This dissertation offers a wide-ranging examination of the half-length sacred figure over the door in medieval and early Renaissance Italian art. Drawing on a wealth of visual material that has attracted little attention among scholars, it argues that such images played a vital role in the religious lives of their beholders, transforming doorways into sites of devotional experience both within and beyond the church. Depicted incompletely, the holy body joined with the threshold below it to form a synthetic, composite image, one that invited the imaginative and corporeal participation of the viewer. This project employs various lenses to interpret the meaning and function of works about which scant written documentation comes down to us. In addition to considering scriptural metaphor and exegetical thought regarding the significance of doors, it explores the relationship of overdoor frescoes, mosaics, and reliefs to sacred icon panels, suggesting that the former might be recognized as wall icons, possessive of a heightened devotional appeal. It also uses overdoor images to illuminate broader spiritual and artistic concerns, including the nature of passage to the Christian afterlife, and the interaction between picture and frame, a topic central to Renaissance illusionism. Serving as an introduction to an important yet overlooked aspect of Italian visual culture, this text provides a conceptual framework for understanding a vast corpus of images that were essential to everyday piety, and that inflect our view of familiar art historical narratives.

This dissertation analyzes the dates and artistic provenance of key architectural and decorative projects commissioned by the Pucci family for their townhomes, villas, and palaces during the Renaissance. It identifies the family’s insistent identification with prestigious Renaissance architects and artisans as a key element in a political and social stratagem that took its cue from the humanist ethos cultivated by their political patrons, the Medici. Temporally, this study is bracketed on both ends of the Renaissance by architectural commissions related to the Pucci’s long-standing patronage of Santissima Annunziata, the most important pilgrimage church in Florence. Methodoligically, it is an archival project that relies principally on previously unknown letters, wills, payment records, inventories, and notarial documents.

This dissertation focuses on the artistic and architectural patronage of the Pucci family, Medici stalwarts whose carefully constructed political and cultural alignment with the ruling family of Florence was the impetus for their rising fortunes over the course of the 15th and 16th centuries. Their homes, chapels, and palaces in Tuscany and Rome were designed and furnished with paintings, sculpture, and intarsiated woodwork attributable to Michelozzo; the Pollaiuolo brothers; Botticelli; Giuliano da Sangallo and the heirs to his workshop: Francesco da Sangallo and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Baccio d'Agnolo; Pontormo; Bronzino; Baccio and Raffaello da Montelupo; Pietro and Domenico Rosselli; Michelangelo; Bartolommeo Ammannati; Giovanni Battista Naldini; Alessandro Allori; and Giovanni Battista Caccini.

Fine Arts / Master / Master of Philosophy

The motif of the uncovered female breast is ubiquitous in art of all ages and cultures. Modern analysis of breast imagery tends to be biased by the sexual significance that breasts have now. However in Italian renaissance art the exposed breast appears in many different manifestations. The purpose of this thesis is to explore several specific types of breast iconography. The first chapter will examine images of Maria lactans, and consider the religious, cultural and psychological meaning held within the image and the social changes which were to lead to its loss of popularity. Chapter Two will consider the appearance of secular images of breastfeeding, particularly in the city-states of north Italy in the early Renaissance, and examine possible sociological reasons for the political use of the depiction of breast feeding. Other associated breast iconography will also be considered. Chapter Three will focus on images of the tortured breast, particularly depictions of St. Agatha suffering the removal of her breasts during martyrdom. Both the sacred and sado-sexual elements of such images will be examined. The fourth chapter will look at images of Lucretia. It will be examined why in so many cases artists chose to depict her with her breasts exposed (in contradiction to ancient sources) and with the dagger actually pointing at or embedded in her breast. It will be argued that the breast was used in art as external symbol of the female heart. The final chapter of the thesis will focus on paintings Cleopatra. Again, there is an even more marked contradiction to ancient sources when Cleopatra is depicted dying by a snakebite to the breast. A full-circle will be achieved in the contrast of paintings of Mary suckling Christ with images of Cleopatra apparently breastfeeding a snake.

My project examines the pictorial and theoretical dimensions of the concept of melancholy as they were understood, expressed, and, most importantly, figured by Renaissance artists. By focusing on the figural pose traditionally associated with the melancholic state and humor, it presents a hitherto unexplored connection between Northern and Southern Europe, considering the different ways in which artists self-identified as melancholics and expressed this understanding in their art. In both Italy and the North, the basic figural structure is appropriated for somewhat different ends. The relationship of the isolated figure to its cultural context varies, either declaring a special creative status, responsive to a higher inspiration, or setting the figure apart as an outsider with special insight into the follies of this lower world. Chapter One serves as an introduction to the pose of melancholy, its historical weight and the visual meaning carried by the isolated, brooding figure, generally wth lowered head supported by a hand and often with legs crossed. This is the figure epitomized in Dürer's Melancolia I. Chapter Two considers Michelangelo as the exemplar of a melancholic and addresses the cultural and personal identification of him as such. The relevance of the melancholy pose to the identification of the artist in sixteenth-century Italy is demonstrated by Raphael's depiction of the melancholy Heraclitus in The School of Athens, which I accept as portrait of Michelangelo; articulated in his poetry, the artist's self-identification as melancholic is visually declared in his Last Judgment. Chapter Three addresses the works of Hieronymus Bosch, in whose art the figure of melancholy runs as something of a leitmotif, although it has remained generally unobserved; the figure serves as a running comment on the thematic concerns of the paintings--such as The Garden of Earthly Delights and Death and the Miser--at once participant and outsider. Chapter Four explores the role of melancholics in specific paintings by Bruegel, especially The Triumph of Death, and the relationship between melancholics and fools in the artist's oeuvre. Chapter Five has at its focus Titian's Flaying of Marsyas and the artist's self-inclusion in the guise of the melancholy Midas. As a conclusion, this chapter reflects on the personal significance of melancholy for Renaissance artists.

No description available.