The Renaissance courtesan in words, letters and images

The Renaissance courtesan in words, letters and images PDF Author: Eugenio Giusti
Publisher: LED Edizioni Universitarie
ISBN: 8879167049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Although throughout history women had been confined to enclosed spaces, the advent of courtly life and culture required that men and women would share and interact in public arenas like the princely courts, intellectual salons, or gambling houses. But also in all of these public spaces behavioral rules and regulations aimed to control women’s body by equating honesty with chastity. In this monograph I analyze how in the XVI, XVII, and XVIII centuries women in general, and in particular prostitutes and courtesans, repeatedly challenged those rules in the attempt to affirm their individual freedom. I call this behavior «social amphibology », as just like amphibians these women were able to cross class boundaries and thrive in different social environments. My analysis has three complementary approaches. First, an historical approach where census documents and sumptuary laws are investigated in order to describe the ways in which the political establishment unsuccessfully attempts to enforce its rules over women’s behavior. Second, a literary approach where works by Castigione, Aretino, Bandello, and Veronica Franco are analyzed in order to emphasize the terminological proximity between the legal and the literary languages, and the evolution of the term «courtesan» with its attribute «honest». A third – visual – approach looks at prints of women’s clothing, made by XVI and XVII century artists.The iconographic similarity of all of the images requires a set of rubrics or labels, as a way to control such visual amphibology. In the last segment of this monograph I apply a diachronic perspective to these visual representations as I show how contemporary art historians use the same means of categorization, used in previous centuries, to identify – without any definite proof – paintings and prints included in two recent art exhibitions.

The Renaissance courtesan in words, letters and images

The Renaissance courtesan in words, letters and images PDF Author: Eugenio Giusti
Publisher: LED Edizioni Universitarie
ISBN: 8879167049
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Although throughout history women had been confined to enclosed spaces, the advent of courtly life and culture required that men and women would share and interact in public arenas like the princely courts, intellectual salons, or gambling houses. But also in all of these public spaces behavioral rules and regulations aimed to control women’s body by equating honesty with chastity. In this monograph I analyze how in the XVI, XVII, and XVIII centuries women in general, and in particular prostitutes and courtesans, repeatedly challenged those rules in the attempt to affirm their individual freedom. I call this behavior «social amphibology », as just like amphibians these women were able to cross class boundaries and thrive in different social environments. My analysis has three complementary approaches. First, an historical approach where census documents and sumptuary laws are investigated in order to describe the ways in which the political establishment unsuccessfully attempts to enforce its rules over women’s behavior. Second, a literary approach where works by Castigione, Aretino, Bandello, and Veronica Franco are analyzed in order to emphasize the terminological proximity between the legal and the literary languages, and the evolution of the term «courtesan» with its attribute «honest». A third – visual – approach looks at prints of women’s clothing, made by XVI and XVII century artists.The iconographic similarity of all of the images requires a set of rubrics or labels, as a way to control such visual amphibology. In the last segment of this monograph I apply a diachronic perspective to these visual representations as I show how contemporary art historians use the same means of categorization, used in previous centuries, to identify – without any definite proof – paintings and prints included in two recent art exhibitions.

Jacopo Tintoretto: Identity, Practice, Meaning

Jacopo Tintoretto: Identity, Practice, Meaning PDF Author: AA. VV.
Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Over the past twenty years or so it has finally been understood that Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19-1594) is an old master of the very highest calibre, whose sharp visual intelligence and brilliant oil technique provides a match for any painter of any time. Based on papers given at a conference held at Keble College, Oxford, to mark the quincentenary of Tintoretto’s birth, this volume comprises ten new essays written by an international range of scholars that open many fresh perspectives on this remarkable Venetian painter. Reflecting current ‘hot spots’ in Tintoretto studies, and suggesting fruitful avenues for future research, chapters explore aspects of the artist’s professional and social identity; his graphic oeuvre and workshop practice; his secular and sacred works in their cultural context; and the emergent artistic personality of his painter-son Domenico. Building upon the opening-up of the Tintoretto phenomenon to less fixed or partial viewpoints in recent years, this volume reveals the great master’s painting practice as excitingly experimental, dynamic, open-ended, and original.

Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present

Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present PDF Author: Maria Marotti
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271041250
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description


Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance

Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: Meredith K. Ray
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802097049
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
During the Italian Renaissance, dozens of early modern writers published collections of private correspondence, using them as vehicles for self-presentation, self-promotion, social critique, and religious dissent. Writing Gender in Women's Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance examines the letter collections of women writers, arguing that these works were a studied performance of pervasive ideas about gender as well as genre, a form of self-fashioning that variously reflected, manipulated, and subverted cultural and literary conventions regarding femininity and masculinity. Meredith K. Ray presents letter collections from authors of diverse backgrounds, including a noblewoman, a courtesan, an actress, a nun, and a male writer who composed letters under female pseudonyms. Ray's study includes extensive new archival research and highlights a widespread interest in women's letter collections during the Italian Renaissance that suggests a deep curiosity about the female experience and a surprising openness to women's participation in this kind of literary production.

