Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura PDF Author: Peter D'Epiro
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 038572019X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
A witty, erudite celebration of fifty great Italian cultural achievements that have significantly influenced Western civilization from the authors of What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? “Sprezzatura,” or the art of effortless mastery, was coined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. No one has demonstrated effortless mastery throughout history quite like the Italians. From the Roman calendar and the creator of the modern orchestra (Claudio Monteverdi) to the beginnings of ballet and the creator of modern political science (Niccolò Machiavelli), Sprezzatura highlights fifty great Italian cultural achievements in a series of fifty information-packed essays in chronological order.

Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura PDF Author: Peter D'Epiro
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 038572019X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book Here

Book Description
A witty, erudite celebration of fifty great Italian cultural achievements that have significantly influenced Western civilization from the authors of What Are the Seven Wonders of the World? “Sprezzatura,” or the art of effortless mastery, was coined in 1528 by Baldassare Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier. No one has demonstrated effortless mastery throughout history quite like the Italians. From the Roman calendar and the creator of the modern orchestra (Claudio Monteverdi) to the beginnings of ballet and the creator of modern political science (Niccolò Machiavelli), Sprezzatura highlights fifty great Italian cultural achievements in a series of fifty information-packed essays in chronological order.

Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura PDF Author: Paolo D'Angelo
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231540345
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
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.

Sprezzatura

Sprezzatura PDF Author: Mike Young
Publisher: Publishing Genius Press
ISBN: 9780988750395
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Poetry. SPREZZATURA is a collection of poems about love and fear and money, about your own devices and stupid contemporary immune systems, about how we know what we know in a confusing era of fleeting information. SPREZZATURA is about how we know our feelings, and how we feel our knowledge.

Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy

Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy PDF Author: Eugenia Paulicelli
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134787103
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
The first comprehensive study on the role of Italian fashion and Italian literature, this book analyzes clothing and fashion as described and represented in literary texts and costume books in the Italy of the 16th and 17th centuries. Writing Fashion in Early Modern Italy emphasizes the centrality of Italian literature and culture for understanding modern theories of fashion and gauging its impact in the shaping of codes of civility and taste in Europe and the West. Using literature to uncover what has been called the ’animatedness of clothing,’ author Eugenia Paulicelli explores the political meanings that clothing produces in public space. At the core of the book is the idea that the texts examined here act as maps that, first, pinpoint the establishment of fashion as a social institution of modernity; and, second, gauge the meaning of clothing at a personal and a political level. As well as Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and Cesare Vecellio’s The Clothing of the Renaissance World, the author looks at works by Italian writers whose books are not yet available in English translation, such as those by Giacomo Franco, Arcangela Tarabotti, and Agostino Lampugnani. Paying particular attention to literature and the relevance of clothing in the shaping of codes of civility and style, this volume complements the existing and important works on Italian fashion and material culture in the Renaissance. It makes the case for the centrality of Italian literature and the interconnectedness of texts from a variety of genres for an understanding of the history of Italian style, and serves to contextualize the debate on dress in other European literatures.

The Absence of Grace

The Absence of Grace PDF Author: Harry Berger
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804739047
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The Absence of Grace is a study of male fantasy, representation anxiety, and narratorial authority in two sixteenth-century books, Baldassare Castiglione's Il libro del Cortegiano (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa's Galateo (1558). The interpretive method is a form of close reading the author describes as reconstructed old New Criticism, that is, close reading conditioned by an interest in and analysis of the historical changes reflected in the text. The book focuses on the way the Courtier and Galateo cope with and represent the interaction between changes of elite culture and the changing construction of masculine identity in early modern Europe. More specifically, it connects questions of male fantasy and masculine identity to questions about the authority and reliability of narrators, and shows how these questions surface in narratorial attitudes toward socioeconomic rank or class, political power, and gender. The book is in three parts. Part One examines a distinction and correlation the Courtier establishes between two key terms, (1) sprezzatura, defined as a behavioral skill intended to simulate the attributes of (2) grazia, understood as the grace and privileges of noble birth. Because sprezzatura is negatively conceptualized as the absence of grace it generates anxiety and suspicion in performers and observers alike. In order to suggest how the binary opposition between these terms affected the discourse of manners, the author singles out the titular episode of Galateo, an anecdote about table manners, which he reads closely and then sets in its historical perspective. Part Two takes up the question of sprezzatura in the gender debate that develops in Book 3 of the Courtier, and Part Three explores in detail the characterization of the two narrators in the Courtier and Galateo, who are represented as unreliable and an object of parody or critique.

