Medici Women

Medici Women PDF Author: Gabrielle Langdon
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802038255
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 457

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Book Description
The ducal court of Cosimo I de' Medici in sixteenth-century Florence was one of absolutist, rule-bound order. Portraiture especially served the dynastic pretensions of the absolutist ruler, Duke Cosimo and his consort, Eleonora di Toledo, and was part of a Herculean programme of propaganda to establish legitimacy and prestige for the new sixteenth-century Florentine court. In this engaging and original study, Gabrielle Langdon analyses selected portraits of women by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Alessandro Allori, and other masters. She defines their function as works of art, as dynastic declarations, and as encoded documents of court culture and propaganda, illuminating Cosimo's conscious fashioning of his court portraiture in imitation of the great courts of Europe. Langdon explores the use of portraiture as a vehicle to express Medici political policy, such as with Cosimo's Hapsburg and Papal alliances in his bid to be made Grand Duke with hegemony over rival Italian princes. Stories from archives, letters, diaries, chronicles, and secret ambassadorial briefs, open up a world of fascinating, personalities, personal triumphs, human frailty, rumour, intrigue, and appalling tragedies. Lavishly illustrated, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal in the Court of Duke Cosimo I is an indispensable work for anyone with a passion for Italian renaissance history, art, and court culture.

Medici Women

Medici Women PDF Author: Gabrielle Langdon
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802038255
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 457

Get Book Here

Book Description
The ducal court of Cosimo I de' Medici in sixteenth-century Florence was one of absolutist, rule-bound order. Portraiture especially served the dynastic pretensions of the absolutist ruler, Duke Cosimo and his consort, Eleonora di Toledo, and was part of a Herculean programme of propaganda to establish legitimacy and prestige for the new sixteenth-century Florentine court. In this engaging and original study, Gabrielle Langdon analyses selected portraits of women by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Alessandro Allori, and other masters. She defines their function as works of art, as dynastic declarations, and as encoded documents of court culture and propaganda, illuminating Cosimo's conscious fashioning of his court portraiture in imitation of the great courts of Europe. Langdon explores the use of portraiture as a vehicle to express Medici political policy, such as with Cosimo's Hapsburg and Papal alliances in his bid to be made Grand Duke with hegemony over rival Italian princes. Stories from archives, letters, diaries, chronicles, and secret ambassadorial briefs, open up a world of fascinating, personalities, personal triumphs, human frailty, rumour, intrigue, and appalling tragedies. Lavishly illustrated, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal in the Court of Duke Cosimo I is an indispensable work for anyone with a passion for Italian renaissance history, art, and court culture.

The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo

The Cultural World of Eleonora di Toledo PDF Author: Konrad Eisenbichler
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351545175
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Eleonora di Toledo was a powerful and influential woman who, over the course of nearly a quarter century (1539-62), contributed profoundly to the cultural flowering of ducal Florence. Her patronage of some of the leading artists of the time, her support of newly arrived Jesuit preachers, her involvement in charitable activities, her unfailing devotion to her husband and his policies, not to mention her successful farming and business ventures are only some of the areas where her influence was unambiguously exercised and felt. She also provided the House of Medici with a full stable of children to re-invigorate the failing family line, ensure male succession even in the face of unexpected calamities, and provide enough females to establish marriage connections with a variety of noble and ruling houses in Italy. In spite of all these contributions, Eleonora has attracted little attention from scholars. This apparent disinterest may be a factor of Eleonora's personal style, or of the bad press that, as a Spanish noblewoman, she quickly received from her Florentine subjects, or of modern antipathy for some of the basic characteristics of ducal Florence. An examination of her impact on Tuscany is long overdue. In fact, a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the duchess can shed a more profound light not only on her as a person, or on her impact on Tuscan culture in the sixteenth century, but also on the contribution of female consorts to the vitality of a successful early-modern state. The essays collected here bring together a variety of scholars working in various disciplines. While many of the articles take their cue from art history (a natural reflection of the innovative research recent art historians have carried out on the duchess), they also reach out towards other disciplines - political history, literature, spectacle, and religion to mention just a few. In so doing, they expand our understanding of Eleonora's place in her society and reveal a very complex,

Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe

Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe PDF Author: J.R. Mulryne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317168917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The fourteen essays that comprise this volume concentrate on festival iconography, the visual and written languages, including ephemeral and permanent structures, costume, dramatic performance, inscriptions and published festival books that ’voiced’ the social, political and cultural messages incorporated in processional entries in the countries of early modern Europe. The volume also includes a transcript of the newly-discovered Register of Lionardo di Zanobi Bartholini, a Florentine merchant, which sets out in detail the expenses for each worker for the possesso (or Entry) of Pope Leo X to Rome in April 1513.

Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy

Motherhood and Patriarchal Masculinities in Sixteenth-Century Italian Comedy PDF Author: Yael Manes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317094034
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Exploring individual and collective formation of gender identities, this book contributes to current scholarly discourses by examining plays in the genre of 'erudite comedy' (commedia erudita), which was extremely popular among sixteenth-century Italians from the elite classes. Author Yael Manes investigates five erudite comedies-Ludovico Ariosto's I suppositi (1509), Niccolò Machiavelli's La Mandragola (1518) and Clizia (1525), Antonio Landi's Il commodo (1539), and Giovan Maria Cecchi's La stiava (1546)-to consider how erudite comedies functioned as ideological battlefields where the gender system of patriarchy was examined, negotiated, and critiqued. These plays reflect the patriarchal order of their elite social milieu, but they also offer a unique critical vantage point on the paradoxical formation of patriarchal masculinity. On the one hand, patriarchal ideology rejects the mother and forbids her as an object of desire; on the other hand, patriarchal male identity revolves around representations of motherhood. Ultimately, the comedies reflect the desire of the Italian Renaissance male elite for women who will provide children to their husbands but not actively assume the role of a mother. In sum, Manes reveals a wide cultural understanding that motherhood-as an activity that women undertake, not simply a relational position they occupy-challenges patriarchy because it bestows women with agency, power, and authority. Manes here recovers the complexity of Renaissance Italian discourse on gender and identity formation by approaching erudite comedies not only as mirrors of their audiences but also as vehicles for contemporary audiences' ideological, psychological, and emotional expressions.

The Politics of Water in the Art and Festivals of Medici Florence

The Politics of Water in the Art and Festivals of Medici Florence PDF Author: Felicia M. Else
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429890354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This book tells the story of one dynasty's struggle with water, to control its flow and manage its representation. The role of water in the art and festivals of Cosimo I and his heirs, Francesco I and Ferdinando I de' Medici, informs this richly-illustrated interdisciplinary study. Else draws on a wealth of visual and documentary material to trace how the Medici sought to harness the power of Neptune, whether in the application of his imagery or in the control over waterways and maritime frontiers, as they negotiated a place in the unstable political arena of Europe, and competed with foreign powers more versed in maritime traditions and aquatic imagery.

A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici

A Companion to Cosimo I de’ Medici PDF Author: Alessio Assonitis
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004465219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 659

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Book Description
Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.

Benedetto and Santi Buglioni

Benedetto and Santi Buglioni PDF Author: Allan Marquand
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sculptors
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description


Fecundity, Security, Eternity

Fecundity, Security, Eternity PDF Author: Catherine Vassaux
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781339672373
Category : Art, Italian
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
This thesis offers a new perspective on the relationship between the duchess Eleonora and the art of Bronzino in her private chapel of the Palazzo Vecchio, with an emphasis on her centrality to the conception of the chapel's subject matter and design. Building on previous scholarship, this project views the chapel's iconography and theological program as extensions of the allegorical images of fecundity, security, and eternity that decorated Eleonora's initial procession into Florence and which were used to construct her dynastic identity. Consequently, it is argued that the chapel imagery aided its primary viewer, the new duchess, in her duty to provide the Medici line with healthy male heirs, and provided her with the sacred model of the Virgin Mary to emulate. Also building on previous scholarship emphasizing the importance of the Eucharist to the chapel's program, this study expands on this thematic aspect by underscoring the extensive emphasis on the Virgin's maternal role in salvation as a statement of Eleonora's parallel influence in the Medici dynasty.

Routes of Image-making

Routes of Image-making PDF Author: Doris Galton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description


Eternal Covenant" in the Pentateuc

Eternal Covenant Author: Steven D. Mason
Publisher: T&T Clark
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This book provides the reader a uniquely comprehensive and exegetical study of "eternal covenant." It answers questions involving eternal covenant in the Bible by beginning with an exegetical study of Berit Olam" in the Pentateuch. The study reveals that Berit Olam" actually represents a bilateral and conditional arrangement that reflects certain common themes as it is used within distinct passages.