Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance

Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance
Author: J. Paul Getty Museum
Publisher: J Paul Getty Museum Publications
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2012
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9781606061268

Florence and the Renaissance have become virtually synonymous, bringing to mind names like Dante, Giotto, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and many others whose creativity thrived during a time of unprecedented prosperity, urban expansion, and intellectual innovation. With more than 200 illustrations, Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance reveals the full complexity and enduring beauty of the art of this period, including panel paintings, illuminated manuscripts, and stained glass panels. The book considers not only the work of Giotto and other influential artists, including Bernardo Daddi, Taddeo Gaddi, and Pacino di Bonaguida, but also that of the larger community of illuminators and panel painters who collectively contributed to Florence's artistic legacy. It places particular emphasis on those artists who worked in both panel painting and manuscript illumination, and presents new conservation research and scientific analyses that shed light on artists' techniques and workshop practices of the times. Reunited here for the first time are twenty-six leaves of the most important illuminated manuscript commission of the period: the Laudario of Sant' Agnese. The splendor of this book of hymns exemplifies the spiritual and artistic aspirations of early Renaissance Florence. A major exhibition on this subject will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum November 13, 2012, through February 10, 2013, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario March 16, 2013, through June 16, 2013. Contributors to this volume include Roy S. Berns, Eve Borsook, Bryan Keene, Francesca Pasut, Catherine Schmidt Patterson, Alan Phenix, Laura Rivers, Victor M. Schmidt, Alexandra Suda, Yvonne Szafran, Karen Trentelman, and Nancy Turner.

Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art

Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art
Author: A. Victor Coonin
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-11-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1789141672

The Italian sculptor known as Donatello helped to forge a new kind of art—one that came to define the Renaissance. His work was progressive, challenging, and even controversial. Using a variety of novel sculptural techniques and innovative interpretations, Donatello uniquely depicted themes involving human sexuality, violence, spirituality, and beauty. But to really understand Donatello, one needs to understand his changing world, marked by the transition from Medieval to Renaissance style and to an art that was more personal and representative of the modern self. Donatello was not just a man of his times, he helped shape the spirit of the times he lived in and profoundly influenced those that came after. In this beautifully illustrated book—the first thorough biography of Donatello in twenty-five years—A. Victor Coonin describes the full extent of Donatello’s revolutionary contributions, revealing how his work heralded the emergence of modern art.

Building the Italian Renaissance

Building the Italian Renaissance
Author: Paula Kay Lazrus
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2019-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1469653400

Building the Italian Renaissance focuses on the competition to select a team to execute the final architectural challenge of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore--the erection of its dome. Although the model for the dome was widely known, the question of how this was to be accomplished was the great challenge of the age. This dome would be the largest ever built. This is foremost a technical challenge but it is also a philosophical one. The project takes place at an important time for Florence. The city is transitioning from a High Medieval world view into the new dynamics and ideas and will lead to the full flowering of what we know as the Renaissance. Thus the competition at the heart of this game plays out against the background of new ideas about citizenship, aesthetics, history (and its application to the present), and new technology. The central challenge is to expose players to complex and multifaceted situations and to individuals that animated life in Florence in the early 1400s. Humanism as a guiding philosophy is taking root and scholars are looking for ways to link the mercantile city to the glories of Rome and to the wisdom of the ancients across many fields. The aesthetics of the classical world (buildings, plastic arts and intellectual pursuits) inspired wonder, perhaps even envy, but the new approaches to the past by scholars such as Petrarch suggested that perhaps the creative classes are not simply crafts people, but men of ideas. Three teams compete for the honor to construct the dome, a project overseen by the Arte Della Lana (wool workers guild) and judged by them and a group of Florentine citizens who are merchants, aristocrats, learned men, and laborers. Their goal is to make the case for the building to live up to the ideals of Florence. The game gives students a chance to enter into the world of Florence in the early 1400s to develop an understanding of the challenges and complexity of such a major artistic and technical undertaking while providing an opportunity to grasp the interdisciplinary nature of major public works.

The Springtime of the Renaissance

The Springtime of the Renaissance
Author: Beatrice Paolozzi Strozzi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 548
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9788874611867

Florence is justly named the 'cradle of the renaissance'. It was here that, inspired by the revival of interest in classical antiquity, fuelled by civic pride and fostered by the wealthy Medici family, a visual language was created that was to be spoken

Gardens of the Renaissance

Gardens of the Renaissance
Author: J. Paul Getty Museum
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1606061437

Whether part of a grand villa or an extension of a common kitchen, gardens in the Renaissance were planted and treasured in all reaches of society. Illuminated manuscripts of the period offer a glimpse into how people at the time pictured, used, and enjoyed these idyllic green spaces. This illustrated volume explores gardens on many levels, from the literary Garden of Love and the biblical Garden of Eden to courtly gardens of the nobility, and reports on the many activities that took place there.

