Renaissance Bodies

Renaissance Bodies PDF Author: Lucy Gent
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9780948462085
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Renaissance Bodies is a unique collection of views on the ways in which the human image has been represented in the arts and literature of English Renaissance society. The subjects discussed range from high art to popular culture - from portraits of Elizabeth I to polemical prints mocking religious fanaticism - and include miniatures, manners, anatomy, drama and architectural patronage. The authors, art historians and literary critics, reflect diverse critical viewpoints, and the 78 illustrations present a fascinating exhibition of the often strange and haunting images of the period. With essays by John Peacock, Elizabeth Honig, Andrew and Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Sawday, Susan Wiseman, Ellen Chirelstein, Tamsyn Williams, Anna Bryson, Maurice Howard and Nigel Llewellyn. "The whole book ... presents a mirror of contemporary concerns with power, the merits and demerits of individualism, sex-roles, 'selves', the meaning of community and (even) conspicuous consumption."--The Observer

Renaissance Bodies

Renaissance Bodies PDF Author: Lucy Gent
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9780948462085
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book Here

Book Description
Renaissance Bodies is a unique collection of views on the ways in which the human image has been represented in the arts and literature of English Renaissance society. The subjects discussed range from high art to popular culture - from portraits of Elizabeth I to polemical prints mocking religious fanaticism - and include miniatures, manners, anatomy, drama and architectural patronage. The authors, art historians and literary critics, reflect diverse critical viewpoints, and the 78 illustrations present a fascinating exhibition of the often strange and haunting images of the period. With essays by John Peacock, Elizabeth Honig, Andrew and Catherine Belsey, Jonathan Sawday, Susan Wiseman, Ellen Chirelstein, Tamsyn Williams, Anna Bryson, Maurice Howard and Nigel Llewellyn. "The whole book ... presents a mirror of contemporary concerns with power, the merits and demerits of individualism, sex-roles, 'selves', the meaning of community and (even) conspicuous consumption."--The Observer

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture

Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture PDF Author: Karen Raber
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812208595
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

Get Book Here

Book Description
Animal Bodies, Renaissance Culture examines how the shared embodied existence of early modern human and nonhuman animals challenged the establishment of species distinctions. The material conditions of the early modern world brought humans and animals into complex interspecies relationships that have not been fully accounted for in critical readings of the period's philosophical, scientific, or literary representations of animals. Where such prior readings have focused on the role of reason in debates about human exceptionalism, this book turns instead to a series of cultural sites in which we find animal and human bodies sharing environments, mutually transforming and defining one another's lives. To uncover the animal body's role in anatomy, eroticism, architecture, labor, and consumption, Karen Raber analyzes canonical works including More's Utopia, Shakespeare's Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet, and Sidney's poetry, situating them among readings of human and equine anatomical texts, medical recipes, theories of architecture and urban design, husbandry manuals, and horsemanship treatises. Raber reconsiders interactions between environment, body, and consciousness that we find in early modern human-animal relations. Scholars of the Renaissance period recognized animals' fundamental role in fashioning what we call "culture," she demonstrates, providing historical narratives about embodiment and the cultural constructions of species difference that are often overlooked in ecocritical and posthumanist theory that attempts to address the "question of the animal."

Books of the Body

Books of the Body PDF Author: Andrea Carlino
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226092879
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
We usually see the Renaissance as a marked departure from older traditions, but Renaissance scholars often continued to cling to the teachings of the past. For instance, despite the evidence of their own dissections, which contradicted ancient and medieval texts, Renaissance anatomists continued to teach those outdated views for nearly two centuries. In Books of the Body, Andrea Carlino explores the nature and causes of this intellectual inertia. On the one hand, anatomical practice was constrained by a reverence for classical texts and the belief that the study of anatomy was more properly part of natural philosophy than of medicine. On the other hand, cultural resistance to dissection and dismemberment of the human body, as well as moral and social norms that governed access to cadavers and the ritual of their public display in the anatomy theater, also delayed anatomy's development. A fascinating history of both Renaissance anatomists and the bodies they dissected, this book will interest anyone studying Renaissance science, medicine, art, religion, and society.

