Italian Peninsula (c. 1501-1800)
More general subjects:
Contending Representations III: Questioning Republicanism in Early Modern Genoa
Several studies have been devoted to the flowering of the republic of Genoa during the so-called ‘siglo de los Genoveses’ when Genoa became the hub of European trade and an important center of artistic and literary production. Yet little attention has been granted to the political and cultural crisis that followed starting in 1559 and culminating in 1684 when the French bombed Genoa. Addressing this chronological gap the volume explores how the image of the Genoese Republic was shaped exploited or contested in the long seventeenth century. How did Genoese politicians and men of letters represent their homeland? How was Genoa represented in Spain or in the Low Countries? How was its political system conceived by Italian and foreign political writers and how did the prevailing absolutist model influence such ideas? In order to answer these questions the volume gathers contributions from art historians literary scholars political and cultural historians thus adopting a comparative multidisciplinary approach.
Contending Representations II: Entangled Republican Spaces in Early Modern Venice
This bookaddresses the issue of political celebration in early modern Venice. Dealing with processional orders and iconographic programs historiographical narratives and urbanistic canons stylistic features and diplomatic accounts the interdisciplinary contributions gathered in these pages aim to question the performative effectiveness and the social consistency of the so called ‘myth’ of Venice: a system of symbols beliefs and meanings offering a self-portrait of the ruling elite the Venetian patriciate. In order to do so the volume calls for a spatial turn in Venetian studies blurring the boundaries between institutionalized and unofficial ceremonial spaces and considering their ongoing interaction in representing the rule of the Serenissima. The twelve chapters move from Ducal Palace to the Venetian streets and from the city of Venice to its dominions thus widening considerably the range of social and political actors and audiences involved in the analysis. Such multifocal perspective allows us to challenge the very idea of a single ‘myth’ of Venice.
Noble Magnificence
Culture of the Performing Arts in Rome 1644-1740
The thirty chapters in this book are based on the work of an international multidisciplinary team of researchers and archivists brought together for the PerformArt project funded by the European Research Council from 2016 to 2022. This project investigated the artistic patronage of the great Roman aristocratic families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through research in the extant archives.After the accession to the papal throne of Innocent X in 1644 and more so after the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 – which led to a greater loss of power for the pope in his relations with other European states – the Roman families stepped up their efforts to assert their social preeminence not only through architecture and the fine arts but also through the ephemeral performing arts: music theatre and dance which were omnipresent throughout the year and especially during the intense period of artistic production that was the Roman Carnival. The search for traces of these spectacles in the archives of these families reveals that their desire to display their magnificence – an ideal well documented in the literature of the period – gave rise to lavish expenditure on a scale that could only be justified by the benefits (if not tangible then at least symbolic) they hoped to gain.The essays in this book which draw on social economic history the history of ideas and the evolving artistic practices of the time make a major contribution to our knowledge of courtly societies in Ancien Régime Europe by integrating the performing arts into their analyses in innovative ways.
À l’ombre du laurier
Musique et culture à Florence 1530-1570
Fruit de plus de quinze années de recherches dans les bibliothèques et archives de Florence ce livre souhaite mettre en évidence le rôle de la musique dans le dispositif culturel mis en place par les premiers ducs de Florence Alessandro et Cosimo 1 depuis la chute de la dernière République jusqu’à l’obtention par Cosimo du titre de grand-duc de Toscane par le pape Pie V. Ces quatre décennies marquées par des bouleversements politiques sociaux et culturels ont été scrutées avec la plus grande attention dans les domaines de l’histoire de l’art de l’histoire politique économique ou littéraire mais la place de la musique dans cette société en mouvement n’avait jamais été évaluée en profondeur. Observer la vie musicale florentine de cette période permet pourtant de révéler les mutations profondes des structures de pouvoir des réseaux de sociabilité et des référents culturels.
Suivant un plan chronologique le livre s’appuie sur certains personnages-clés qui traversent toute la période les peintres Bronzino et Vasari les écrivains et académiciens Benedetto Varchi Antonfrancesco Grazzini ou Giovan Battista Strozzi dont les collaborations et les amitiés avec les musiciens florentins ont laissé de nombreuses traces. En suivant les activités de cette communauté cette enquête relate la transformation progressive des canti carnascialeschi en mascherate de cour les débats musicaux au sein de l’Accademia Fiorentina le dynamisme de la pratique du madrigal polyphonique dans les milieux amateurs sans oublier les mécanismes du mécénat musical et la construction d’une musique de cour au service du nouveau duché des Médicis.
