Nature and History in Modern Italy

Nature and History in Modern Italy
Author: Marco Armiero
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2010-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 0821419161

Marco Armiero is Senior Researcher at the Italian National Research Council and Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies, Universitat Aut(noma de Barcelona. He has published extensively on-Italian environmental history and edited Views from the South: Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World. --

Italy and the Environmental Humanities

Italy and the Environmental Humanities
Author: Serenella Iovino
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2018-03-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813941083

Bringing together new writing by some of the field’s most compelling voices from the United States and Europe, this is the first book to examine Italy--as a territory of both matter and imagination--through the lens of the environmental humanities. The contributors offer a wide spectrum of approaches--including ecocriticism, film studies, environmental history and sociology, eco-art, and animal and landscape studies--to move past cliché and reimagine Italy as a hybrid, plural, eloquent place. Among the topics investigated are post-seismic rubble and the stratifying geosocial layers of the Anthropocene, the landscape connections in the work of writers such as Calvino and Buzzati, the contaminated fields of the ecomafia’s trafficking, Slow Food’s gastronomy of liberation, poetic birds and historic forests, resident parasites, and nonhuman creatures. At a time when the tension between the local and the global requires that we reconsider our multiple roots and porous place-identities, Italy and the Environmental Humanities builds a creative critical discourse and offers a series of new voices that will enrich not just nationally oriented discussions, but the entire debate on environmental culture. Contributors: Marco Armiero, Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm * Franco Arminio, Writer, poet, and filmmaker * Patrick Barron, University of Massachusetts * Damiano Benvegnù, Dartmouth College and the Oxford Center for Animal Ethics * Viktor Berberi, University of Minnesota, Morris * Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University * Luca Bugnone, University of Turin * Enrico Cesaretti, University of Virginia *Almo Farina, University of Urbino * Sophia Maxine Farmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison * Serena Ferrando, Colby College * Tiziano Fratus, Writer, poet, and tree-seeker * Matteo Gilebbi, Duke University * Andrea Hajek, University of Warwick * Marcus Hall, University of Zurich * Serenella Iovino, University of Turin * Andrea Lerda, freelance curator * Roberto Marchesini, Study Center of Posthuman Philosophy in Bologna * Marco Moro, Editor-in-Chief of Edizioni Ambiente, Milan * Elena Past, Wayne State University * Carlo Petrini, Founder of International Slow Food Movement * Ilaria Tabusso Marcyan, Miami University (Ohio)* Monica Seger, College of William and Mary * Pasquale Verdicchio, University of California, San Diego

Brunelleschi's Egg

Brunelleschi's Egg
Author: Mary D. Garrard
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520261526

"Garrard, one of a small handful of truly distinguished feminist art historians, presents a detailed and visually convincing account of the relationship between nature and art in all its fraught and gendered cultural meaning from antiquity on. Brunelleschi's Egg constitutes an exemplary feat of interdisciplinary study that requires no specialized theoretical baggage to follow and emulate."--Mieke Bal, author of Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art "Mary Garrard's discerning eye and deep knowledge of Renaissance art informs this fascinating book. She offers a sophisticated exploration of a rich artistic conversation on the relationship of nature and art, describing the central role of gender in structuring artists' complex and changing attitudes toward nature. Brunelleschi's Egg is so much more than a history of style; it maps the changing mindsets of Renaissance society in the several centuries during which scientific developments gradually seized masculine authority, relegating both art and nature to mastered femininity. This book provides new perspective on Italian Renaissance masterworks; it will be central to future discussion of Renaissance art." --Margaret R. Miles, author of A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750 "In this sweeping study, the magnum opus of one of feminist art history's founding mothers, Mary Garrard extends the gendered critique of art into the realms of philosophy and science, psychology and myth. Her eloquently prophetic and richly detailed synthesis chronicles western culture's increasing feminization of nature and art, and its parallel masculinization of the human mind (both male and female), as a Renaissance tragedy on an epic scale. The book is a must-read for historians of the early modern period, with a theme also of urgent contemporary concern."--James M. Saslow, author of Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality and Art "A completely new and thoroughly convincing way of looking at the major monuments of the Italian Renaissance. The ideas in Brunelleschi's Egg are so compelling that it is hard to imagine a reader who would not be drawn into the analysis."--Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, author of Art, Marriage, and Family in the Italian Renaissance Palace "Garrard offers an unprecedented perspective on an amazing plethora of seminal works. Written beautifully, Brunelleschi's Egg is nothing but exemplary."--Yael Even, University of Missouri, St. Louis

Inventing Futurism

Inventing Futurism
Author: Christine Poggi
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2009
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780691133706

