Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances

Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances PDF Author: Joyce de Vries
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351953206
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In the first major book in four decades on Caterina Sforza (1463-1509), Joyce de Vries investigates the famous noblewoman's cultural endeavors, and explores the ways in which gender, culture, and consumption practices were central to the invention of the self in early modern Italy. Sforza commissioned elaborate artistic and architectural works, participated in splendid civic and religious rituals, and collected a dazzling array of clothing, jewelry, and household goods. By engaging in these realms of cultural production, de Vries suggests, Sforza manipulated masculine and feminine norms of behavior and effectively promoted her social and political agendas. Drawing on visual evidence, inventories, letters, and contemporary texts, de Vries offers a penetrating new interpretation of women's contributions to early modern culture. She explains the correlations between prescriptive literature and women's actions and reveals the mutability of gender roles in the princely courts. De Vries's analysis of Sforza's posthumous legend suggests that what we see as "the Renaissance" was as much a historical invention as a coherent moment in historical time.

Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances

Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances PDF Author: Joyce de Vries
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351953206
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the first major book in four decades on Caterina Sforza (1463-1509), Joyce de Vries investigates the famous noblewoman's cultural endeavors, and explores the ways in which gender, culture, and consumption practices were central to the invention of the self in early modern Italy. Sforza commissioned elaborate artistic and architectural works, participated in splendid civic and religious rituals, and collected a dazzling array of clothing, jewelry, and household goods. By engaging in these realms of cultural production, de Vries suggests, Sforza manipulated masculine and feminine norms of behavior and effectively promoted her social and political agendas. Drawing on visual evidence, inventories, letters, and contemporary texts, de Vries offers a penetrating new interpretation of women's contributions to early modern culture. She explains the correlations between prescriptive literature and women's actions and reveals the mutability of gender roles in the princely courts. De Vries's analysis of Sforza's posthumous legend suggests that what we see as "the Renaissance" was as much a historical invention as a coherent moment in historical time.

Memoirs of Women Writers, Part III vol 10

Memoirs of Women Writers, Part III vol 10 PDF Author: Gina Luria Walker
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040250262
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
Mary Hays was a radical feminist whose writings brought her to the attention of her contemporaries William Blake, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Her Female Biography is an ambitious and acclaimed work, covering the lives of 294 women.

Daughters of Alchemy

Daughters of Alchemy PDF Author: Meredith K. Ray
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674504232
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Meredith Ray shows that women were at the vanguard of empirical culture during the Scientific Revolution. They experimented with medicine and alchemy at home and in court, debated cosmological discoveries in salons and academies, and in their writings used their knowledge of natural philosophy to argue for women’s intellectual equality to men.

Adriatic

Adriatic PDF Author: Caroline Boggis-Rolfe
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445695065
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Book Description
Adriatic recounts the shared history of the countries around the sea, from Italy to Croatia and beyond, from the Romans to the present.

The World of Plants in Renaissance Tuscany

The World of Plants in Renaissance Tuscany PDF Author: Cristina Bellorini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131701149X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
In the sixteenth century medicinal plants, which until then had been the monopoly of apothecaries, became a major topic of investigation in the medical faculties of Italian universities, where they were observed, transplanted, and grown by learned physicians both in the wild and in the newly founded botanical gardens. Tuscany was one of the main European centres in this new field of inquiry, thanks largely to the Medici Grand Dukes, who patronised and sustained research and teaching, whilst also taking a significant personal interest in plants and medicine. This is the first major reconstruction of this new world of plants in sixteenth-century Tuscany. Focusing primarily on the medical use of plants, this book also shows how plants, while maintaining their importance in therapy, began to be considered and studied for themselves, and how this new understanding prepared the groundwork for the science of botany. More broadly this study explores how the New World's flora impacted on existing botanical knowledge and how this led to the first attempts at taxonomy.

A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici

A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici PDF Author: Alessio Assonitis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004465219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 659

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Book Description
Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.

Art Patronage, Family, and Gender in Renaissance Florence

Art Patronage, Family, and Gender in Renaissance Florence PDF Author: Maria DePrano
Publisher:
ISBN: 1108416055
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 453

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Book Description
This book examines a Renaissance Florentine family's art patronage, even for women, inspired by literature, music, love, loss, and religion.

Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy

Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy PDF Author: Katherine A. McIver
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351872478
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Through a visually oriented investigation of historical (in)visibility in early modern Italy, the essays in this volume recover those women - wives, widows, mistresses, the illegitimate - who have been erased from history in modern literature, rendered invisible or obscured by history or scholarship, as well as those who were overshadowed by male relatives, political accident, or spatial location. A multi-faceted invisibility of the individual and of the object is the thread that unites the chapters in this volume. Though some women chose to be invisible, for example the cloistered nun, these essays show that in fact, their voices are heard or seen through their commissions and their patronage of the arts, which afforded them some visibility. Invisibility is also examined in terms of commissions which are no longer extant or are inaccessible. What is revealed throughout the essays is a new way of looking at works of art, a new way to visualize the past by addressing representational invisibility, the marginalized or absent subject or object and historical (in)visibility to discover who does the 'looking,' and how this shapes how something or someone is visible or invisible. The result is a more nuanced understanding of the place of women and gender in early modern Italy.

Cellini's Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi

Cellini's Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi PDF Author: Christine Corretti
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004296786
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, one of Renaissance Italy’s most complex sculptures, is the subject of this study, which proposes that the statue’s androgynous appearance is paradoxical. Symbolizing the male ruler overcoming a female adversary, the Perseus legitimizes patriarchal power; but the physical similarity between Cellini’s characters suggests the hero rose through female agency. Dr. Corretti argues that although not a surrogate for powerful Medici women, Cellini’s Medusa may have reminded viewers that Cosimo I de’ Medici’s power stemmed in part from maternal influence. Drawing upon a vast body of art and literature, Dr. Corretti concludes that Cellini and his contemporaries knew the Gorgon as a version of the Earth Mother, whose image is found in art for Medici women.

Moral Combat

Moral Combat PDF Author: Gerry Milligan
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487517289
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
The Italian sixteenth century offers the first sustained discussion of women’s militarism since antiquity. Across a variety of genres, male and female writers raised questions about women’s right and ability to fight in combat. Treatise literature engaged scientific, religious, and cultural discourses about women’s virtues, while epic poetry and biographical literature famously featured examples of women as soldiers, commanders, observers, and victims of war. Moral Combat asks how and why women’s militarism became one of the central discourses of this age. Gerry Milligan discusses the armed heroines of biography and epic within the context of contemporary debates over women’s combat abilities and men’s martial obligations. Women are frequently described as fighting because men have failed their masculine duty. A woman’s prowess at arms was asserted to be a cultural symptom of men’s shortcomings. Moral Combat ultimately argues that the popularity of the warrior woman in sixteenth-century Italian literature was due to her dual function of shame and praise: calling men to action and signaling potential victory to a disempowered people.