The Renaissance of Letters

The Renaissance of Letters PDF Author: Paula Findlen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429770952
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The Renaissance of Letters traces the multiplication of letter-writing practices between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Italian peninsula and beyond to explore the importance of letters as a crucial document for understanding the Italian Renaissance. This edited collection contains case studies, ranging from the late medieval re-emergence of letter-writing to the mid-seventeenth century, that offer a comprehensive analysis of the different dimensions of late medieval and Renaissance letters—literary, commercial, political, religious, cultural, social, and military—which transformed them into powerful early modern tools. The Renaissance was an era that put letters into the hands of many kinds of people, inspiring them to see reading, writing, receiving, and sending letters as an essential feature of their identity. The authors take a fresh look at the correspondence of some of the most important humanists of the Italian Renaissance, including Niccolò Machiavelli and Isabella d'Este, and consider the use of letters for others such as merchants and physicians. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of Early Modern History and Literature, Renaissance Studies, and Italian Studies. The engagement with essential primary sources renders this book an indispensable tool for those teaching seminars on Renaissance history and literature.

The Renaissance World

The Renaissance World PDF Author: John Jeffries Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136894047
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 726

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Book Description
With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses the history of ideas, political history, cultural history and art history, this volume, in the successful Routledge Worlds series, offers a sweeping survey of Europe in the Renaissance, from the late thirteenth to early seventeenth centuries, and shows how the Renaissance laid key foundations for many aspects of the modern world. Collating thirty-four essays from the field's leading scholars, John Jeffries Martin shows that this period of rapid and complex change resulted from a convergence of a new set of social, economic and technological forces alongside a cluster of interrelated practices including painting, sculpture, humanism and science, in which the elites engaged. Unique in its balance of emphasis on elite and popular culture, on humanism and society, and on women as well as men, The Renaissance World grapples with issues as diverse as Renaissance patronage and the development of the slave trade. Beginning with a section on the antecedents of the Renaissance world, and ending with its lasting influence, this book is an invaluable read, which students and scholars of history and the Renaissance will dip into again and again.

Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art

Fashioning Identities in Renaissance Art PDF Author: Mary Rogers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351777696
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Originally published in 2000. Fashioning Identities analyses some of the different ways in which identities were fashioned in and with art during the Renaissance, taken as meaning the period c.1300-1600. The notion of such a search for new identities, expressed in a variety of new themes, styles and genres, has been all-pervasive in the historical and critical literature dealing with the period, starting with Burckhardt, and it has been given a new impetus by contemporary scholarship using a variety of methodological approaches. The identities involved are those of patrons, for whom artistic patronage was a means of consolidating power, projecting ideologies, acquiring social prestige or building a suitable public persona; and artists, who developed a distinctive manner to fashion their artistic identity, or drew attention to aspects of their artistic personality either in self portraiture, or the style and placing of their signature, or by exploiting a variety of literary forms.

Poems and Selected Letters

Poems and Selected Letters PDF Author: Veronica Franco
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226259854
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman prescribed by Renaissance gender ideology. As an "honored courtesan", Franco made her living by arranging to have sexual relations, for a high fee, with the elite of Venice and the many travelers—merchants, ambassadors, even kings—who passed through the city. Courtesans needed to be beautiful, sophisticated in their dress and manners, and elegant, cultivated conversationalists. Exempt from many of the social and educational restrictions placed on women of the Venetian patrician class, Franco used her position to recast "virtue" as "intellectual integrity," offering wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life. Franco became a writer by allying herself with distinguished men at the center of her city's culture, particularly in the informal meetings of a literary salon at the home of Domenico Venier, the oldest member of a noble family and a former Venetian senator. Through Venier's protection and her own determination, Franco published work in which she defended her fellow courtesans, speaking out against their mistreatment by men and criticizing the subordination of women in general. Venier also provided literary counsel when she responded to insulting attacks written by the male Venetian poet Maffio Venier. Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries make her life and work pertinent today.

Language and Images of Renaissance Italy

Language and Images of Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Alison Brown
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
The Italian Renaissance has traditionally been regarded as a critical turning point in the history of Europe; the vital stepping stone between the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason. This classical view of the Renaissance as the birth of individualism and modernity, as formulated by the famous Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, is challenged and reassessed in this intriguing and diverse group of essays. _ Leading scholars from different disciplines use a variety of approaches - textual and literary criticism, social anthropology and gender studies - to re-evaluate the period as a whole. the book is divided into three section, which discuss the model of death and rebirth and its political function; the social context of revival in terms of corporate and individual patronage; and the renaissance body as a political metaphor and social gesture. What emerges is an account of a mixed and lively culture which avoids the old generalizations and gives a fresh view of this most creative and fascinating period of European history.

The Renaissance Courtesan in Words, Letters and Images. Social Amphibology and Moral Framing (A Diachronic Perspective)

The Renaissance Courtesan in Words, Letters and Images. Social Amphibology and Moral Framing (A Diachronic Perspective) PDF Author: Eugenio L. Giusti
Publisher:
ISBN: 9788879166843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description