Performing the Renaissance Body

Performing the Renaissance Body PDF Author: Sidia Fiorato
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110464810
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the Renaissance period the body emerges as the repository of social and cultural forces and a privileged metaphor for political practices and legal codification. Due to its ambivalent expressive force, it represents the seat and the means for the performance of normative identity and at the same time of alterity. The essays of the collection address the manifold articulations of this topic, demonstrating how the inscription of the body within the discursive spheres of gender identity, sexuality, law, and politics align its materiality with discourses whose effects are themselves material. The aesthetic and performative dimension of law inform the debates on the juridical constitution of authority, as well as its reflection on the formation and the moulding of individual subjectivity. Moreover, the inherently theatrical elements of the law find an analogy in the popular theatre, where juridical practices are represented, challenged, occasionally subverted or created. The works analyzed in the volume, in their ample spectre of topics and contexts aim at demonstrating how in the Renaissance period the body was the privileged focus of the social, legal and cultural imagination.

The Body Emblazoned

The Body Emblazoned PDF Author: Jonathan Sawday
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134526423
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Get Book Here

Book Description
An outstanding piece of scholarship and a fascinating read, The Body Emblazoned is a compelling study of the culture of dissection the English Renaissance, which informed intellectual enquiry in Europe for nearly two hundred years. In this outstanding work, Jonathan Sawday explores the dark, morbid eroticism of the Renaissance anatomy theatre, and relates it to not only the great monuments of Renaissance art, but to the very foundation of the modern idea of knowledge. Though the dazzling displays of the exterior of the body in Renaissance literature and art have long been a subject of enquiry, The Body Emblazoned considers the interior of the body, and what it meant to men and women in early modern culture. A richly interdisciplinary work, The Body Emblazoned re-assesses modern understanding of the literature and culture of the Renaissance and its conceptualization of the body within the domains of the medical and moral, the cultural and political.

Seen from Behind

Seen from Behind PDF Author: Patricia Lee Rubin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300236552
Category : Art, Renaissance
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This original book examines the range of meaning that has been attached to the male backside in Renaissance art and culture, the transformation of the base connotation of the image to high art, and the question of homoerotic impulses or implications of admiring male figures from behind.

The Prince’s Body

The Prince’s Body PDF Author: Valeria Finucci
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674967062
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book Here

Book Description
Defining the proper female body, seeking elective surgery for beauty, enjoying lavish spa treatments, and combating impotence might seem like today’s celebrity infatuations. However, these preoccupations were very much alive in the early modern period. Valeria Finucci recounts the story of a well-known patron of arts and music in Renaissance Italy, Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua (1562–1612), to examine the culture, fears, and captivations of his times. Using four notorious moments in Vincenzo’s life, Finucci explores changing concepts of sexuality, reproduction, beauty, and aging. The first was Vincenzo’s inability to consummate his earliest marriage and subsequent medical inquiry, which elucidates new concepts of female anatomy. Second, Vincenzo’s interactions with Bolognese doctor Gaspare Tagliacozzi, the “father of plastic surgery,” illuminate contemporary fascinations with elective procedures. Vincenzo’s use of thermal spas explores the proliferation of holistic, noninvasive therapies to manage pain, detoxify, and rehabilitate what the medicine of the time could not address. And finally, Vincenzo’s search for a cure for impotence later in life analyzes masculinity and aging. By examining letters, doctors’ advice, reports, receipts, and travelogues, together with (and against) medical, herbal, theological, even legal publications of the period, Finucci describes an early modern cultural history of the pathology of human reproduction, the physiology of aging, and the science of rejuvenation as they affected a prince with a large ego and an even larger purse. In doing so, she deftly marries salacious tales with historical analysis to tell a broader story of Italian Renaissance cultural adjustments and obsessions.

Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present

Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present PDF Author: Kate Fisher
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230354122
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Get Book Here

Book Description
An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.

Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy

Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Domenico Laurenza
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588394565
Category : Anatomy, Artistic
Languages : en
Pages : 52

Get Book Here

Book Description
Known as the "century of anatomy," the 16th century in Italy saw an explosion of studies and treatises on the discipline. Medical science advanced at an unprecedented rate, and physicians published on anatomy as never before. Simultaneously, many of the period's most prominent artists--including Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, and Rubens working in Italy--turned to the study of anatomy to inform their own drawings and sculptures, some by working directly with anatomists and helping to illustrate their discoveries. The result was a rich corpus of art objects detailing the workings of the human body with an accuracy never before attained. "Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy "examines this crossroads between art and science, showing how the attempt to depict bone structure, musculature, and our inner workings--both in drawings and in three dimensions--constituted an important step forward in how the body was represented in art. While already remarkable at the time of their original publication, the anatomical drawings by 16th-century masters have even foreshadowed developments in anatomic studies in modern times.

The Renaissance Nude

The Renaissance Nude PDF Author: Thomas Kren
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 160606584X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 436

Get Book Here

Book Description
A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.