Jill Burke | University of Edinburgh (original) (raw)

Books by Jill Burke

The

Chi è quello che abbia per alcun secolo in tale arte veduto mai statue antiche o moderne così fat... more Chi è quello che abbia per alcun secolo in tale arte veduto mai statue antiche o moderne così fatte? Conoscendosi non solo la quiete di chi dorme, ma il dolore e la malinconia di chi perde cosa onorata e grande." 20 For the poems about Night, see Land, The Viewer as Poet, 76-9; Jacobs, The Living Image, 43-6. 21 Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo, 35: "che' è fatta in forma di donna di maravigliosa bellezza"; "tale an[i]maluccio di continuo rode et consuma, non altrimenti chel tempo, ogni cosa divora." 22 Hirst, Michelangelo, 199. 23 Stark and Nelson, "The Breasts of 'Night.'" I have benefited from Jonathan Nelson's more recent thoughts on this matter at a symposium in December 2016. 24 Discussed in Campbell, "Beyond the Ideal Nude." 25 See also for the fissile nature of artistic discourse at this time, Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art. 26 Perhaps it is a sign of the times that there have been several publications very recently on this subject: Kren, Campbell, and Burke, The Renaissance Nude, and Burke, "The European Nude" both look at the development of the nude across Europe; Lazzarini, "The Nude in Central Italian Painting" partially notes A Note on Notes The references in this book are given as the author's surname, a shortened title, and a page reference. The relevant information for texts in full can be found in the bibliography. 3 Berchorius, Dictionarii, 588-9. For other discussions of "virtuous nakedness," Snow-Smith, "Michelangelo's Christian Neoplatonic Aesthetic"; Nagel, "Experiments in Art and Reform in Italy in the Early Sixteenth Century." 4 Berchorius, Dictionarii, 588: "Arbores nascitur cum cortice, animalia nascuntur cum vellere, pisces cum squamis, volucres cum plumis, homo autem nudus et debilis nascitur, ut ad deum recurrere copellatur." 5 Ibid. "Et istud proculdubio est causa magnae humilitatis, quia in hoc est homo vilior et inferior exteris rebus." 6 Innocent III, De miseria condicionis humane, 104-05. 7 Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness and "Themes for a Renaissance Anthropology." More recently, Stark, "Renaissance Anthropologies," 175-82. 8 Amended translation from Murchland, ed., Two Views of Man, 92. Original in Manetti, De dignitate, 130-31: "Ad quod nos decoris et pulchritudinis causa homines ita nasci oportuisse respondemus. .. profecto natura humanum corpus, ceterorum omnium operum suorum pulcherrimum ac nimirum formossisumum opificium ab ea mirabiliter fabrefactum, nunquam alieno ondumento abscondisset, ne forte pulchritudines suas incongruis et abiectis velaminibus cooperirit." Discussed in Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness, 256-7. See also for Manetti, Trinkaus, "Themes for a Renaissance Anthropology"; Garin, "La 'dignitas hominis'".

The Italian Renaissance Nude, 2018

This is the full PDF of the main text of my now sold-out monograph, The Italian Renaissance Nude,... more This is the full PDF of the main text of my now sold-out monograph, The Italian Renaissance Nude, (2018). For footnotes, see the next file.

Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume ... more Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs - the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume - essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks - permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

The perception that the early sixteenth century saw a culmination of the Renaissance classical re... more The perception that the early sixteenth century saw a culmination of the Renaissance classical revival – only to degrade into mannerism shortly after Raphael's death in 1520 – has been extremely tenacious; but many scholars agree that this tidy narrative is deeply problematic. Exploring how we can reconceptualise the High Renaissance in a way that reflects how we research and teach today, this volume complicates and deepens our understanding of artistic change.

Focusing on Rome, the paradigmatic centre of the High Renaissance narrative, each essay presents a case study of a particular aspect of the culture of the city in the early sixteenth century, including new analyses of Raphael's stanze, Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and the architectural designs of Bramante. The contributors question notions of periodisation, reconsider the Renaissance relationship with classical antiquity, and ultimately reconfigure our understanding of 'high Renaissance style'.

Contents: Preface; Introductory Essay: Inventing the High Renaissance from Winckelmann to Wikipedia, Jill Burke; Part I Vantage Points: Teaching (and thinking about) the High Renaissance, with some observations on its relationship to Classical Antiquity, Brian Curran; Figments and fragments: Julius II's Rome, Suzanne Butters; Humanists, historians and the fullness of time in Renaissance Rome, Kenneth Gouwens; Cellini's Roma, Gwendolyn Trottein; On the unity/disunity of the arts: Vasari (and other)s on architecture, David Cast. Part II Making the High Renaissance: Classicism, Conflation and Culmination: Bramante and the origins of the 'High Renaissance', Christoph Frommel; Classical mistranslations: the absence of a modular system in Calvo's De Architectura, Angeliki Pollali; Giuliano da Sangallo between Florentine Quattrocento and Roman High Renaissance, Sabine Frommel; Perugino, Raphael and the decoration of the Stanza dell'Incendio, Michael Bury; Forgery, faith and divine hierarchy after Lorenzo Valla, Meredith J. Gill; 'Wishing to shed a little light upon the whole rather than mention the parts': on the conception and design of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, David Hemsoll; Pope Clement VII and the decorum of medieval art, Sheryl E. Reiss; Index.

