Ali Humayun Akhtar and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-31 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy and the Islamic World tells the story of how Italian cities have been centres of international exchange for centuries, linking Europe with the most storied marketplaces of the Middle East and North Africa. From the Ancient Roman period and the Renaissance to the rise of the Italian Republic, Italy has been a global crossroads for more than two millennia. In Ali Humayun Akhtar's new picture of European history, Italy's debates about trade with its southern neighbours evoke an earlier era of encounters - one that sheds light on where the EU is heading today.
Download or read book Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy written by Luca Zenobi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-02 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Space matters. It situates our history, structures our daily lives, and often determines what we can and cannot do. Borders are central to this reality. Tools and symbols of separation, power, and identity, they bring people together as much as they set them apart. This book explores how borders were understood, made, and encountered at the end of the Middle Ages, and what they can tell us about the spatial fabric of society at the threshold of modernity. It shows that pre-modern borders were nothing like the fuzzy lines they are typically made out to be, that border-making was rarely a top-down process and should instead be studied as an interactive endeavour, and that space was shaped by communities far more than states in this period. At its core, Borders and the Politics of Space in Late Medieval Italy is the account of a frontier which would mark the Italian peninsula for centuries, that between the territories of the Duchy of Milan and those of the Republic of Venice. But it is also a study of how rulers and subjects alike defined spaces they could call their own. Luca Zenobi combines methods from several disciplines and applies them to a range of evidence from twenty different libraries and archives, including theoretical treatises and pragmatic records, written chronicles and cartographic visualisations, private documents and official correspondence. The cast of characters is equally eclectic, featuring influential thinkers and pragmatic statesmen, zealous factions and clumsy bureaucrats, hopeless beggars and ambitious princes. On the border, their stories intersect and reveal their part in a shared history.
Download or read book The Early History of Venice written by Francis Cotterell Hodgson and published by London : G. Allen. This book was released on 1901 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book American Notes and Queries written by William Shepard Walsh and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Italian Wars 1494 1559 written by and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Italian Wars of 1494-1559 had a major impact on the whole of Renaissance Europe. In this important text, Michael Mallett and Christine Shaw place the conflict within the political and economic context of the wars. Emphasising the gap between aims and strategies of the political masters and what their commanders and troops could actually accomplish on the ground, they analyse developments in military tactics and the tactical use of firearms and examine how Italians of all sectors of society reacted to the wars and the inevitable political and social change that they brought about. The history of Renaissance Italy is currently being radically rethought by historians. This book is a major contribution to this re-evaluation, and will be essential reading for all students of Renaissance and military history.
Download or read book Revolutions of 1848 written by Priscilla Smith Robertson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This social history of Europe during 1848 selects the most crucial centers of revolt and shows by a vivid reconstruction of events what revolution meant to the average citizen and how fateful a part he had in it. A wealth of material from contemporary sources, much of which is unavailable in English, is woven into a superb narrative which tells the story of how Frenchmen lived through the first real working-class revolt, how the students of Vienna took over the city government, how Croats and Slovenes were roused in their first nationalistic struggle, how Mazzini set up his ideal republic Rome.
Download or read book The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities written by Patrick Lantschner and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2015-03-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume traces the logic of urban political conflict in late medieval Europe's most heavily urbanized regions, Italy and the Southern Low Countries. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are often associated with the increasing consolidation of states, but at the same time they also saw high levels of political conflict and revolt in cities that themselves were a lasting heritage of this period. In often radically different ways, conflict constituted a crucial part of political life in the six cities studied for this book: Bologna, Florence, and Verona, as well as Liège, Lille, and Tournai. The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities argues that such conflicts, rather than subverting ordinary political life, were essential features of the political systems that developed in cities. Conflicts were embedded in a polycentric political order characterized by multiple political units and bases of organization, ranging from guilds to external agencies. In this multi-faceted and shifting context, late medieval city dwellers developed particular strategies of legitimating conflict, diverse modes of behaviour, and various forms of association through which conflict could be addressed. At the same time, different configurations of these political units gave rise to specific systems of conflict which varied from city to city. Across all these cities, conflict lay at the basis of a distinct form of political organization-and represents the nodal point around which this political and social history of cities is written.
Download or read book Street Life in Renaissance Italy written by Fabrizio Nevola and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical new perspective on the dynamics of urban life in Renaissance Italy The cities of Renaissance Italy comprised a network of forces shaping both the urban landscape and those who inhabited it. In this illuminating study, those complex relations are laid bare and explored through the lens of contemporary urban theory, providing new insights into the various urban centers of Italy’s transition toward modernity. The book underscores how the design and structure of public space during this transformative period were intended to exercise a certain measure of authority over its citizens, citing the impact of architecture and street layout on everyday social practices. The ensuing chapters demonstrate how the character of public space became increasingly determined by the habits of its residents, for whom the streets served as the backdrop of their daily activities. Highlighting major hubs such as Rome, Florence, and Bologna, as well as other lesser-known settings, Street Life in Renaissance Italy offers a new look at this remarkable era.
Download or read book Milan Undone written by John Gagné and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of how one of the Renaissance’s preeminent cities lost its independence in the Italian Wars. In 1499, the duchy of Milan had known independence for one hundred years. But the turn of the sixteenth century saw the city battered by the Italian Wars. As the major powers of Europe battled for supremacy, Milan, viewed by contemporaries as the “key to Italy,” found itself wracked by a tug-of-war between French claimants and its ruling Sforza family. In just thirty years, the city endured nine changes of government before falling under three centuries of Habsburg dominion. John Gagné offers a new history of Milan’s demise as a sovereign state. His focus is not on the successive wars themselves but on the social disruption that resulted. Amid the political whiplash, the structures of not only government but also daily life broke down. The very meanings of time, space, and dynasty—and their importance to political authority—were rewritten. While the feudal relationships that formed the basis of property rights and the rule of law were shattered, refugees spread across the region. Exiles plotted to claw back what they had lost. Milan Undone is a rich and detailed story of harrowing events, but it is more than that. Gagné asks us to rethink the political legacy of the Renaissance: the cradle of the modern nation-state was also the deathbed of one of its most sophisticated precursors. In its wake came a kind of reversion—not self-rule but chaos and empire.
Download or read book Leonardo and the Last Supper written by Ross King and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than five centuries The Last Supper has been an artistic, religious and cultural icon. The art historian Kenneth Clark called it 'the keystone of European art', and for a century after its creation it was regarded as nothing less than a miraculous image. And yet there is a very human story behind this artistic 'miracle'. Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper is both a 'biography' of one of the most famous works of art ever painted and a record of Leonardo da Vinci's last five years in Milan.
