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.

Aux XIVe et XVe siècles, la plupart des villes d’Italie centrale expérimente des gouvernements seigneuriaux. Camerino passe sous la domination des da Varano, Fabriano des Chiavelli et Foligno des Trinci. Ces familles obtiennent de la commune la reconnaissance de leur pouvoir et du pape d’importantes délégations d’autorité. À côté de ces piliers de leur légitimité, elles en construisent un troisième ne dépendant que d’elles-mêmes. Le pouvoir devient dynastique, il repose sur des qualités individuelles et familiales. Les seigneuries développent une véritable politique de communication. L’urbanisme, l’architecture, la peinture mais aussi la littérature sont les médias principaux qu’elles utilisent pour élaborer l’image de bons dirigeants. Cette dernière est d’abord étudiée, ici, à partir des peintures murales des résidences familiales. De telles réalisations ne sont pas le reflet déformé d’une domination, elles sont des actes de gouvernement qui contribuent au bien commun et à l’honneur de la ville. Elles sont encore un instrument de renommée et l’expression de vertus singulières, telle la magnificence, qui justifient le pouvoir personnel. La commande artistique place la famille dominante au cœur de l’histoire de la ville. Elle la situe dans la continuité des institutions communales dont elle reste dépendante. En ville et dans le contado, les images présentent également une hégémonie de plus en plus enracinée dans la succession dynastique et appuyée par une cour restreinte. Elles parviennent ainsi à faire cohabiter les légitimations contradictoires d’un pouvoir patrimonialisé mais présenté comme conforme aux traditions et aux intérêts de la communauté. / In the 14th and 15th centuries, most cities in Central Italy fell under the rule of powerful families. Camerino saw the rise of the Varanos, Fabriano of the Chiavellis, and Foligno of the Trincis. As communal authorities ended up acknowledging their power, the Popes also agreed to handing out to them significant delegations of their authority. While the two most important foundational aspects of their legitimacy laid there, these families were able to build on a third one that depended on themselves and on themselves alone. Their power became dynastic.Urban lords developed genuine communication policies. Town planning, architecture, commission of paintings as well as of literary works where the most useful tools in the building up of their image as good leaders. This study first explores this achievement by examining wall-paintings in family residences. Such works should be regarded as acts of government perceived as contributions to honor of the city. As instruments of fame, they also manifested singular virtues and thus justified the exercise of a personal power.Artistic commissions situated leading families at the heart of their city’s history. They created a sense of continuity with the urban authorities upon which the new rulers still depended. Images were meant to display an hegemony that came to be more and more deeply grounded in dynastic succession and that was supported by the gathering of a select court. While the different sources of legitimacy of such patrimonialised power may have been contradictory, images managed to accommodate these contradictions. They made new styles of ruling suitable to the claims of customs and to the communities’ self-interests.

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In early 1505, at twenty-nine years of age, Michelangelo began work on a massive tomb for Pope Julius II. The formal, temporal, and constructional intertwinings of this project are plumbed to create the foundation of this text. Finding its only full manifestation in the narratives of Vasari and Condivi, this tomb was the site of Michelangelo's first engagement with the making of architecture. The execution of this project would go on to intermittently occupy nearly half of Michelangelo's lifetime, making it a pivotal and paradigmatic work in the understanding of his opera. Explored as an embodied architectural treatise, the tomb reveals Michelangelo's dynamic process of creative making. Problematic issues in the prevailing Twentieth Century analyses and reconstructions of the tomb are called into question and alternative approaches to establish a deeper understanding of the project are proposed. Conjectures on the relevance of history, the hegemony and limits of analysis, the physical manifestation of ideas, what it means to "finish" a project, and what constitutes a "work," are projected from the foundations of the tomb onto the making of architecture today.

This investigation of the studioli, small contemplation chambers in the ducal palaces of Urbino and Gubbio, considers their position in the western tradition of the memory arts. Drawing upon select images in the studioli, as well as text sources readily available to Duke Federico da Montefeltro (1422--82) and the members of his court, this inquiry examines how the discipline of architecture equipped the late quattrocento mind with a bridge between the mathematical arts, which lend themselves to mechanical practices, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline central to the cultivation of memory and eloquence. As ramifications of material and mental craft, the studioli offered the Urbino court models for education and prudent governance.

My dissertation examines the cultural history of the Renaissance Venetian maritime empire. In this project I bring into conversation two historiographical subfields, the intellectual history of Venetian Renaissance humanism and the colonial history of the early modern Mediterranean, which have previously developed separately. In doing so, I examine the relationship between power and knowledge as it unfolded in the early modern Mediterranean. The ways in which Venetian Renaissance intellectual culture was shaped by its imperial engagements - and, conversely, how Venetian approaches to governance were inflected by humanist practices - are the central axes of my dissertation. In the first part of the dissertation, I examine the ways in which writing and textual collecting were used by elite Venetian readers to represent the geopolitical dimensions of their empire. I consider a group of manuscripts and printed books which contain technical, navigational, and cartographic writing and images about Venetian mercantile and imperial activity in the Mediterranean. In the second part, I undertake two case-studies of Venetian patrician governors who were trained in the humanist schools of Venice, before being posted to colonial offices in Dalmatia and the Aegean, respectively. I examine how their education in Venice as humanists influenced their experience and practice of governance in the stato da mar. Their personal texts offer an alternative intellectual history of empire, one which demonstrates the formation of political thought amongst the men actually practicing and experiencing imperial governance. Overall, I aim to build a picture of the ways in which literary culture, the physical world of the stato da mar, and political thought came to be entwined in the Venetian Renaissance; and then to describe how these dense relationships worked for the Venetian administrators who experienced them in the Mediterranean.

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Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

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