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.

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


The Honest Courtesan

The Honest Courtesan PDF Author: Margaret F. Rosenthal
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022602749X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the cortigiana onesta—the honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life? Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was such a woman, a writer and citizen of Venice, whose published poems and familiar letters offer rich testimony to the complexity of the honest courtesan's position. Margaret F. Rosenthal draws a compelling portrait of Veronica Franco in her cultural social, and economic world. Rosenthal reveals in Franco's writing a passionate support of defenseless women, strong convictions about inequality, and, in the eroticized language of her epistolary verses, the seductive political nature of all poetic contests. It is Veronica Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women—and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries—that makes her literary works and her dealings with Venetian intellectuals so pertinent today. Combining the resources of biography, history, literary theory, and cultural criticism, this sophisticated interdisciplinary work presents an eloquent and often moving account of one woman's life as an act of self-creation and as a complex response to social forces and cultural conditions. "A book . . . pleasurably redolent of Venice in the 16th-century. Rosenthal gives a vivid sense of a world of salons and coteries, of intricate networks of family and patronage, and of literary exchanges both intellectual and erotic."—Helen Hackett, Times Higher Education Supplement The Honest Courtesan is the basis for the film Dangerous Beauty (1998) directed by Marshall Herskovitz. (The film was re-titled The Honest Courtesan for release in the UK and Europe in 1999.)

Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative

Caravaggio and Pictorial Narrative PDF Author: Lorenzo Pericolo
Publisher: Harvey Miller
ISBN: 9781905375486
Category : Painters
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
HMSBA is Harvey Miller Studies in Baroque Art.

Loss and the Other in the Visionary Work of Anna Maria Ortese

Loss and the Other in the Visionary Work of Anna Maria Ortese PDF Author: Vilma DeGasperin
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199673810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Combines theme and genre analysis in a study of the Italian author, from her first literary writings in the 1930s to her novels in the 1990s.

The Clothing of the Renaissance World

The Clothing of the Renaissance World PDF Author: Cesare Vecellio
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780500514269
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 600

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Book Description
A tour de force of scholarship and book production: an essential reference for anyone interested in costume history, Renaissance studies, theater, and ethnography.

Anagram Solver

Anagram Solver PDF Author: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408102579
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
Anagram Solver is the essential guide to cracking all types of quiz and crossword featuring anagrams. Containing over 200,000 words and phrases, Anagram Solver includes plural noun forms, palindromes, idioms, first names and all parts of speech. Anagrams are grouped by the number of letters they contain with the letters set out in alphabetical order so that once the letters of an anagram are arranged alphabetically, finding the solution is as easy as locating the word in a dictionary.

On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy

On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Douglas Biow
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812246713
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
In recent decades, scholars have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt's notion that the free, untrammeled, and essentially modern Western individual emerged in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow does not deny the strong cultural and historical constraints that placed limits on identity formation in the early modern period. Still, as he contends in this witty, reflective, and generously illustrated book, the category of the individual was important and highly complex for a variety of men in this particular time and place, for both those who belonged to the elite and those who aspired to be part of it. Biow explores the individual in light of early modern Italy's new patronage systems, educational programs, and work opportunities in the context of an increased investment in professionalization, the changing status of artisans and artists, and shifting attitudes about the ideology of work, fashion, and etiquette. He turns his attention to figures familiar (Benvenuto Cellini, Baldassare Castiglione, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jacopo Tintoretto, Giorgio Vasari) and somewhat less so (the surgeon-physician Leonardo Fioravanti, the metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio). One could excel as an individual, he demonstrates, by possessing an indefinable nescio quid, by acquiring, theorizing, and putting into practice a distinct body of professional knowledge, or by displaying the exclusively male adornment of impressively designed facial hair. Focusing on these and other matters, he reveals how we significantly impoverish our understanding of the past if we dismiss the notion of the individual from our narratives of the Italian and the broader European Renaissance.

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.

Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice

Textual Masculinity and the Exchange of Women in Renaissance Venice PDF Author: Courtney Quaintance
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442649135
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Analyzes the pornographic poetry, letters, plays, and verse dialogues written in poet Domenico Venier's social circle, showing how male writers created female characters who were defiled and available to all. Also shows how two women writers with ties to the salon appropriated and transformed these tropes of female sexuality.