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Author: Christine Corretti
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
In one respect Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy) legitimized the patriarchal power of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici's Tuscany. The bronze statue symbolizes the body of the male ruler as the state overcoming an adversary personified as female, but the sculpture's androgynous appearance (the heads of Perseus and Medusa are remarkably similar) emphasizes the fact that Perseus, Cosimo's surrogate, rose to power through a female agency€- the Gorgon. Though not a surrogate for the powerful women of the Medici family, Cellini's Medusa may have reminded viewers of the fact that Cosimo's power stemmed in various ways from maternal influence. In this fashion the statue suggests that female power was palpable in the Medicean state. Under the Loggia dei Lanzi maternal power assumes, specifically, the form of Medusa as Mother Goddess. In the preceding context it is telling that additional works of art celebrating the duke's political greatness align Cosimo's image with maternal agency. The Perseus' androgynous nature problematizes the Greek subject's role as an epitome of virt & 249; (virility). Thus, the statue points up the contingent nature of patriarchal power, which in Cellini's day was synonymous with virt & 249;. I discuss the Perseus as a reflection of Niccolo Macchiavelli's theory that virt & 249; depends upon adversary in the form of Fortuna, a version of the Mother Goddess, for political purposes. The similarity between the heads of Cellini's Perseus and Medusa suggests that Cellini (as Perseus) identified with the Gorgon as a hunted figure. Thus, the statue reminds one of social, cultural, and legal restrictions imposed upon men who lived in Cosimo's Florence. Here, the cult of honor and virt & 249; bred more divisions in the absolutist state by perpetuating violence. Similarly, Cellini's statue implies that violence may turn against itself by appealing to the aggression of its viewers. My study concludes with an analysis of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo's image in art as Mother Goddess, a force who rivals the power of her husband, Cosimo I. Thus, the duchess' image ultimately served as Medusa's counterpart.
Author: Christine Corretti
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book Here
Book Description
In one respect Benvenuto Cellini's Perseus and Medusa (Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence, Italy) legitimized the patriarchal power of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici's Tuscany. The bronze statue symbolizes the body of the male ruler as the state overcoming an adversary personified as female, but the sculpture's androgynous appearance (the heads of Perseus and Medusa are remarkably similar) emphasizes the fact that Perseus, Cosimo's surrogate, rose to power through a female agency€- the Gorgon. Though not a surrogate for the powerful women of the Medici family, Cellini's Medusa may have reminded viewers of the fact that Cosimo's power stemmed in various ways from maternal influence. In this fashion the statue suggests that female power was palpable in the Medicean state. Under the Loggia dei Lanzi maternal power assumes, specifically, the form of Medusa as Mother Goddess. In the preceding context it is telling that additional works of art celebrating the duke's political greatness align Cosimo's image with maternal agency. The Perseus' androgynous nature problematizes the Greek subject's role as an epitome of virt & 249; (virility). Thus, the statue points up the contingent nature of patriarchal power, which in Cellini's day was synonymous with virt & 249;. I discuss the Perseus as a reflection of Niccolo Macchiavelli's theory that virt & 249; depends upon adversary in the form of Fortuna, a version of the Mother Goddess, for political purposes. The similarity between the heads of Cellini's Perseus and Medusa suggests that Cellini (as Perseus) identified with the Gorgon as a hunted figure. Thus, the statue reminds one of social, cultural, and legal restrictions imposed upon men who lived in Cosimo's Florence. Here, the cult of honor and virt & 249; bred more divisions in the absolutist state by perpetuating violence. Similarly, Cellini's statue implies that violence may turn against itself by appealing to the aggression of its viewers. My study concludes with an analysis of Duchess Eleonora di Toledo's image in art as Mother Goddess, a force who rivals the power of her husband, Cosimo I. Thus, the duchess' image ultimately served as Medusa's counterpart.
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.
Author: Karl A.E. Enenkel
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004437894
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 503
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Book Description
This volume explores early modern recreations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, focusing on the creative ingenium of artists and writers who freely handled the original text so as to adapt it to different artistic media and genres.
Author: Karen-edis Barzman
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004331514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389
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Book Description
This book considers the production of collective identity in Venice (Christian, civic-minded, anti-tyrannical), which turned on distinctions drawn in various fields of representation from painting, sculpture, print, and performance to classified correspondence. Dismemberment and decapitation bore a heavy burden in this regard, given as indices of an arbitrary violence ascribed to Venice’s long-time adversary, “the infidel Turk.” The book also addresses the recuperation of violence in Venetian discourse about maintaining civic order and waging crusade. Finally, it examines mobile populations operating in the porous limits between Venetian Dalmatia and Ottoman Bosnia and the distinctions they disrupted between “Venetian” and “Turk” until their settlement on farmland of the Venetian state. This occurred in the eighteenth century with the closing of the borderlands, thresholds of difference against which early modern “Venetian-ness” was repeatedly measured and affirmed.