Articles by Jill Burke

The Venus Paradox, 2017

A short essay about how women sought to beautify their bodies in order to meet ideals presented b... more A short essay about how women sought to beautify their bodies in order to meet ideals presented by paintings and other visual art. Includes some cross-cultural considerations of Alessio Piemontese's secreti.

Thomas J. Loughman, Kathleen M. Morris and Lara Yeager-Crasselt eds, Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes from the Prado. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown Massachusetts, 2016

This article considers the emergence of the nude in European art 1400-1600. It explains social un... more This article considers the emergence of the nude in European art 1400-1600. It explains social understandings of nakedness and how this is affected by class, gender and age; and draws a distinction between the "academic" and "erotic" approaches to the naked body, also investigating the use of both male and female life models in the early modern period. Artists considered include Dürer, Titian, MIchelangelo and Rubens.

This article takes a joke letter by Michelangelo’s as a starting point to investigate the texture of relationships within elite circles in Rome and Florence in the early sixteenth-century, and in particular, to show how visual and verbal humour at this time acted as a means through which to express anxieties about the pace of social change. Considers the Calandra by Bernardo Dovizi and early frescos by Raphael's workshop in the Sala del Costantino, arguing that Comitas is a personification of humour.

Art History, Sep 2013

We discovered innumerable lands, we saw innumerable people and different languages, and all were ... more We discovered innumerable lands, we saw innumerable people and different languages, and all were naked. 1 (Amerigo Vespucci, letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de ' Medici, 1500) This essay proposes that we question the current understanding of the Italian Renaissance nude by examining contemporaries' perceptions of nakedness. Despite the importance of the nude for the development of Western art, there have been few studies that consider how the revival of the nude form in fi fteenth-century Italy was understood by people at the time. 2 Most scholars, understandably, see the new fashion for portraying naked fi gures in the fi fteenth century as a direct refl ection of the enthusiasm for classical antiquity during this era. Without denying the crucial importance of antique precedents, I wish here to investigate another possibility: that travellers' accounts of naked natives encountered on European voyages of exploration, particularly those to sub-Saharan Africa, infl uenced the creation of what has been called a 'Renaissance anthropology' -debates about the nature of mankind. 3 This provided a new conceptual fi lter through which the nude fi gure was seen -and in some cases, these accounts may have directly affected the iconography of otherwise puzzling images.

This introductory essay considers how the term "High Renaissance" came into usage, and whether we... more This introductory essay considers how the term "High Renaissance" came into usage, and whether we should use it or not today. It links to particular methodologies we associate with High Renaissance artist and introduces the essays in the volume.

This essay considers a cluster of texts dating from the first decade of the sixteenth century tha... more This essay considers a cluster of texts dating from the first decade of the sixteenth century that berate, puzzle over – and often make excuses for - painters and sculptors being unable to meet contractual deadlines Focussing on the missed deadlines of Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, it seems that this behaviour was never ascribed to what seems to be the main reason for tardiness – overwork – but instead was related to fundamental character traits that were deemed a necessary by-product of the creative process.

This was originally an Excel spreadsheet of references to Florentine patricians 1494-1512, that I... more This was originally an Excel spreadsheet of references to Florentine patricians 1494-1512, that I've taken from various chronicle sources over the years.

If you're interested in finding out more about specific individuals, and would like references to them, it's worth a look - but do check refs with the original source, as there are probably quite a few mistakes in there. For a list of abbreviations used, and the actual Excel file (it's gone quite strange on the Scribd version here), see http://renresearch.wordpress.com/databases-and-notes/

Sebastiano's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha is only one example of an early-sixteenth-century religiou... more Sebastiano's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha is only one example of an early-sixteenth-century religious image that deliberately evokes erotic desire in the viewer. The figure of Saint Agatha, derived from a broken sculpture of Venus with the features of a beautiful contemporary, was intended to provoke lust in its original owner, a young cardinal pilloried for his homosexual activity. The essential ambivalence of this work and others of the same genre should be seen in the context of Roman attitudes to sexuality: clerics were, in principle, admonished to live chastely, but in practice were likely to be sexually active.