The Book of the Courtier

The Book of the Courtier PDF Author: Baldassarre Castiglione
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description


Italian Chic

Italian Chic PDF Author: Andrea Ferolla
Publisher: Assouline Publishing
ISBN: 1614286809
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 6

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Book Description
Italy is a country synonymous with style and beauty in all aspects of life: the rich history of Rome, Renaissance art of Florence, graceful canals of Venice, high fashion of Milan, signature pasta alla bolognese of Bologna, colorful architecture of Portofino and winking blue waters of Capri and the Amalfi Coast, among many others. Italians themselves live effortlessly amid all this splendor, knowing instinctively just the type of outfit to throw on, design element to balance, or delectable ingredient to add.

You, Inc.

You, Inc. PDF Author: Harry Beckwith
Publisher: Balance
ISBN: 0759572860
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
In You, Inc. Beckwith provides practical tips, anecdotes and insights based on his 30 years of marketing and selling his advertising services. Beckwith learned early on in his career that no matter what product you're selling, the most important component of the product is you. In You, Inc.: A Field Guide to Selling Yourself, Beckwith relates tantalizing tidbits and real stories of how to harness your enthusiasm with an ability to impress your key accounts.Written in his traditional homespun style, Beckwith offers doses of humour and pithy knowledge to anyone who wants to seal the deal and thrive in business.

True Style

True Style PDF Author: G. Bruce Boyer
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465061591
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
From choosing the right pair of eyeglasses to properly coordinating a shirt, tie, and pocket square, getting dressed is an art to be mastered. Yet, how many of us just throw on, well, whatever each morning? How many understand the subtleties of selecting the right pair of socks or the most compatible patterns of our various garments-much less the history, imperatives, and importance of our choices? In True Style, acclaimed fashion expert G. Bruce Boyer provides a crisp, indispensable primer for this daily ritual, cataloguing the essential elements of the male wardrobe and showing how best to employ them. In witty, stylish prose, Boyer breezes through classic items and traditions in menswear, detailing the evolution and best uses of fabrics like denim and linen, accoutrements like neckties and eyeglasses, and principles for combining patterns, colors, and textures. He enlightens readers about acceptable circumstances for donning a turtleneck, declaims the evils of wearing dress shoes without socks, and trumpets the virtues of sprezzatura, the artistry of concealing effort beneath a cloak of nonchalance. With a gentle yet firm approach to the rules of dressing and an incredible working knowledge of the different items, styles, and principles of menswear, Boyer provides essential wardrobe guidance for the discriminating gentleman, explaining what true style looks like-and why.

The Compleat Gentleman

The Compleat Gentleman PDF Author: Brad Miner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1684512158
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
“Here is a welcome reminder that men can be gentlemen without turning into ladies—or louts.”—Michelle Malkin "Miner writes with wit and charm."—Wall Street Journal The Gentleman: An Endangered Species? The catalog of masculine sins grows by the day—mansplaining, manspreading, toxic masculinity—reflecting our confusion over what it means to be a man. Is a man’s only choice between the brutish, rutting #MeToo lout and the gelded imitation woman, endlessly sensitive and fun to go shopping with? No. Brad Miner invites you to discover the oldest and best model of manhood— the gentleman. In this tour de force of popular history and gentlemanly persuasion, Miner lays out the thousand-year history of this forgotten ideal and makes a compelling case for its modern revival. Three masculine archetypes emerge here—the warrior, the lover, and the monk—forming the character of “the compleat gentleman.” He cultivates a martial spirit in defense of the true and the beautiful. He treats the opposite sex with passionate respect. And he values learning in pursuit of the truth. Miner’s gentleman stands out for the combination of discretion, decorum, and nonchalance that the Renaissance called sprezzatura. He belongs to an aristocracy of virtue, not of wealth or birth, following a lofty code of manly conduct, which, far from threatening democracy, is necessary for its survival.