Raffaele Riario, Jacopo Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, 1471–1572
On Michelangelo’s first day in Rome in June 1496 Cardinal Raffaele Riario asked him if he could create ‘something beautiful’ in competition with the antique. The twenty-one-year old sculptor responded to this unique challenge with the statue of Bacchus now in the Bargello museum. This statue as well as the Sleeping Cupid which first brought Michelangelo to Riario’s attention have long been shrouded in mystery and the Bacchus as well as its patron have long suffered from critical censure.
Through a comprehensive analysis of overlooked and previously-unpublished sources this study sheds new light on the Sleeping Cupid the Bacchusand a fascinating period in the history of Renaissance Rome when the careers of Riario Galli and Michelangelo were closely intertwined. It considers the rise of the Riario dynasty starting with the election of Pope Sixtus IV in 1471 Riario’s partnership with Jacopo Galli in the reconstruction of the palace now known as the Palazzo della Cancelleria the attempted sale of Michelangelo’s Sleeping Cupid in Rome as an antiquity Riario’s patronage of the Bacchus and the Bacchus’s displayin the house of the Galli up until its sale to the Medici in 1572. Taking a broad interdisciplinary perspective it offers a fundamental reassessment of Cardinal Riario’s career as a patron of Jacopo Galli’s role as an intermediary for both Riario and Michelangelo and of Michelangelo’s collaboration with Riario and Galli.
Teaching Plato in Italian Renaissance Universities
During the Renaissance the Arts curriculum in universities was based almost exclusively on the teaching of Aristotle. With the revival of Plato however professors of philosophy started to deviate from the official syllabus and teach Plato’s dialogues. This collection of essays offers the first comprehensive overview of Platonic teaching in Italian Renaissance universities from the establishment of a Platonic professorship at the university of Florence-Pisa in the late 15th century to the introduction of Platonic teaching in the schools and universities of Bologna Padua Venice Pavia and Milan in the 16th and 17th centuries. The essays draw from new evidence found in manuscripts and archival material to explore how university professors adapted the format of Plato’s dialogues to suit their audience and defended the idea that Plato could be accommodated to university teaching. They provide significant and fundamental insight into how Platonism spread during the 16th and 17th centuries and how a new interpretation of Plato emerged distinct from the Neoplatonic tradition revived by Marsilio Ficino.
Repertorio di letteratura biblica in italiano a stampa (ca 1462-1650)
This catalogue collects Italian biblical works issued from the beginning of print to the middle of the 17th century. The abundant literature had multiple uses: the transmission of the sacred text its interpretation preaching religious education and devotional uses (meditation and prayer). It was also used as a foundation of learning and general knowledge ethics professional practices (i.e. in medecine and politics) domestic piety and everyday life as well as literary and theatrical entertainment. This catalogue will help to reconstruct the access to the Bible by Italian lay people. It contributes to the historiographical debate on how Italians could read the Bible after the ban of biblical translations. It represents an extremely rich source of information for future research about authorship readership and the very nature and use of this production shedding light on forgotten bestsellers of Italian Renaissance.
Languages and Cross-Cultural Exchanges in Renaissance Italy
Although much work has been done in the field of Renaissance Studies at present there is no book which offers a comparative overview of the linguistic interaction between Renaissance Italy and the wider world. The present volume is intended to fill this void representing the first-ever collection of essays that deal with multiple types of language contact and cross-cultural exchanges in and with respect to Renaissance Italy (1300‒1600). We bring diverse disciplinary perspectives together: literary scholars historians and linguists with different regional expertise; we argue for multilingualism and language contact as products of a period of dynamic change which cannot be fully grasped through a single framework. The contributions present a variety of case-studies by often cross-fertilising their approaches with other disciplinary lenses. This book aims to provide a comprehensive picture of a truly global Renaissance Italy where languages textual traditions and systems of knowledge from different geographical areas either combined or clashed. It takes a fresh approach to the history of late medieval and early modern Italy by focusing on East/West linguistic and cultural encounters transmission of ideas and texts multilingualism in literature (various genres and various forms of multilingualism) translation practices reception/adaptation of new knowledge transculturalism and literary exchanges and the relationship between languages and language varieties.
