Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence

Cathedral and Civic Ritual in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence
Author: Marica Tacconi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2005-12-08
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780521817042

The service books of the Florentine Duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore were, like the church itself, a cultural reflection of the city's position of power and prestige. Largely unexplored by modern scholars, these manuscripts provided the texts and, sometimes, the music necessary for the celebration of the liturgical services. Marica S. Tacconi offers the first comprehensive investigation of the sixty-five extant liturgical manuscripts produced between 1150 and 1526 for both Santa Maria del Fiore and its predecessor, the early cathedral of Santa Reparata. She employs a multidisciplinary approach that recognizes the books as codicological, liturgical, musical, and artistic products. Their cultural contexts, and their civic and propagandistic uses, are uncovered through the analysis of extensive archival material, much of which is presented here for the first time. This important and fascinating study provides new insights into late medieval and Renaissance Florentine ritual and culture.

Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence

Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence
Author: Joanne Allen
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 621
Release: 2022-05-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 110898343X

Before the late sixteenth century, the churches of Florence were internally divided by monumental screens that separated the laity in the nave from the clergy in the choir precinct. Enabling both separation and mediation, these screens were impressive artistic structures that controlled social interactions, facilitated liturgical performances, and variably framed or obscured religious ritual and imagery. In the 1560s and 70s, screens were routinely destroyed in a period of religious reforms, irreversibly transforming the function, meaning, and spatial dynamics of the church interior. In this volume, Joanne Allen explores the widespread presence of screens and their role in Florentine social and religious life prior to the Counter-Reformation. She presents unpublished documentation and new reconstructions of screens and the choir precincts which they delimited. Elucidating issues such as gender, patronage, and class, her study makes these vanished structures comprehensible and deepens our understanding of the impact of religious reform on church architecture.

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages
Author: Lucy Donkin
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 150175386X

Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages illuminates how the floor surface shaped the ways in which people in medieval western Europe and beyond experienced sacred spaces. The ground beneath our feet plays a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in our relationship with the environments we inhabit and the spaces with which we interact. By focusing on this surface as a point of encounter, Lucy Donkin positions it within a series of vertically stacked layers—the earth itself, permanent and temporary floor coverings, and the bodies of the living above ground and the dead beneath—providing new perspectives on how sacred space was defined and decorated, including the veneration of holy footprints, consecration ceremonies, and the demarcation of certain places for particular activities. Using a wide array of visual and textual sources, Standing on Holy Ground in the Middle Ages also details ways in which interaction with this surface shaped people's identities, whether as individuals, office holders, or members of religious communities. Gestures such as trampling and prostration, the repeated employment of specific locations, and burial beneath particular people or actions used the surface to express likeness and difference. From pilgrimage sites in the Holy Land to cathedrals, abbeys, and local parish churches across the Latin West, Donkin frames the ground as a shared surface, both a feature of diverse, distant places and subject to a variety of uses over time—while also offering a model for understanding spatial relationships in other periods, regions, and contexts.

The Flower of Paradise

The Flower of Paradise
Author: David J. Rothenberg
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2011-10-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0195399714

In spite of their widely disparate uses, Marian prayers and courtly love songs from the Middle Ages and Renaissance often show a stylistic similarity. This book examines the convergence of these two styles in polyphonic music and its broader poetic, artistic, and devotional context from c.1200-c.1500.

The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture

The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture
Author: Tim Shephard
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 416
Release: 2013-07-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1135956464

As a coherent field of research, the field of music and visual culture has seen rapid growth in recent years. The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture serves as the first comprehensive reference on the intersection between these two areas of study, an ideal introduction for those coming to the field for the first time as well as a useful source of information for seasoned researchers. This collection of over forty entries, from musicologists and art historians from the US and UK, delineate the key concepts in the field in five parts: Starting Points Methodologies Reciprocation – the musical in visual culture and the visual in musical culture Convergence –in metaphor, in conception, and in practice Hybrid Arts This reference work speaks to the important questions concerning this burgeoning field of research –what are the established approaches to studying musical and visual cultures side by side? What have been the major points of contact between these two areas and what kind of questions can this interdisciplinary research address moving forward? The Routledge Companion to Music and Visual Culture is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in the field of music and visual culture.

Leonardo and the Last Supper

Leonardo and the Last Supper
Author: Ross King
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2012-08-30
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1408834278

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.

The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music
Author: Iain Fenlon
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 732
Release: 2019-01-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108671276

Part of the seminal Cambridge History of Music series, this volume departs from standard histories of early modern Western music in two important ways. First, it considers music as something primarily experienced by people in their daily lives, whether as musicians or listeners, and as something that happened in particular locations, and different intellectual and ideological contexts, rather than as a story of genres, individual counties, and composers and their works. Second, by constraining discussion within the limits of a 100-year timespan, the music culture of the sixteenth century is freed from its conventional (and tenuous) absorption within the abstraction of 'the Renaissance', and is understood in terms of recent developments in the broader narrative of this turbulent period of European history. Both an original take on a well-known period in early music and a key work of reference for scholars, this volume makes an important contribution to the history of music.

Love and Sex in the Time of Plague

Love and Sex in the Time of Plague
Author: Guido Ruggiero
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674259564

As a pandemic swept across fourteenth-century Europe, the Decameron offered the ill and grieving a symphony of life and love. For Florentines, the world seemed to be coming to an end. In 1348 the first wave of the Black Death swept across the Italian city, reducing its population from more than 100,000 to less than 40,000. The disease would eventually kill at least half of the population of Europe. Amid the devastation, Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron was born. One of the masterpieces of world literature, the Decameron has captivated centuries of readers with its vivid tales of love, loyalty, betrayal, and sex. Despite the death that overwhelmed Florence, Boccaccio’s collection of novelle was, in Guido Ruggiero’s words, a “symphony of life.” Love and Sex in the Time of Plague guides twenty-first-century readers back to Boccaccio’s world to recapture how his work sounded to fourteenth-century ears. Through insightful discussions of the Decameron’s cherished stories and deep portraits of Florentine culture, Ruggiero explores love and sexual relations in a society undergoing convulsive change. In the century before the plague arrived, Florence had become one of the richest and most powerful cities in Europe. With the medieval nobility in decline, a new polity was emerging, driven by Il Popolo—the people, fractious and enterprising. Boccaccio’s stories had a special resonance in this age of upheaval, as Florentines sought new notions of truth and virtue to meet both the despair and the possibility of the moment.

St. Anne in Renaissance Music

St. Anne in Renaissance Music
Author: Michael Alan Anderson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2014-05-12
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1107056241

Michael Alan Anderson explores the political implications of music devoted to St Anne in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Orsanmichele

Orsanmichele
Author: Marie D’Aguanno Ito
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 776
Release: 2023-10-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9004515666

This work provides a new narrative for Orsanmichele in the era before the Renaissance. It examines Orsanmichele from the mid-thirteenth century, as the piazza transformed into the city’s grain market. It considers the market’s tandem confraternity, with its stunning Madonnas over three successive loggias. It examines the grain market and confraternity from a social, economic, political, and artistic perspective. It provides extensive data on the Florentine grain trade, sales at the market, and the nexus between traders, political leaders, and the confraternity. The work suggests that developments at Orsanmichele during the medieval period formed the basis for the Renaissance structure.