Since the 1960s, the Italian altarpiece has attracted unprecedented scholarly attention, bringing artistic, liturgical, social and technical considerations to bear on the subject. The eight contributors to this book provide an impressive synopsis of the different approaches developed in order to enlarge and deepen our knowledge of paintings in terms of their historical functions. Patronage, morphology, religious meaning, pictorial composition, reception, and original setting are all discussed. In several cases, new light is shed on paintings that until a few years ago were dealt with only as elements within a history of style. In nearly all the contributions there is an overwhelming concern with reconstruction, and much new material is presented concerning the historical significance of a specific category of painting. This volume is the result of an international symposium held in June 1988 at the Harvard University for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Since the 1960s, the Italian altarpiece has attracted unprecedented scholarly attention, bringing artistic, liturgical, social and technical considerations to bear on the subject. The eight contributors to this book provide an impressive synopsis of the different approaches developed in order to enlarge and deepen our knowledge of paintings in terms of their historical functions. Patronage, morphology, religious meaning, pictorial composition, reception, and original setting are all discussed. In several cases, new light is shed on paintings that until a few years ago were dealt with only as elements within a history of style. In nearly all the contributions there is an overwhelming concern with reconstruction, and much new material is presented concerning the historical significance of a specific category of painting. This volume is the result of an international symposium held in June 1988 at the Harvard University for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti in Florence.

Examining the history of altar decorations, this study of the visual liturgy grapples with many of the previous theoretical frameworks to reveal the evolution and function of these ritual objects. Using an interdisciplinary approach, this book uses traditional art-historical methodologies and media technology theory to reexamine ritual objects. Previous analysis has not considered the in-between nature of these objects as deliberate and virtual conduits to the divine. The liturgy, the altarpiece, the altar environment, relics, and their reliquaries are media. In a series of case studies, several objects tell a different story about culture and society in medieval Europe. In essence, they reveal that media and media technologies generate and modulate the individual and collective structure of feelings of sacredness among assemblages of humans and nonhumans. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, early modern studies, and architectural history.

In this volume Giulia Zanon sheds new light on our grasp of social hierarchy and the possibilities for social mobility in pre-modern Italy. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines deep archival research with a multitude of artistic and architectural artefacts, this work breaks new ground by contextualizing the part played by social relationships and the arts in publicly affirming and displaying the prestige of the middling sorts, the cittadini, in early modern Venice.

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero lived. At the same time, Piero’s paintings depict a world that is distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never visited. The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this paradoxical aspect of Piero’s art. It tells the story of an artist who could think of the local churches, palaces, and landscapes in and around his hometown of Sansepolcro as miraculously built replicas of the monuments of Jerusalem. Piero’s application of perspective, to which he devoted a long treatise, was meant to convince his contemporaries that his paintings report on things that Piero actually observed. Piero’s methodical way of painting seems to have offered no room for his own fantasy. His art looks deliberately styleless. This book uncovers a world in which painting needed to validate itself by cultivating the illusion that it reported on things observed instead of things imagined by the artist. Piero’s painting claimed truth in a world of increasing uncertainties.

Students of the Italian Renaissance who wish to go beyond the standard names and subjects will find in this text abundant information on the lives, customs, beliefs, and practices of those who lived during this exciting time period. The World of Renaissance Italy: A Daily Life Encyclopedia engages all of the Italian peninsula from the Black Death (1347–1352) to 1600. Unlike other encyclopedic works about the Renaissance era, this book deals exclusively with Italy, revealing the ways common Italian people lived and experienced the events and technological developments that marked the Renaissance era. The coverage specifically spotlights marginal or traditionally marginalized groups, including women, homosexuals, Jews, the elderly, and foreign communities in Italian cities. The entries in this two-volume set are organized into 10 sections of 25 alphabetically listed entries each. Among the broad sections are art, fashion, family and gender, food and drink, housing and community, politics, recreation and social customs, and war. The "See Also" sources for each article are listed by section for easy reference, a feature that students and researchers will greatly appreciate. The extensive collection of contemporary documents include selections from a diary, letters, a travel journal, a merchant's inventory, Inquisition testimony, a metallurgical handbook, and text by an artist that describes what the author feels constitutes great work. Each of the primary source documents accompanies a specific article and provides an added dimension and degree of insight to the material.

Early Modern Italy is a fascinating survey of society in Italy from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries - the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Covering the whole of the Peninsula from the Venetian Republic, to Florence, through to Naples it shows how the huge economic, cultural and social divides of the period still affect the stability of present day united Italy. This is an essential guide to one of the most vibrant yet tempestuous periods of Italian history.