The Heresy of the Brothers, a Heterodox Community in Sixteenth-Century Italy
Around the mid-sixteenth century one of the largest Italian heterodox communities developed in Modena: the community of ‘Brothers’. At the beginning of the century a flourishing humanistic tradition had inspired protests against the authority of the Church and had led many of the city’s prominent figures to sympathize with Luther and the Reformation. Over the following decades such positions became more extreme: most of the ‘Brothers’ held radical convictions ranging from belief in predestination to contestation of the Antichrist pope. In some cases the ‘Brothers’ even went so far as to deny the value of baptism.
This heterodox community in Modena created a hidden network for the free expression of its reformed faith. Within twenty years however the election of Pope Pius V (1566-1572) and the consolidation of the Holy Office led to a harsh campaign to disperse dissenters in the city. Despite the protection of illustrious members of the Roman Catholic hierarchy the bishops of Modena and the dukes of Ferrara the Holy Office succeeded in repressing the community. The history of the ‘Brothers’ of Modena therefore provides a case study for understanding how the Inquisition influenced the balance of religious Italy changing the face of the Peninsula forever.
Convent Networks in Early Modern Italy
The walls of early modern convents suggested the existence of absolute conditions that seldom existed in reality. While the built enclosure communicated the convent’s isolation from the world outside connections between women religious and individuals or groups outside their communities extended into and from these houses with each constituency exploiting these associations to serve its own aims.Likewise the walls conveyed the presence of a homogeneous and unified community where often differences in status power and other interests led to the development of internal alliances and factions.
Building on an upsurge of scholarly interest in convent networks that previously has not been focused in a single volume this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how and why such associations existed. The collection examines personal spatial and temporal networks that emerged in among and beyond convents in Italy during the early modern period. These ties were established cultivated or even rejected in a variety of ways that influenced nuns’ devotional lives their relationships with patrons and their cultural engagement and production.
These essays cover the time period before and after the Council of Trent permitting an analysis of convents’ responses to changing power dynamics both inside and outside the enclosure. The book also engages a broad geographical and cultural range with chapters focusing on the centres of Florence Venice and Rome the courts of Urbino Ferrara and Mantua and smaller cities across Northern Italy offering unprecedented insights into early modern Italian convent life and its varied forms and modes of expression.
La Renaissance italienne dans les rues du Ghetto
L’œuvre poétique yiddish d’Élia Lévita (1469-1549)
Cet ouvrage constitue la première étude d’ensemble de l’œuvre poétique yiddish d’Élia Lévita (1469-1549) et cherche à définir sa place dans la littérature de la Renaissance en analysant les transferts esthétiques et culturels ayant présidé à sa production. Il situe l’œuvre vernaculaire de ce savant hébraïste proche des humanistes chrétiens dans les traditions poétiques juives hébraïques et yiddish et dans la logique d’une affirmation du rôle de l’écrivain séculier et de la langue vernaculaire dans la société juive. Il analyse également la portée des modèles extérieurs chrétiens en insistant sur l’inscription des romans de chevalerie de Lévita dans l’évolution générale du genre chevaleresque en Italie. L’Arioste et en particulier son Roland furieux ont joué un rôle majeur dans le raffinement progressif du projet esthétique du poète yiddish. Par son ampleur et par sa variété l’œuvre vernaculaire d’Élia Lévita constitue non seulement la première œuvre moderne de la littérature yiddish mais aussi un cas particulièrement évocateur de diffusion des modèles esthétiques de la Renaissance dans des catégories ethniques (les Juifs) et sociales (les classes populaires) que l’on aurait pu croire éloignées de ces mutations culturelles.
Jerusalem in the Alps
The Sacro Monte of Varallo and the Sanctuaries of North-Western Italy
The Sacro Monte (Holy Mountain) at Varallo is a sanctuary in the Italian Alps west of Milan. It was founded in the late fifteenth century by a Franciscan friar with the support of the town’s leading families. He designed it as a schematic replica of Jerusalem to enable the faithful to make a virtual pilgrimage to the Holy City if they could not undertake the perilous journey to visit it physically. The Sacro Monte consists of a sequence of chapels containing tableaux of life-size painted terra-cotta figures with fresco backgrounds recounting the life and Passion of Christ. A century later in the era of the Counter-Reformation a ‘second wave’ of Sacri Monti was constructed in the north-western Alps modelled on Varallo but dedicated to other devotional themes like the Rosary or the life of St Francis. All these sanctuaries like Varallo were the result of local initiatives initiated by the clergy and the leaders of the communities where they were situated. Like Varallo they were the work of artists and craftsmen from the alpine valleys or from nearby Lombardy. Long dismissed as folk art unworthy of serious critical attention the Sacri Monti are now recognised as monuments of unique artistic significance. In 2003 UNESCO listed nine of them in its register of World Heritage Sites. This book studies their development as the products of the religious sensibilities and the social economic and political conditions of the mountain communities that created them.
