Between 1289 and 1327 Siena witnessed a series of lavish ceremonial events marking the visits to the city of successive Angevin kings and princes, members of the French dynasty that ruled the whole of southern Italy. The reason for these magnificent civic rituals was Siena's status as a Guelph city state closely allied both to the papacy and to the kingdom of Naples. Based on extensive new research, including unpublished archival material, Diana Norman explores in detail the nature and extent of this distinctive political and diplomatic relationship and the ways in which it impacted upon the production and dissemination of Sienese art during the first half of the fourteenth century. In so doing, she demonstrates that this relationship not only informed the conception and resolution of a number of major pictorial schemes for key civic sites in Siena itself, but that it also familiarised the Angevin royal family with the quality of contemporary Sienese art. This, in turn, led to the employment of Sienese artists by the Angevins and to the production of significant images that commemorated various members of the dynasty. In this beautifully illustrated book, works of art executed by well-known fourteenth-century artists - including Simone Martini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Tino di Camaino - are examined in a new light, together with other finely crafted objects produced by lesser known artists, all whom contributed to this hitherto over-looked example of late medieval cultural exchange.

Joanna Cannon's scholarship and teaching have helped shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art; this essay collection by her former students is a tribute to her work.

(The open access version of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.) The book proposes a reassessment of royal portraiture and its function in the Middle Ages via a comparative analysis of works from different areas of the Mediterranean world, where images are seen as only one outcome of wider and multifarious strategies for the public mise-en-scène of the rulers’ bodies. Its emphasis is on the ways in which medieval monarchs in different areas of the Mediterranean constructed their outward appearance and communicated it by means of a variety of rituals, object-types, and media. Contributors are Michele Bacci, Nicolas Bock, Gerardo Boto Varela, Branislav Cvetković, Sofia Fernández Pozzo, Gohar Grigoryan Savary, Elodie Leschot, Vinni Lucherini, Ioanna Rapti, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, Marta Serrano-Coll, Lucinia Speciale, Manuela Studer-Karlen, Mirko Vagnoni, and Edda Vardanyan.

This book is the first comprehensive study of images of rape in Italian painting at the dawn of the Renaissance. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Péter Bokody examines depictions of sexual violence in religion, law, medicine, literature, politics, and history writing produced in kingdoms (Sicily and Naples) and city-republics (Florence, Siena, Lucca, Bologna and Padua). Whilst misogynistic endorsement characterized many of these visual discourses, some urban communities condemned rape in their propaganda against tyranny. Such representations of rape often link gender and aggression to war, abduction, sodomy, prostitution, pregnancy, and suicide. Bokody also traces how the new naturalism in painting, introduced by Giotto, increased verisimilitude, but also fostered imagery that coupled eroticism and violation. Exploring images and texts that have long been overlooked, Bokody's study provides new insights at the intersection of gender, policy, and visual culture, with evident relevance to our contemporary condition.

Celebrating the Virgin Mary as both an object of religious affection and a focus of civic pride, artists of fourteenth-century Siena established for their city a vibrant tradition that continued into the early decades of the next century. Such celebratory portraits of the Virgin were also common in Siena's extensive subject territories, the contado. This richly illustrated book explores late medieval Sienese art--how it was created, commissioned, and understood by the citizens of Siena. Examining political, economic, and cultural relations between Siena and the contado, Diana Norman offers a new understanding of Marian art and its political function as an expression of civic ideology. Drawing on extensive unpublished archives, Norman reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the commission of Marian art in the three most prestigious locations of fourteenth-century Siena: the cathedral, the Palazzo Pubblico, and the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. She analyzes similarly important commissions in the contado towns of Massa Marittima, Montalcino, and Montepulciano. Casting new light on such topics as the original site for the reliquary tomb of Saint Cerbone, patron saint of Massa Marittima, and the identity of the patrons of the Marian frescoes in the rural hermitage of San Leonardo al Lago, the author deepens our insight into the origins and meanings of Sienese art production of the late medieval period.

We live in a world in which almost all states purport to be republican. Very few adhere to the Ciceronian concept of res publica, understood as “that which belongs to the popolo (respublica respopuli) [...] and which has the observance of the law and the commonality of interests as its foundation”. The concept of republicanism is traditionally connected to the principle that true political freedom consists of not being subject to the arbitrary will of any man or group of men, and it requires equality of civil and political rights. Republicanism has attracted scholars who aim to develop insights from the classical republican tradition into an attractive political doctrine suitable for modern pluralistic societies. The volume examines republicanism from an historical and theoretical perspective after many years of scholarly investigation and debate.

"Siena rivaled Florence in the arts throughout the 13th and 14th centuries: the important late medieval painter Duccio (1253?1319) was a Sienese, but worked across the peninsula, and the mural of "Good Government" by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico, or town hall, is a magnificent example of late-Medieval/early Renaissance art as well as a representation of the utopia of urban society as conceived during that period. Siena was devastated by the Black Death of 1348, and also suffered from ill-fated financial enterprises. In 1355, with the arrival of Charles IV of Luxembourg in the city, the population rose and suppressed the government of the Nove (Nine), establishing that Dodici (Twelve) nobles assisted by a council with a popular majority. This was also short-lived, being replaced by the Quindici (Fifteen) reformers in 1385, the Dieci (Ten, 1386?1387), Undici (Eleven, 1388?1398) and Twelve Priors (1398?1399) who, in the end, gave the city's seigniory to Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan in order to defend it from the Florentine expansionism."--Wikipedia.