In Florence, in the summer of 1501, a man named Antonio Rinaldeschi was arrested and hanged after throwing horse dung at an outdoor painting of the Virgin Mary. His punishment was severe, even for the times, and the crimes with which he was formally charged, gambling, blasphemy and attempted suicide, did not normally warrant the death penalty. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence unveils a series of newly discovered sources concerning this striking episode. The authors show how the political and religious context of Renaissance Florence resulted both in Rinaldeschi's death sentence and in the creation by the followers of Savonarola of a new religious devotion, in the heart of the city, commemorating the event. -- Amazon.com.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de? Medici?s impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman?s contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family?s domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi?s Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi?s painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de? Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women?s agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

Covering the history of Renaissance Florence from the fourteenth century to the beginnings of the Medici duchy, Richard C. Trexler traces collective ritual behavior in all its forms, from a simple greeting to the most elaborate community festival. He examines three kinds of social relationships: those between individual Florentines, those between Florentines and foreigners, and those between Florentines and God and His saints. He maintains that ritual brought life to the public world and, when necessary, reformed public life.

First published in 1971, The Society of Renaissance Florence is an invaluable collection of 132 original Florentine documents dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Bodies mangled, limbs broken, skin flayed, blood spilled: from paintings to prints to small sculptures, the art of the late Middle Ages and early modern period gave rise to disturbing scenes of violence. Many of these torture scenes recall Christ?s Passion and its aftermath, but the martyrdoms of saints, stories of justice visited on the wicked, and broadsheet reports of the atrocities of war provided fertile ground for scenes of the body?s desecration. Contributors to this volume interpret pain, suffering, and the desecration of the human form not simply as the passing fancies of a cadre of proto-sadists, but also as serving larger social functions within European society. Taking advantage of the frameworks established by scholars such as Samuel Edgerton, Mitchell Merback, and Elaine Scarry (to name but a few), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 provides an intriguing set of lenses through which to view such imagery and locate it within its wider social, political, and devotional contexts. Though the art works discussed are centuries old, the topics of the essays resonate today as twenty-first-century Western society is still absorbed in thorny debates about the ethics and consequences of the use of force, coercion (including torture), and execution, and about whether it is ever fully acceptable to write social norms on the bodies of those who will not conform.

Miraculous images are the focus for an exploration of art and devotion in Renaissance Italy.