Luxury and the Ethics of Greed in Early Modern Italy
This book unravels the complex interaction of the paradigms of luxury and greed which lie at the origins of modern consumption practices. In the Western world the phenomenon of luxury and the ethical dilemmas it raised appeared for the first time since antiquity in early modern Italy. Here luxury emerged as a core idea in the conceptualization of consumption. Simultaneously greed - which manifested in new and unrestrained consumption practices - came under close ethical scrutiny. As the buying power of new classes gained pace these paradigms evolved as they continued both to influence and be influenced by other emerging global cultures through the early modern period.
After defining luxury and greed in their historical contexts the volume’s chapters elucidate new consumptive goods from chocolate to official robes of state; they examine how ideas about and objects of luxury and greed were disseminated through print diplomacy and gift-giving; and they reveal how even the most elite of consumers could fake their luxury objects. A group of international scholars from a range of disciplines thereby provide a new appraisal and vision of luxury and the ethics of greed in early modern Italy.
Languages of Power in Italy (1300-1600)
The essays in this collection explore the languages — artistic symbolic and ritual as well as written and spoken — in which power was articulated challenged contested and defended in Italian cities and courts villages and countryside between 1300 and 1600. Topics addressed include court ceremonial gossip and insult the performance of sanctity and public devotions the appropriation and reuse of imagery and the calculated invocation (and sometimes undermining) of authoritative models and figures. The collection balances a broad geographic and chronological range with a tight thematic focus allowing the individual contributions to engage in vigorous and fruitful debate with one another even as they speak to some of the central issues in current scholarship. The authors recognize that every institutional action is in its context a political act and that no institution operates disinterestedly. At the same time they insist on the inadequacy of traditional models whether Marxian or Weberian as the complex realities of the early modern state pose tough problems for any narrative of modernization rationalization and centralization.
The Greeks of Venice, 1498–1600
Immigration, Settlement, and Integration
People have always immigrated in search of better working and living conditions to escape persecution reconnect with family or simply for the experience. This volume traces the history of Venice’s Greek population during the formative years between 1498 and 1600 when thousands left their homelands for Venice. It describes how Greeks established new communal and social networks and follows their transition from outsiders to insiders (though not quite Venetians) through an approach that offers a comparative perspective between the ‘native’ and the immigrant. It places Greeks within the context of multi-cultural multi-ethnic and multi-lingual Venice. Personal stories are interwoven throughout for a more intimate account of how people lived worked prayed and formed new social networks. These accounts have been drawn from a variety of sources collected from the Venetian state archives the archives of the Venetian church and documentation held by the Hellenic Institute of Venice. Notarial documents petitions government and church records registries of marriages and deaths and census data form part of the collected material discussed here. Above all this study aims to reconstruct the lives of the largest ethnic and Christian minority in early modern Venice and to trace the journey of all immigrants from foreigner to local.
Kings of the Street
Power, Community, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence
For more than a century the artisans and labourers of Renaissance Florence turned the city into their own ‘empire’ during times of public festivity. From the republic of the late 1400s through to the grand duchy of the early seventeenth century up to forty brigades of men called the potenze or powers elected kings carved out territories and entered into a dialogue with citizens and with their Medici patrons.
This study traces the rise and fall of this carnivalesque subculture for the first time. It describes how workers represented themselves their neighbourhoods and their trades on the public stage through rituals such as stone-fighting and jousting and reveals how the politics of this festive world were closely linked to everyday patterns of social bargaining around the person of the prince. In the early 1600s the micro-states of the potenze were partially suppressed and they gradually disappeared from the Florentine urban stage. The account of this transformation presented here shows how Tridentine reform and economic crisis combined to undermine hypermasculine carnival ritual as a language of civic contract confining the potenze to making pilgrimages to shrines and convents in the Florentine countryside. At the same time it is shown how economic and religious change empowered groups of artisan women to take up the model of the potenze in order to make their own collective pilgrimages outside the city walls.
Through the story of the potenze this book provides fresh insights into the dynamics of class and gender relations and the nature of agency in early modern Italy.
Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual
Studies in Italian Urban Culture
This collection of fifteen studies brings together scholars of late medieval Renaissance and early modern Italy to reflect on the multifaceted world of ritual. The scope is expansive covering four centuries and the length and breadth of the Italian peninsula.
Because of older presumptions about the modernity of the Renaissance and hence its supposed aversion to the irrational scholarship on ritual life in Italian city-states of the Renaissance has lagged behind the historiography on symbols and rituals in monarchies north of the Alps. Only by the 1990s had a wide range of scholars across disciplines become interested in these subjects and approaches for the late medieval and early modern Italian city-state; yet no synthesis or comparative work on rituals and symbols has peered across the regional enclaves of Italy. Through original research in libraries and archives across the Italian peninsula these essays analyze the richness and importance of ritual at the heart of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation states the importance of oaths ritual space the power of images processions curses guild ceremonies saints and more. The wide geographic and disciplinary range of these essays provides a new platform for viewing the significance of ritual and symbolic power in Renaissance and early modern Italy.
Faith’s Boundaries
Laity and Clergy in Early Modern Confraternities
Who owns the spaces of religion? Does the question matter or even make sense? Modern distinctions between sacred and secular spheres tend to assume that clergy dominate the former and lay people the latter. A man or woman living in the early modern period might not have been so sure. They would have thought more immediately of things of heaven and things of earth and would have seen each as the concern of clergy and laity alike. Faith’s boundaries while real were very porous. This collection offers the first sustained comparative examination of lay-clerical relations in confraternities through the late medieval and early modern periods. It shows how laity and clergy debated accommodated resolved or deflected the key issues of gender race politics class and power. The sixteen essays are organized into six sections that consider different aspects of the function of confraternities as social spaces where laity and clergy met mediated and sometimes competed and fought. They cover a period historically when kinship was a dominant metaphor in religious life and when kinship groups like confraternities were dominant models in religious institutions. They deal with Catholic Jewish and Islamic confraternities and range geographically from Europe to the Middle East Central and South Asia and Latin America.
Les théâtres de « Maures et Chrétiens »
Conflits politiques et dispositifs de réconciliation (Espagne, Sicile, XVIIe-XXIe siècle)
Jeux théâtraux performances rituelles et fêtes urbaines dans maintes villes d’Espagne et d’Italie du Sud mobilisent depuis le xviie siècle l’histoire de l’affrontement entre « Maures et Chrétiens ». Loin d’être des épiphénomènes de type folklorique ces manifestations fortement soutenues par les pouvoirs locaux impliquent tous les secteurs des sociétés concernées et dépassent le temps et l’espace qui leur est dévolu pour charpenter des discours et des pratiques sociales des modes de gouvernance politique et de gestion du sacré. Deborah Puccio-Den nous livre ici les résultats de plus de dix ans d’enquêtes de terrain au pays valencien en Andalousie en Aragon et en Sicile articulés dans une perspective comparatiste et conjuguant la méthode historique à la démarche anthropologique. Cette double approche fait émerger les multiples relations de sens établies par les acteurs entre les anciennes batailles opposant chrétiens et musulmans et les conflits plus récents qui ont ébranlé ces pays du Sud de l’Europe : la guerre civile espagnole et le combat entre la mafia sicilienne et le front de l’Antimafia. L’hypothèse explorée par cet ouvrage identifie dans ces théâtralisations de la guerre et de la conversion religieuses des opérateurs de pacification qui tout en conférant les traits des ennemis d’antan - barbarie idolâtrie superstition - aux adversaires politiques du présent ménagent les conditions symboliques et réelles de leur réintégration sociale. À travers cette réflexion fondée sur une microanalyse des mécanismes de fabrication et de résorption de l’altérité intérieure c’est la prégnance du lien entre politique et religieux au sein des sociétés démocratiques du monde occidental qui est mise au jour.Deborah Puccio-Den anthropologue est chargée de recherche au CNRS rattachée au Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale (Institut Marcel Mauss EHESS/CNRS). Auteur de l’ouvrage Masques et dévoilements. Jeux du féminin dans les rituels carnavalesques et nuptiaux Paris CNRS Éditions 2002 elle a aussi consacré plusieurs travaux aux constructions judiciaires artistiques et mémorielles de la mafia sicilienne. Ses recherches actuelles dans le cadre d’une anthropologie pragmatique de la justice explorent parallèlement les pratiques professionnelles des juges anti-mafia et le fonctionnement de l’association secrète Cosa Nostra.