“Passionate Love and Immortality: a Portrait of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta and His Court from the Liber Isottaeus” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Facets of Love in Renaissance Culture
Revista Humanitas, 2022
Using a qualitative, documentary and semiotics-based methodology, primary sources of various types were analysed: texts of Art Theory and Philosophy and drawings and paintings, comparing and revisiting them within a cut-out that intends to highlight the symbolic value and the eidetic meaning of love as especially relevant and agglutinating in the Renaissance. This article intends to contribute to systematize a concept that throughout the Renaissance permeates what can be called a culture of the time in a broad sense, being dispersed in many different areas and under multiple forms: From the revisitation of its representation in classical mythology, embodied in the Poetry of Dante, Petrarch, Colonna, in the Visual Arts with Botticelli, Titian among others, sensing itself in the very narrative of Art Theory that adopts the style of dialogue in Homage to Plato, author of the venerated Symposium, and reaching a philosophical splendour of which the Love Dialogues of Leão Hebreu bear full witness. It is a theme that was found in the very tangible Renaissance court culture, evident in Castiglione’s aspirations of a perfecto cortesano, reaching increasingly erudite and mystical expressions with the philosophical views of Ficino, Leão Hebreu, where the Cosmogony is seen as a gesture of divine love. Thus, through a key Renaissance concept and guided by an agglutinative perspective, this article aims to contribute to a greater awareness of the central place of this concept in the Renaissance cultural agenda.
'I love those who love me': Reciprocal Love in Renaissance Ferrara and Mantua
In the Renaissance, love was usually defined in binary oppositions: love of the spirit versus love of the body, the celestial versus earthly Venus and the heavenly Eros versus his terrestrial counterpart. In the early 1500s, however, patrons in Mantua and Ferrara ordered pictorial decorations that reflected a more refined thinking about love. Artists and humanists at the courts of Mantua and Ferrara did not renounce the sensual in favour of the rational, but instead showed concord between the two Venuses and between Eros and Anteros. Local treatises on love did not try to remove sexuality from love nor follow the usual hierarchy of the senses but stressed the ennobling force of love, sensual or spiritual. This paper will discuss the ‘culture of love’ at the courts of Mantua and Ferrara and compare the paintings for Isabella d’Este’s studiolo to Garofalo’s little known decorations at Palazzo Costabili in Ferrara where all the senses are activated to move the audience to feelings of love.
• This article refl ects on the centrality of the senses of sight and hearing in the birth of romantic love. It explores the treatment of two forms of love, natural and divine, in fi fteenth-and early sixteenth-century Italy, tracing the initial movements of the former and shifts in the latter. Making use of two literary works, by Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pope Pius II) and Pietro Bembo, two paintings, by Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, and several treatises on marital obligation and the " marital debt " , it charts the emergence of the idea that sensual love was legitimate in marriage and the impact of aff ective mysticism on the concept of divine love.
Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2004)
2004
Now in paperback and e-book. This is a very playful collection of four "true" short stories in the New Yorker mode, plus one epistolary novel-ette, with real letters and a sixteenth-century lab report on poisoned pigeons, and a soap opera where all the words come straight, or almost straight, from the pages of the archival manuscript. I had to sift for the best lines but changed nothing. The essay in the opera appears in the stage directions, prologue, intermezzi, and epilogue. The subject of the book is social action and social expression in 16c Rome but the lesson is a double one: pay close attention to your papers, but let your scholar's pen play with the conventions of the modern essay. Invite your reader to admire the elusive, intense nature of our knowledge of the past. A jury gave it a prize (Marraro, AHA, 2005) so at least three scholars enjoyed the book. Students often love it. Chicago will let you read some of chapter 1: https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo3631023.html
Routledge , 2023
The Allegory of Love in the Early Renaissance This monograph is the first full-length study to critically engage with the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and with Poliphilo as a character within this narrative in relation to the antiquarian, architectural, numerosophical, botanical and iconographical symbolism that frames each scene. The Hypnerotomachia is a Renaissance allegorical dream narrative published anonymously by the Aldine press in 1499 and attributed posthumously to Francesco Colonna (1433-1527) a Venetian Dominican priest (though which Francesco Colonna is still a matter of some debate). The narrative follows Poliphilo through a series of highly symbolic and allegorical scenes from the selva oscura (dark forest) of Brunetto Latini and Dante, through landscapes littered with classical ruins, through extraordinary gardens, architecture and topography, before a magical wedding ritual and eventual union with Polia, for whom he is searching for on his dream-love-journey. This book examines the love-journey of Poliphilo, and the series of symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical experiences narrated by him that are indicative of his metamorphosing interiority within this mystagogic love journey. This is conducted through a narratological analysis of the relationship between Poliphilo and his external surroundings in sequences of the narrative pertaining to thresholds; the symbolic architectural, topographical, and garden forms and spaces; and Poliphilo’s transforming interior passions pertaining to his love of antiquarianism, language and rhetoric, and of Polia, the latter of which leads to his elegiac description of lovesickness. This is framed in relation to the broader European literary context from which this extraordinary narrative draws its inspiration from and which encompasses a great breadth of Medieval scholasticism and Renaissance humanism. This study examines the relationship between the narrative, which functions both realistically and symbolically to portray the protagonist’s transforming self into its final state at the climax of the narrative, and the symbolic function of the architecture and objects of art within the narrative. The monograph engages with the source material for the narrative that is drawn from classical, medieval, and Renaissance literature in the areas of philosophy, poetry, natural history, travel diaries and architectural treatises. It demonstrates, through analysis of the broad literary source material of the Hypnerotomachia, how antiquarian objects, buildings, gardens, and topography are used as expressive narrative devices by the author, drawing on medieval and humanist concepts, to demonstrate Poliphilo’s transforming interiority, symbolically, metaphorically or allegorically, and established through the character’s encounters during the narrative.
Michael Camille, the Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire.
Critical book review focusing on several gender-aspects found in Michael Camille's The Medieval Art of Love: Objects and Subjects of Desire (1998). This review was written as part of a seminar with the working title: 'Heavenly and Earthly Love: Love in Art and Literature in the Middle Ages under supervision of Dr. E. den Hartog and L.A. Smits MA as part of the Arts and Culture MA program taught at Leiden University.