An exploration of the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance that shows us how and why Florence became the center of the revival of Greek and Classical culture Written by a lover of Florence, The Heart of the Renaissance explores the Greek mythology and Christian traditions and legends shown in the great works of art and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. Richard Lloyd provides historical context to the stories of local saints and miraculous works of art, details the lives of the artists and their patrons, and gives precise locations to the city's works of art and notable buildings. Gorgeously illustrated, the book acts as a practical guide for art lovers exploring Florence, paying homage to the splendors of the city, its history, its art, and its architecture.

This lovely book provides an introduction to the activities of the leading artists active in Florence during one decade of the quattrocento. It illustrates their special contributions and highlights their differences, common sources and ambitions, and responses to each other. It also explain how their art was made within the framework established by the religious, political, and social needs of powerful Florentine families. This was an era when Lorenzo de'Medici and his allies were working to consolidate their dominance in Florence, and cultivation of the visual arts were an essential part of the way in which they asserted their influence. Competition and collaboration was encouraged between artists, as was innovation in subject and technique. The book concentrates on the art of Andrea Verrocchio, Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo, Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi. Their paintings are presented within the context of the other arts practiced in the same or in neighboring workshops, and a number of works in other media are included: sculpture and objects in marble, bronze, and clay; manuscript illumination; medals; engravings and drawings. Among the drawings discussed are some by the young Leonardo, who worked with Verrocchio and was responsive to the art of the Pollaiuolo brothers during this period.

Sansovino successively dismantled and reconstituted the categories of art-making. Hardly capable of sustaining a program of reform, the experimental art of this period was succeeded by a new era of cultural codification in the second half of the sixteenth century. --

Building the Italian Renaissance focuses on the competition to select a team to execute the final architectural challenge of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore--the erection of its dome. Although the model for the dome was widely known, the question of how this was to be accomplished was the great challenge of the age. This dome would be the largest ever built. This is foremost a technical challenge but it is also a philosophical one. The project takes place at an important time for Florence. The city is transitioning from a High Medieval world view into the new dynamics and ideas and will lead to the full flowering of what we know as the Renaissance. Thus the competition at the heart of this game plays out against the background of new ideas about citizenship, aesthetics, history (and its application to the present), and new technology. The central challenge is to expose players to complex and multifaceted situations and to individuals that animated life in Florence in the early 1400s. Humanism as a guiding philosophy is taking root and scholars are looking for ways to link the mercantile city to the glories of Rome and to the wisdom of the ancients across many fields. The aesthetics of the classical world (buildings, plastic arts and intellectual pursuits) inspired wonder, perhaps even envy, but the new approaches to the past by scholars such as Petrarch suggested that perhaps the creative classes are not simply crafts people, but men of ideas. Three teams compete for the honor to construct the dome, a project overseen by the Arte Della Lana (wool workers guild) and judged by them and a group of Florentine citizens who are merchants, aristocrats, learned men, and laborers. Their goal is to make the case for the building to live up to the ideals of Florence. The game gives students a chance to enter into the world of Florence in the early 1400s to develop an understanding of the challenges and complexity of such a major artistic and technical undertaking while providing an opportunity to grasp the interdisciplinary nature of major public works.

In today's increasingly electronic world, we say our personality traits are "hard-wired" and we "replay" our memories. But we use a different metaphor when we speak of someone "reading" another's mind or a desire to "turn over a new leaf"—these phrases refer to the "book of the self," an idea that dates from the beginnings of Western culture. Eric Jager traces the history and psychology of the self-as-text concept from antiquity to the modern day. He focuses especially on the Middle Ages, when the metaphor of a "book of the heart" modeled on the manuscript codex attained its most vivid expressions in literature and art. For instance, medieval saints' legends tell of martyrs whose hearts recorded divine inscriptions; lyrics and romances feature lovers whose hearts are inscribed with their passion; paintings depict hearts as books; and medieval scribes even produced manuscript codices shaped like hearts. "The Book of the Heart provides a fresh perspective on the influence of the book as artifact on our language and culture. Reading this book broadens our appreciation of the relationship between things and ideas."—Henry Petroski, author of The Book on the Bookshelf

European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of these conventions in travel writing, science, and, most unexpectedly, art: the Arctic. Icy, unpopulated, visually and temporally “abstract,” the far North – a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination – offered more than new stuff to be mapped, plundered, or even seen. Neither a continent, an ocean, nor a meteorological circumstance, the Arctic forced visitors from England, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, to grapple with what we would now call a “nonsite,” spurring dozens of previously unknown works, objects, and texts – and this all in an intellectual and political milieu crackling with Reformation debates over art’s very legitimacy. Into the White uses five case studies to probe how the early modern Arctic (as site, myth, and ecology) affected contemporary debates of perception and matter, of representation, discovery, and the time of the earth – long before the nineteenth century romanticized the polar landscape. In the far North, this book contends, the Renaissance exotic became something far stranger than the marvelous or the curious, something darkly material and unmasterable, something beyond the idea of image itself.

"This book introduces, for the first time in English, a fascinating yet strangely neglected aspect of Italian Renaissance art. During the quattrocento painting became more popular and probably more beautiful than at any time before or since. House interiors and furniture were painted with exotic stories and symbols, one of the most fashionable possessions in the grandest room in the palazzo being the painted cassone or marriage chest." /