The Italian Renaissance

The Italian Renaissance
Author: John Harold Plumb
Publisher: Mariner Books
Total Pages: 318
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780618127382

Spanning an age that witnessed great achievements in the arts and sciences, this definitive overview of the Italian Renaissance will both captivate ordinary readers and challenge specialists. Dr. Plumb’s impressive and provocative narrative is accompanied by contributions from leading historians, including Morris Bishop, J. Bronowski, Maria Bellonci, and many more, who have further illuminated the lives of some of the era’s most unforgettable personalities, from Petrarch to Pope Pius II, Michelangelo to Isabella d'Este, Machiavelli to Leonardo. A highly readable and engaging volume, THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE is a perfect introduction to the movement that shaped the Western world.

Images of Quattrocento Florence

Images of Quattrocento Florence
Author: Stefano Ugo Baldassarri
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 436
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300080520

This anthology provides a panoramic view of fifteenth-century Florence in the words of the city's own citizens and visitors. The fifty-one selections offer glimpses into Renaissance thought. Together, the documents demonstrate the social, political, religious, and cultural impact Florence had in shaping the Italian and European Renaissance, and they reveal how Florence created, developed, and diffused the mythology of its own origins and glory. The documents point up the divergences in quattrocento accounts of the origins of Florence, and they reveal the importance of the city's economy, social life, and military success to the formation of its image. The book includes sources that elaborate on the city's accomplishments in literature and the visual arts, others that present major trends in Florentine religious life, and still others that attest to the acclaim and admiration that Florence evoked from foreign visitors. The editors also provide an informative introduction, a detailed chronology of fifteenth-century Italy, maps, photographs, an annotated bibliography, and a biographical sketch of the author of each document.

The History of Florence in Painting

The History of Florence in Painting
Author: Antonella Fenech Kroke
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-12-10
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0789211459

A landmark, hardcover, slipcased volume that tells the story of the archetypal Renaissance city anew, through its art. Placed at the heart of Italy, Florence was already in the Middle Ages a center of commerce and fine craftsmanship. Spurred on by a few powerful dynasties of merchants and financiers—above all the Medici, but also the Strozzi, the Pitti, and others—the city became the leading force in the Renaissance of the arts, literature, and science. Challenging the primacy of the Venetian Republic and even the city of the Popes, Florence attained a glory that was reflected down through the later centuries of Medici rule. And Florence was all along a city of painters, who recorded its sights; the likenesses of its leaders and luminaries; its battles, civic myths, and patron saints; and, of course, the changing tastes of their Tuscan patrons. In this magnificent volume are assembled a wide variety of artworks, both familiar and rarely seen, that, interwoven with an authoritative text, illustrate the eventful history of Florence—from the age of Cimabue and Giotto, through the High Renaissance of Leonardo and Michelangelo, to the Mannerism of Vasari and Bronzino, and even to the era of modern travelers like Sargent and Degas. The History of Florence in Painting is a feast for the eyes and the intellect, and worthy companion to the previous volumes in this series, The History of Venice in Painting, The History of Paris in Painting, and The History of Rome in Painting.

The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860–1930

The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination, 1860–1930
Author: Martin A. Ruehl
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2015-10-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1316298655

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Germany's bourgeois elites became enthralled by the civilization of Renaissance Italy. As their own country entered a phase of critical socioeconomic changes, German historians and writers reinvented the Italian Renaissance as the onset of a heroic modernity: a glorious dawn that ushered in an age of secular individualism, imbued with ruthless vitality and a neo-pagan zest for beauty. The Italian Renaissance in the German Historical Imagination is the first comprehensive account of the debates that shaped the German idea of the Renaissance in the seven decades following Jacob Burckhardt's seminal study of 1860. Based on a wealth of archival material and enhanced by more than one hundred illustrations, it provides a new perspective on the historical thought of Imperial and Weimar Germany, and the formation of a concept that is still with us today.

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance

Luxury Arts of the Renaissance
Author: Marina Belozerskaya
Publisher: Getty Publications
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2005-10-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0892367857

Today we associate the Renaissance with painting, sculpture, and architecture—the “major” arts. Yet contemporaries often held the “minor” arts—gem-studded goldwork, richly embellished armor, splendid tapestries and embroideries, music, and ephemeral multi-media spectacles—in much higher esteem. Isabella d’Este, Marchesa of Mantua, was typical of the Italian nobility: she bequeathed to her children precious stone vases mounted in gold, engraved gems, ivories, and antique bronzes and marbles; her favorite ladies-in-waiting, by contrast, received mere paintings. Renaissance patrons and observers extolled finely wrought luxury artifacts for their exquisite craftsmanship and the symbolic capital of their components; paintings and sculptures in modest materials, although discussed by some literati, were of lesser consequence. This book endeavors to return to the mainstream material long marginalized as a result of historical and ideological biases of the intervening centuries. The author analyzes how luxury arts went from being lofty markers of ascendancy and discernment in the Renaissance to being dismissed as “decorative” or “minor” arts—extravagant trinkets of the rich unworthy of the status of Art. Then, by re-examining the objects themselves and their uses in their day, she shows how sumptuous creations constructed the world and taste of Renaissance women and men.