The study of Florentine artistic patronage has attracted several approaches over the last three decades, including the exploration of patron-­‐client structures and how the use of art in private and public spheres contributed to shape families’s identity. Building on past research, this work focuses on the art patronage of a prominent, yet overlooked, family, the Vespucci, to whom Amerigo, the navigator who reached the coasts of America in the late fifteenth century, belonged. Although the family’s importance was achieved through a synergy of political, religious and intellectual forces, attention is given to the Vespucci’s engagement with the arts and their key contribution to Florence’s humanistic culture between the years 1470-­1500. The family’s houses and private chapels are analysed, and three artists, Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Piero di Cosimo, considered. Combining history, art history, and archival resources, new evidence and interpretations are advanced to ascribe selected artworks -­ controversially believed to be Vespucci commissions - to the private patronage of this Florentine family. Examining the Vespucci’s artistic taste in private and public settings, whilst attempting a reconstruction of partially lost painted commissions, deepens comprehension on the role that domestic and social life played in the creation of art and culture; the family’s force in shaping spaces; and the practice of buying, commissioning, and displaying as a means of signifying wealth, increasing status, and establishing identity. Power seekers, the Vespucci entered the Medici intellectual circles through which they created chains of friendship with prominent families inside and outside of Florence. As questions about shared artistic tastes and the paradigmatic role of the Medici artistic patronage have been the focus of scholarly enquiry, this study of the Vespucci provides an insight into the family’s spreading of new ideas and its interaction with the development of the visual arts. Investigation into the Vespucci’s breadth of interests helps to reframe the current knowledge of Florentine cultural exchanges and to contextualise the family’s influence beyond the geographical discoveries it has been exclusively associated with.

The thirteen essays in this volume demonstrate the multiplicity of connections between learning and politics in Renaissance Italy. Some engage explicitly with Hans Baron's "civic humanism" thesis illustrating its continuing viability, but also stretching its application to prove the limitations of its original expression. Others move beyond Baron's thesis to examine the actual practice of various individuals and groups engaged in both political and learned activities in a variety of diverse settings. The collective impression of all the contributions is that of a complex, ever-shifting mosaic of learned enterprises in which the well-examined civic paradigm emerges as just one of several modes that explain the interaction between learning and politics in Italy between 1300 and 1650. The model that emerges rejects any single category of explanation in favour of one that emphasizes variety and multiplicity. It suggests that learning was indispensible to all politics in Renaissance Italy and that, in fact, at its heart the Renaissance was a political event as much as a cultural movement. "In moving past the constraints imposed by the so-called Baron thesis, the essays in this volume allow for an innovative focus on Renaissance humanism as a set of 'practices' determined more by social structures and networks than by specific historical events. In so doing, a number of these studies open up new areas of scholarly exploration." - Scott Blanchard, Misericordia University / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1149/thumbnail.jpg

Book Summary:Diplomacy has never been a politically neutral field of historical research, even when it was confined to merely reconstructing the context of wars and revolutions. Since the nineteenth century, Renaissance Italy has been at the forefront of scholarship on diplomacy; today, with increasing awareness of the long history of the subject as well as a broader spectrum of case studies, the study of Italian diplomacy has become sophisticated and highly articulated, offering scholars many new directions for further exploration. During the period c. 1350–c. 1520 covered by the present volume, diplomatic sources became extremely rich and abundant. This sourcebook presents a selection of primary materials, both published and unpublished, which are mostly unavailable to English readers: a broad range of diplomatic sources, thematically organized, are introduced, translated, and annotated by an international team of leading scholars of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of this volume is to illustrate the richness of diplomatic documents both for the study of diplomacy itself as well as for other areas of historical investigation, such as gender and sexuality, crime and justice, art and leisure, and medicine.

No description available.

