Thesis (doctoral) -- Grossherzoglich-Hess. Ludwigs-Universität Giessen. / Glossary: p. [108]-111. Vita. Includes bibliography.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1998. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [434]-447).

The subject of this study is the phenomenon of plant and animal illustration as an aspect of naturalism in Italian manuscript art from the mid thirteenth century to the early fifteenth century. 'Naturalism' in the context of this study is defined as the accurate representation of natural objects within the given limitations of period and style. In addition, the term is also applied to the phenomenon of the more frequent occurrence of natural objects like plants and animals in manuscript art. Chief among the factors that gave rise to this type of illustration were the demands of medieval science, in terms of practical works like herbals and hunting treatises. Secondly, the secular interests of the courts, in particular Frederick II's court in the thirteenth century, and the courts of the North Italian despots in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries encouraged the pastimes that generated a need for naturalistic illustration. Although Franciscanism has traditionally been credited with stimulating naturalism in Italian art, there is no solid evidence to suggest that the limited aspect of naturalism discussed here was directly influenced by the movement. The accurate portrayal of both plants and animals can be documented in a number of manuscripts dating from the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries. The concentration on accurate portrayal of isolated natural objects resulted in a more sophisticated and at the same time more naturalistic recording of facts about both plants and animals. Eventually, this close observation of nature contributed to certain rudimentary developments toward the mastery of landscape and pictorial space. These developments coincided with, or perhaps even encouraged, the acceptance of the International Gothic Style in Italy. This style incorporated some of the aspects of naturalism discussed in this study, and introduced them into a part of the mainstream of Italian art in the fifteenth century. / Arts, Faculty of / Art History, Visual Art and Theory, Department of / Graduate

The volcanic area west of Naples known as the Phlegraean Fields, or Campi Flegrei, has been an alluring destination since antiquity. Then as now, it is characterized by monumental ancient buildings, natural hot springs and a gentle climate. Yet the same underground supervolcano that is responsible for its thermal power charges the area with instability. This dissertation centers the Campi Flegrei as a specific environment whose unique properties artists responded to during the early modern period. Picturing this place in a variety of media, they made visible its inherent contradictions—the coexistence of loss with continuity, the entanglement of the natural with the humanmade—and brought these tensions to bear on local history and identity. Manuscripts, prints, maps, and images from printed books form the core body of material discussed. Taking an interdisciplinary and embodied approach, this study draws on the history of medicine, science and the environment and is based in firsthand experience of many of the sites discussed. The first chapter concerns a body of illustrated manuscripts and printed books that figure the bathing sites of the Campi Flegrei. It traces the popularity of Peter of Eboli’s late twelfth-century or early thirteenth-century poem De balneis Puteolanis (On the Baths of Pozzuoli) through the Renaissance and early modern periods, when it was copied and its images elaborated upon. The practice of bathing itself connected people directly to a rich local history, and these images emphasize the potency of that direct physical experience embedded in the landscape. The second chapter brings us to the extensive subterranean spaces of Naples, especially its underground aquatic infrastructure. The viscera of the city played an important role in daily life, but were also fertile settings for stories of the city’s past. This chapter contrasts the lack of imagery figuring the Neapolitan underground with the plethora of artworks showing a more porous relationship between above and below in the Campi Flegrei. The visual identities of Naples and the Campi Flegrei were consistently evolving, but constructed and perceived in relationship to one another. During periods in which Angevin, Aragonese, and early viceregal Spanish rulers attempted to impose a new order on the urban fabric of Naples, the Campi Flegrei were pictured in contrast, as the city’s untamable chthonic neighbor. The third chapter follows specific artists and writers into the Campi Flegrei, where their works turn towards mistaken topographies, visual lacunae, nonlinearity, and loss, teasing out visually the mechanisms by which transformation could come about. Working in an expanded context in which images of the Campi Flegrei and Naples circulated beyond the local, they developed new ways to tether their visual languages in drawings, prints, and paintings to local identity.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, November, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-242)

Often the Italian Madrigal is associated with print and the public marketplace. Yet it originated in handwritten anthologies restrictively circulated by Florentine patricians. In recent years, print scholarship broadened Renaissance musical studies from composer and institutional analyses to those focusing on material form, usage, and meaning. Manuscript studies of the Italian Madrigal, however, are yet to receive similar methodological expansions. This dissertation explores the social world of four manuscript anthologies of madrigals crafted in 1530s Florence. I argue that they participated in a culture whose practices aligned with and projected the elite identities of their owners, remaining in use despite the advent of printed collections intended for the broad consumption and general tastes that dominated the genre’s dissemination from the 1540s onward. Through the four manuscript anthologies, I present a needed cultural history of manuscript usage and meaning in an understudied era of the genre, examining processes of self-fashioning, communal and diplomatic circulation, notational difference, and political identity. I uncover this information through paleographic, primary-source analysis of musical and epistolary documents as well as historical survey. This dissertation reveals, firstly, patrician use of manuscripts as markers of hierarchical distinction in Florentine society. Second, it concludes that manuscript madrigals should be understood alongside other Florentine manuscript practices of epistolary exchange and personal record keeping, as documents intended to accumulate new works and preserve family history and legacy. Third, this dissertation provides a comparative analysis of the music-notational and paleographic differences between contemporaneous print and manuscript versions of Florentine madrigals in the 1530s. This dissertation then concludes with an analysis of the political decorations within one of the manuscript partbook sets that offers insight into Florence’s governmental transition from a longstanding republic to Medici rule in 1530. Altogether, my project reveals particular ways in which the manuscript madrigal projected the individual and communal identity of patrician Florentines to garner distinction among other social classes, to solidify diplomatic bonds and preserve family history, to encode performance through subtle notation, and to engage with cataclysmic governmental shifts as reflected through the political views of individuals and the scribal hand.