A short summary of Armin Schlechter's article about a marginal annotation to a early edition of C... more A short summary of Armin Schlechter's article about a marginal annotation to a early edition of Cicero by Agostino Vespucci in October 1503, that discusses Leonardo da Vinci. It includes the earliest known mention of the Mona Lisa, and information about a painting of St Anne and the Battle of Anghiari.

From the Leonardo da Vinci Society Newsletter, May 2008.

This article examines the reception of early sixteenth century imagery through a case study of a ... more This article examines the reception of early sixteenth century imagery through a case study of a previously unknown note about a mechanical lion designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Part of the decorations for the triumphal entry of Louis XII into Milan after the French victory at Agnadello in 1509, I examine the conflicting interpretations of this festival. Using a wide range of further texts concerned with the understanding of imagery, I argue that the social and political upheavals caused by the Italian Wars from 1494 generated a preoccupation with ambiguity of meaning and the subjectivity of interpretation. Now that the traditional stylistic characterisations of High Renaissance art have been largely rejected, I suggest that a consideration of the changed expectations of the beholder offers a useful way of rearticulating what is distinctive about the visual arts of the early sixteenth century.

The organization and decoration of chapels in the churches of Renaissance Florence have much to t... more The organization and decoration of chapels in the churches of Renaissance Florence have much to tell us about neighborhood relationships. Analysis of the church works committees and of the ownership of chapels in the Santo Spirito and Carmine churches reveals that administrative divisions were more important than proximity in determining which church the key families of the area chose to patronize. In both cases the allocation and decoration of chapels expressed local status relationships in visual form, yet the visual language of the two churches was fundamentally different. In Santo Spirito the new Renaissance style expressed the power and aspirations of a community elite. At the Carmine there was extensive neighborhood involvement in the decoration of chapels, sometimes in providing funding and sometimes in regulating their style. There the older style expressed the involvement of a less extensive but more socially diverse neighborhood.

The

The Italian Renaissance Nude, 2018

The Venus Paradox, 2017

Thomas J. Loughman, Kathleen M. Morris and Lara Yeager-Crasselt eds, Splendor, Myth and Vision: Nudes from the Prado. Clark Art Institute, Williamstown Massachusetts, 2016

Art History, Sep 2013

From the Leonardo da Vinci Society Newsletter, May 2008.

Renaissance Quarterly, Jan 1, 2008

Page 1. Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300-1550 Jill Burke Renaissance Quarterly, ... more Page 1. Artists at Court: Image-Making and Identity, 1300-1550 Jill Burke Renaissance Quarterly, Volume 59, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp. 243-244 (Review) ... JILL BURKE University of Edinburgh RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY 244

From Cecilia Hewlett and Peter Howard (eds), Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in H... more From Cecilia Hewlett and Peter Howard (eds), Studies on Florence and the Italian Renaissance in Honour of F. W. Kent. Brepols, 2016, pp. 495-516. This article takes a joke letter by Michelangelo’s as a starting point to investigate the texture of relationships within elite circles in Rome and Florence in the early sixteenth-century, and in particular, to show how visual and verbal humour at this time acted as a means through which to express anxieties about the pace of social change. Considers the Calandra by Bernardo Dovizi and early frescos by Raphael's workshop in the Sala del Costantino, arguing that Comitas is a personification of humour.

Contents: Preface Inventing the High Renaissance from Winckelmann to Wikipedia: an introductory e... more Contents: Preface Inventing the High Renaissance from Winckelmann to Wikipedia: an introductory essay, Jill Burke Part I Vantage Points: Teaching (and thinking about) the High Renaissance, with some observations on its relationship to Classical Antiquity, Brian A. Curran Figments and fragments: Julius II's Rome, Suzanne B. Butters Humanists, historians and the fullness of time in Renaissance Rome, Kenneth Gouwens Cellini's Roma, Gwendolyn Trottein On the unity/disunity of the arts: Vasari (and others) on architecture, David Cast. Part II Making the High Renaissance: Classicism, Conflation and Culmination: Bramante and the origins of the 'High Renaissance', Christoph Luitpold Frommel Classical mistranslations: the absence of a modular system in Calvo's De Architectura, Angeliki Pollali Giuliano da Sangallo between Florentine Quattrocento and Roman High Renaissance, Sabine Frommel Perugino, Raphael and the decoration of the Stanza dell'Incendio, Michael Bury Fo...

Teaching the Renaissance at the University of Edinburgh has undergone several changes over the la... more Teaching the Renaissance at the University of Edinburgh has undergone several changes over the last five years. The most important, perhaps, has been the establishment of our interdisciplinary masters degree, the MSc Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (formerly called the MSc Renaissance to Enlightenment; http://www.medren.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate-studies/taughtdegrees/msc-renaissance-to-enlightenment/).

Renaissance Quarterly, 2009