Around the turn of the year 1431 the city of Lucca charged their new chancellor Cristoforo Turrettini to write a Latin letter to the Florentines decrying their recent bellicose actions against their lands. Turrettini wrote, not to the leading Florentine governmental bodies, but rather to their head secretary, Leonardo Bruni. Bruni responded on January 8 with a seemingly private Latin letter that he later placed into his humanist letter book. Around the same time Bruni wrote a public letter in the vernacular, his Defense against the Detractors of the People of Florence for their Attack against Lucca, in response to the same criticisms. This paper will examine these texts within their political and cultural contexts, with particular emphasis on questions of public and private distinctions as well as political legitimacy in humanist writing during the quattrocento.

A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375–1650 Lisa Kaborycha, A Corresponding Renaissance: Letters Written by Italian Women, 1375–1650, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2016; 320 pp.; 9780199342433, £19.99 (pbk)

Review of Irene O'Daly. 2018. John of Salisbury and the Medieval Roman Renaissance. Manchester University Press. 9781526109491.

No description available.

This thesis project surrounds the life of sixteenth-century poet Vittoria Colonna, and the poetry she wrote following the death of her husband Ferrante D’Avalos, Marquis of Pescara, in 1525. Often regarded in tandem with the works of Michelangelo, Vittoria Colonna’s literary accomplishments in the face of personal tragedy speak for themselves as she became one of the foremost female poets of her time. Beyond her relationship with Michelangelo, the surrounding literature on Colonna looks at her widowhood as a stage for her poetry, her use of Neoplatonist imagery, and the influence of the Petrarchan sonnet. Expanding on the arguments presented by scholars Abigail Brundin and Virginia Cox, who are the foundation for my research with their thorough understanding of these connective elements, my thesis explores how Colonna actively used gender and grief specifically within her widowed poetry to pursue social and spiritual transcendence through a comparison of primary texts. In merging these elements together, I find that Colonna complicates the role of the female widow. She uses her widow’s grief as a tool to remain within the lines of social propriety while also seeking personal freedom. Benefitting from her performance of what Erasmus calls a “true” widow, Colonna presented her grief within the parameters of social expectation but provided a way to break free from them. Within this public space, Colonna’s complicated relationship with gender comes into play as she uses it to her advantage to transcend socially through subversions of Petrarchan convention, while also dismissing gender entirely through Neoplatonism in order to transcend spiritually. In this, Colonna maintains a complex widowhood as she both fulfills and dismantles the boundaries set in place for her, finding a sense of freedom within the blurred lines of propriety.

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. / It is the intention of this Doctor of Creative Arts to convey the complexity of viewing art in museums. Concentrating on both the physical and cultural contexts of art, I focus specifically on Italian museums that house artworks of the Renaissance. I argue that the viewing experience in these museums is formed at the intersection of cultures, histories, the past and the present, art and the subjectivity of the viewer's own gaze. In this project the personal, physical, cerebral, sensorial and temporal experiences of art are central to my concerns. The structure of this DCA combines my photographic art practice with this written reflection. I work with both the visual and the textual to most appropriately and effectively express my concerns with the Renaissance and Italian museums. In a peculiar act of doubling, I am making art about the experience of viewing it, and through image-making I am able both to explore and to comment more profoundly on the experience of these museums. While my research and writing at times responds to these images, it also inspires them. Here I integrate the past, history and art, with contemporary theories that are relevant in the study ofvision and today's art viewing, and rely on numerous writers across the broad .fields of visual arts, art history and theory, museology, historiography and cultural tourism. In surveying these extensive interwoven disciplines I engage with the magnitude of the social, historical and theoretical studies that converge in the museum viewer's field of vision. Beyond the glorious artworks themselves Italian Renaissance museums exhibit a dense visual and historic culture that provides an enriched viewing environment. They paradoxically intersect 'high' art with a phenomenal popularity that appears ever-expanding through endless reproductions and representations via modern technologies. Through examining these museums with their multiple histories and contexts I hope to argue for a slower, more considered engagement with art, that encourages the viewer to experience the sensual as well as the intellectual aspects that this opulent environment offers.