In 1909 the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the founding manifesto of Italian Futurism, an inflammatory celebration of "the love of danger" and "the beauty of speed" that provoked readers to take aggressive action and "glorify war--the world's only hygiene." Marinetti's words unleashed an influential artistic and political movement that has since been neglected owing to its exaltation of violence and nationalism, its overt manipulation of mass media channels, and its associations with Fascism. Inventing Futurism is a major reassessment of Futurism that reintegrates it into the history of twentieth-century avant-garde artistic movements. Countering the standard view of Futurism as naïvely bellicose, Christine Poggi argues that Futurist artists and writers were far more ambivalent in their responses to the shocks of industrial modernity than Marinetti's incendiary pronouncements would suggest. She closely examines Futurist literature, art, and politics within the broader context of Italian social history, revealing a surprisingly powerful undercurrent of anxiety among the Futurists--toward the accelerated rhythms of urban life, the rising influence of the masses, changing gender roles, and the destructiveness of war. Poggi traces the movement from its explosive beginnings through its transformations under Fascism to offer completely new insights into familiar Futurist themes, such as the thrill and trauma of velocity, the psychology of urban crowds, and the fantasy of flesh fused with metal, among others. Lavishly illustrated and unparalleled in scope, Inventing Futurism demonstrates that beneath Futurism's belligerent avant-garde posturing lay complex and contradictory attitudes toward an always-deferred utopian future.

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought

Science, Art and Nature in Medieval and Modern Thought
Author: A. C. Crombie
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 533
Release: 1990-07-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0826431623

The author sees the history of Western Science as the history of a vision and an argument, initiated by the ancient Greeks in their search for principles at once of nature and of argument itself. This scientific vision explored and controlled by argument, and the diversification of both vision and argument by scientific experience and by interaction with the wider contexts of intellectual culture, constitute the long history of European scientific thought. Underlying that development have been specific commitments to conceptions of nature and of science and its intellectual and moral assumptions, accompanied by a recurrent critique; their diversification has generated a series of different styles of scientific thinking and of making theoretical and practical decisions which the work describes.

Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance

Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance
Author: Sarah Blake McHam
Publisher:
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300186031

Pliny's Natural History (A.D. 77-79) served as an indispensable guide to and exemplar of the ideals of art for Renaissance artists, patrons, and theorists. Bearing the imprimatur of antiquity, the Natural History gave permission to do art on a grand scale, to value it, and to see it as an incomparable source of prestige and pleasure. In Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, Sarah Blake McHam surveys Pliny's influence, from Petrarch, the first figure to recognize Pliny's relevance to understanding the history of Greek art and its reception by the Romans, to Vasari and late 16th-century theorists. McHam charts the historiography of Latin and Italian manuscripts and early printed copies of the Natural History to trace the dissemination of its contents to artists from Donatello and Ghiberti to Michelangelo and Titian. Meanwhile, benefactors commissioned works intended to emulate the prototypes Pliny described, aligning themselves with the great patrons of antiquity. This is a richly illustrated, comprehensive reference work of social history, myth making, iconography, theory, and criticism.

Inventing the Renaissance Putto

Inventing the Renaissance Putto
Author: Charles Dempsey
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780807826164

The figure of the putto (often portrayed as a mischievous baby) made frequent appearances in the art and literature of Renaissance Italy. Commonly called spiritelli, or sprites, putti embodied a minor species of demon, in their nature neither good

Corot in Italy

Corot in Italy
Author: Peter Galassi
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300067101

Drawing on the diverse efforts of scholars, dealers, and collectors, Galassi establishes here for the first time the coherence and significance of early outdoor painting in Italy. Building on this foundation, he explores in depth Corot's magnificent landscapes.

Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura
Author: Paolo D'Angelo
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 151
Release: 2018-03-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0231540345

The essence of art is to conceal art. A dancer or musician does not only need to perform with ability. There should also be a lack of visible effort that gives an impression of naturalness. To disguise technique and feign ease is to heighten beauty. To express this notion, Italian has a word with no exact equivalent in other languages, sprezzatura: a kind of unaffectedness or nonchalance. In this book, the first to consider sprezzatura in its own right, philosopher of art Paolo D’Angelo reconstructs the history of concealing art, from ancient rhetoric to our own times. The word sprezzatura was coined in 1528 by Baldassarre Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier to mean a kind of grace with a special essence: the ability to conceal art. But the idea reaches back to Aristotle and Cicero and forward to avant-garde works such as Duchamp’s ready-mades, all of which share the suspicion of the overt display of skill. The precept that art must be hidden turns up in a number of fields, from cosmetics to interior design, politics to poetry, the English garden to shabby chic. Through exploring different articulations of this idea, D’Angelo shows the paradox of aesthetics: art hides that it is art, but in doing so it reveals itself to be art and becomes an assertion about art. When art is concealed, it appears as spontaneous as nature—yet, paradoxically, also reveals its indebtedness to technique. An erudite and surprising tour through aesthetics, philosophy, and art history, Sprezzatura presents a strikingly original argument with deceptive ease.