Author: Brian Jeffrey Maxson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755640128
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
The innovative city culture of Florence was the crucible within which Renaissance ideas first caught fire. With its soaring cathedral dome and its classically-inspired palaces and piazzas, it is perhaps the finest single expression of a society that is still at its heart an urban one. For, as Brian Jeffrey Maxson reveals, it is above all the city-state – the walled commune which became the chief driver of European commerce, culture, banking and art – that is medieval Italy's enduring legacy to the present. Charting the transition of Florence from an obscure Guelph republic to a regional superpower in which the glittering court of Lorenzo the Magnificent became the pride and envy of the continent, the author authoritatively discusses a city that looked to the past for ideas even as it articulated a novel creativity. Uncovering passionate dispute and intrigue, Maxson sheds fresh light too on seminal events like the fiery end of oratorical firebrand Savonarola and Giuliano de' Medici's brutal murder by the rival Pazzi family. This book shows why Florence, harbinger and heartland of the Renaissance, is and has always been unique.
Author: Christopher P. Dickenson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000368246
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which statues have been experienced in public in different cultures and the role that has been played by statues in defining publicness itself. The meaning of public statues is examined through discussion of their appearance and their spatial context and of written discourses having to do with how they were experienced. Bringing together experts working on statues in different cultures, the book sheds light on similarities and differences in the role that public statues had in different times and places throughout history. The book will also provide insight into the diverse methods and approaches that scholars working on these different periods use to investigate statues. The book will appeal to historians, art historians and archaeologists of all periods who have an interest in the display of sculpture, the reception of public art or the significance of public monuments.
Author: Edward J. Olszewski
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527512843
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 221
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Book Description
This study employs cognitive theory as a heuristic framework to interrogate the agency of female types in select Italian Renaissance paintings, with emphasis on Venus, Medusa, the Amazon, Boccaccio's Lady Fiammetta/Cleopatra, Susanna, the Magdalene, and the Madonna. The study disrupts assumptions about the identity of sitters and readings of paintings as it challenges paradigms of female representation. It interrogates why certain paintings were crafted, by whom and for whom. Works are placed in the context of meta-painting, with stress on the cognitive decisions negotiated between patron and artist. The ludic aspects of several paintings are examined with a fine grain semiotic approach to expand their iconographies. Psychoanalytic readings are unpacked, based on the flawed mythological metaphors and incomplete clinical studies of Sigmund Freud's theorizing. The rubric of female agency is deliberately selected to unify popular but enigmatic master paintings of disparate subjects.
Author: R. Scott Smith
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190648317
Category : Mythology, Classical
Languages : en
Pages : 625
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Book Description
The field of mythography has grown substantially in the past thirty years, an acknowledgment of the importance of how ancient writers "wrote down the myths" as they systematized, organized and interpreted the vast and contested mythical storyworld. With the understanding that mythography remains a contested category, that its borders are not always clear, and that it shifted with changes in the socio-cultural and political landscapes, The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography offers a range of scholarly voices that attempt to establish how and to what extent ancient writers followed the "mythographical mindset" that prompted works ranging from Apollodorus' Library to the rationalizing and allegorical approaches of Cornutus and Palaephatus. Editors R. Scott Smith and Stephen M. Trzaskoma provide the first comprehensive survey of mythography from the earliest attempts to organize and comment on myths in the archaic period (in poetry and prose) to late antiquity. The essays also provide an overview of those writers we call mythographers and other major sources of mythographic material (e.g., papyri and scholia), followed by a series of essays that seek to explore the ways in which mythographical impulses were interconnected with other intellectual activities (e.g., geography and history, catasteristic writings, politics). In addition, another section of essays presents the first sustained analysis between mythography and the visual arts, while a final section takes mythography from late antiquity up into the Renaissance. While also taking stock of recent advances and providing bibliographical guidance, this Handbook offers new approaches to texts that were once seen only as derivative sources of mythical data and presents innovative ideas for further research. The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Mythography is an essential resource for teachers, scholars, and students alike.
Author: John-Paul Stonard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1526645831
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 464
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Book Description
A fully illustrated, panoramic world history of art from ancient civilisation to the present day, exploring the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse. Some fifty thousand years ago, on an island in modern-day Indonesia, an early human used red ochre pigment to capture the likeness of a native pig on a limestone cave wall. Around the same time, across the globe in Europe, another human retrieved a lump of charcoal from an old fire and sketched four galloping horses. It was like a light turning on in the human mind. Our instinct to produce images in response to nature allowed the earliest Homo sapiens to understand the world around us, and to thrive. Now, the art historian John-Paul Stonard has travelled across continents to take us on a panoramic journey through the history of art – from ancient Anatolian standing stones to a Qing Dynasty ink handscroll, from a drawing by a Kiowa artist from the Great Plains to a post-independence Congolese painting. Lavishly illustrated throughout, Creation is an ambitious, thrilling and landmark work that leads us from Benin to Belgium, China to Constantinople, Mexico to Mesopotamia. Journeying from pre-history to the present day, it explores the remarkable endurance of humankind's creative impulse, and asks how – and why – we create.
Author: Marina Belozerskaya
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 0892367857
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
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.
