In 1540 Antonio Lafreri, a native of Besançon transplanted to Rome, began publishing maps and other printed images that depicted major monuments and antiquities in Rome. These prints--of statues and ruined landscapes, inscriptions and ornaments, reconstructed monuments and urban denizens--evoked ancient Rome and appealed to the taste for classical antiquity that defined the Renaissance. Collections of these prints came to be known as the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, the "Mirror of Roman Magnificence." Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the University of Chicago Library's Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae, the largest collection of its kind in the world, The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome places these prints in their historical context and examines their publishing history. Editor Rebecca Zorach traces their journey from their creators and publishers to pilgrims, collectors, antiquarians, and dealers--"virtual tourists" who, over several centuries, revisited and reinvented the Renaissance image of Rome. A marvelous exploration of a rich collection of engravings and etchings, this illustrated volume will fascinate anyone interested in Renaissance Rome, the history of print collecting, the reception of antiquity, and tourism.

In sixteenth-century Italy, Rome ranked second only to Venice as an important center for music book production. Throughout the century, printers in the Eternal City experimented more readily and more consistently with the materiality of the book than their Venetian counterparts, who, by standardizing their printing methods, came to dominate the international marketplace. The Romans' ingenuity and willingness to meet individual clients' needs resulted in music editions in a broader array of shapes and sizes, employing a wider range of printing techniques. They became "boutique" printers, eschewing the run-of-the-mill in favor of tailoring production to varied market demands. Accommodating the diverse requirements of their clientele, they supplied customized volumes, which Venetian presses either could not--or would not--produce. In Printing Music in Renaissance Rome, author Jane A. Bernstein offers a panoramic view of the cultures of music and the book in Rome from the beginning of printing in 1476 through the early seventeenth century. Emphasizing the exceptionalism of Roman music publishing, she highlights the innovative printing technologies and book forms devised by Roman bookmen. She also analyzes the Church's predominant influence on the book industry and, in turn, the Roman press's impact on such important composers as Palestrina, Marenzio, Victoria, and Cavalieri. Drawing on innovative publications, Bernstein reveals a synergistic relationship between music repertories and the materiality of the book. In particular, she focuses on the post-Tridentine period, when musical idioms, both new and old, challenged printers to employ alternative printing methods and modes of book presentation in the creation of their music editions. Of interest to musicologists, art historians, and book historians alike, this book builds on Bernstein's previous work as she continues to chart the course of music and the book in Renaissance Italy.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city in transitionparts ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan and Christianand as it emerged from its medieval decline through the return of papal power and the onset of the Renaissance, its portrayals in print transformed as well. Jessica Maier s book explores the history of the Roman city portrait genre during the rise of Renaissance print culture. She illustrates how the maps of this era helped to promote the city, to educate, and to facilitate armchair exploration and what they reveal about how the people of Rome viewed or otherwise imagined their city. She also advances our understanding of early modern cartography, which embodies a delicate, intentional balance between science and art. The text is beautifully illustrated with nearly 100 images of the genre, a dozen of them in color."

This volume provides readers interested in urban history with a collection of essays on the evolution of public space in that paradigmatic western city which is Rome. Scholars specialized in different historical periods contributed chapters, in order to find common themes which weave their way through one of the most complex urban histories of western civilization. Divided into five chronological sections (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Modern and Contemporary) the volume opens with the issue of how public space was defined in classical Roman law and how ancient city managers organized the maintenance of these spaces, before moving on to explore how this legacy was redefined and reinterpreted during the Middle Ages. The third group of essays examines how the imposition of papal order on feuding families during the Renaissance helped introduce a new urban plan which could satisfy both functional and symbolic needs. The fourth section shows how modern Rome continued to express strong interest in the control and management of public space, the definition of which was necessarily selective in this vastly extensive city. The collection ends with an essay on the contemporary debate for revitalizing Rome's eastern periphery. Through this long-term chronological approach the volume offers a truly unique insight into the urban development of one of Europe’s most important cities, and concludes with a discuss of the challenges public space faces today after having served for so many centuries as a driving force in urban history.

Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.

This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood. David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Artists, in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.

A Companion to the City of Rome presents a series of original essays from top experts that offer an authoritative and up-to-date overview of current research on the development of the city of Rome from its origins until circa AD 600. Offers a unique interdisciplinary, closely focused thematic approach and wide chronological scope making it an indispensible reference work on ancient Rome Includes several new developments on areas of research that are available in English for the first time Newly commissioned essays written by experts in a variety of related fields Original and up-to-date readings pertaining to the city of Rome on a wide variety of topics including Rome’s urban landscape, population, economy, civic life, and key events