Play in Renaissance Italy

Play in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Peter Burke
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509543449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
From comic verse to practical jokes, pornography to satire, acting to acrobatics, the Renaissance witnessed the flowering of play in all its forms. In the first wide-ranging and accessible introduction to play in Renaissance Italy, Peter Burke, celebrated historian of the Italian Renaissance, synthesizes over forty years’ research, explores the various forms of play in this period, and offers an overview that reveals the many connections between its different domains. While play could be rough, the Church played an increasing role in determining acceptable and unacceptable forms of play, and, after campaigns against violence and obscenity, much of the licentiousness characteristic of the early Renaissance was tamed. This entertaining study of play reveals much about the culture of Renaissance Italy, and illuminates an essential element in human life.

The Perfect Genre. Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy

The Perfect Genre. Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Kristin Phillips-Court
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351884387
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
Proposing an original and important re-conceptualization of Italian Renaissance drama, Kristin Phillips-Court here explores how the intertextuality of major works of Italian dramatic literature is not only poetic but also figurative. She argues that not only did the painterly gaze, so prevalent in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century devotional art, portraiture, and visual allegory, inform humanistic theories, practices and themes, it also led prominent Italian intellectuals to write visually evocative works of dramatic literature whose topical plots and structures provide only a fraction of their cultural significance. Through a combination of interpretive literary criticism, art historical analysis and cultural and intellectual historiography, Phillips-Court offers detailed readings of individual plays juxtaposed with specific developments and achievements in the realm of painting. Revealing more than historical connections between artists and poets such as Tasso and Giorgione, Mantegna and Trissino, Michelangelo and Caro, or Bruno and Caravaggio, the author locates the history of Renaissance art and drama securely within the history of ideas. She provides us with a story about the emergence and eventual disintegration of Italian Renaissance drama as a rigorously philosophical and empirical form. Considering rhetorical, philosophical, ethical, religious, political-ideological, and aesthetic dimensions of each of the plays she treats, Kristin Phillips-Court draws our attention to the intermedial conversation between the theater and painting in a culture famously dominated by art. Her integrated analysis of visual and dramatic works brings to light how the lines and verses of the text reveal an ongoing dialogue with visual art that was far richer and more intellectually engaged than we might reconstruct from stage diagrams and painted backdrops.

Renaissance Fun

Renaissance Fun PDF Author: Philip Steadman
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787359158
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.

Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance

Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance PDF Author: J.R. Mulryne
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1349217360
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
Theatre of the English and Italian Renaissance studies interrelationships between English and Italian Theatre of the Renaissance period, including texts, performance and performance spaces, and cultural parallels and contrasts. Connections are traced between Italian writers including Aretino, Castiglione and Zorenzo Valla and such English playwrights as Shakespeare, Lyly and Ben Jonson. The impact of Italian popular tradition on Shakespeare's comedies is analysed, together with Jonson's theatrical recreation of Venice, and Italian sources for the court masques of Jonson, Daniel and Campion.

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance

Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Michele Marrapodi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317056442
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Shakespeare and the Italian Renaissance investigates the works of Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists from within the context of the European Renaissance and, more specifically, from within the context of Italian cultural, dramatic, and literary traditions, with reference to the impact and influence of classical, coeval, and contemporary culture. In contrast to previous studies, the critical perspectives pursued in this volume’s tripartite organization take into account a wider European intertextual dimension and, above all, an ideological interpretation of the 'aesthetics' or 'politics' of intertextuality. Contributors perceive the presence of the Italian world in early modern England not as a traditional treasure trove of influence and imitation, but as a potential cultural force, consonant with complex processes of appropriation, transformation, and ideological opposition through a continuous dialectical interchange of compliance and subversion.

Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy

Parlour Games and the Public Life of Women in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: George W. McClure
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442646594
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Confined by behavioural norms and professional restrictions, women in Renaissance Italy found a welcome escape in an alternative world of play. This book examines the role of games of wit in the social and cultural experience of patrician women from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. Beneath the frivolous exterior of such games as occasions for idle banter, flirtation, and seduction, there often lay a lively contest for power and agency, and the opportunity for conventional women to demonstrate their intellect, to achieve a public identity, and even to model new behaviour and institutions in the non-ludic world. By tapping into the records and cultural artifacts of these games, George McClure recovers a realm of female fame that has largely escaped the notice of modern historians, and in so doing, reveals a cohort of spirited, intellectual women outside of the courts.

Art in Renaissance Italy

Art in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: John T. Paoletti
Publisher: Prentice Hall Press
ISBN: 9780131833357
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description


Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy

Royal Tennis in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Cees de Bondt
Publisher: Brepols Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Italy has a long history of competitive games and sports, which was to a great extent inspired by the athletic contests of Antiquity. The human educators and the Renaissance rulers attempted to recreate the grandeur of Imperial Rome. Athletic excellence became an equally strong component of Italian culture during the Renaissance as in ancient Greece and Rome. Italy was the place to be for spectators and to train to be proficient in a variety of physical exercises. The main focus of this study is on how Renaissance Italy became the playground where royal tennis, the ancestor of the modern game, developed into a high cultural form of private court entertainment. The book regularly quotes from the text of the first book on tennis, Antonio Scaino's Trattato del giuoco della palla (Treatise of the Ball Game) of 1555 which was written as an instructive manual for the ballplaying courtier. Scaino's introduction of tennis laws enabled the aristocracy to draw a line between themselves and the populace who continued to play a crude type of the game in the streets.

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy

Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Christiane Klapisch-Zuber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226439267
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
English translations of the author's most important articles.

In Fortune's Theater

In Fortune's Theater PDF Author: Nicholas Scott Baker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108843883
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This innovative cultural history of financial risk-taking explores how a new concept of the future emerged in Renaissance Italy - and its consequences.

The Poetics of Aristotle

The Poetics of Aristotle PDF Author: Aristotle
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781544217574
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 82

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Book Description
In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."