The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno

by Karen-edis Barzman

Overview

The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State constitutes a genealogy of the academic, confraternal, and guild practices of artists in Florence, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries. It examines the institution's everyday practices, for which its daily transactions, expenses, sources of income, and seemingly inconsequential rulings provides an index, along with its official statutes, public mandates, and "extraordinary" proceedings, many of which have remained unpublished until now. Together with theoretical, critical and historiographical primary sources, these documents provide a picture of the operations and work of the Florentine Academy and the processes that governed the gestures, dictated the behaviors, and shaped the thought of those who moved within its walls. Looking diachronically at identity formation within a particular institution of the Medici state, this study also examines the connections between the Academy and an emergent public sphere within which modern bourgeois subjectivity took shape.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521641623
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	09/11/2000
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.38(w) x 9.53(h) x 0.98(d)

Table of Contents

Part I. Culture and Politics: The Academy under the Medici Principate: 1. Cosimo I de' Medici and the foundation of the Compagnia ed Accademia del Disegno; 2. The evolution of the Università, Compagnia, ed Accademia del Disegno from Francesco I to Cosimo II; 3. Institutional reform of the Academy under Ferdinando II; 4. The rise of an administrative class and the decline of the Academy as a Medici Institution under Cosimo III and Giangastone; Part II. Discourses and Power: Disegno and Corporate Unity in the Formation of the Academy: 5. Disegno as a disciplinary practice: the Academy school; 6. Fellowships of discourse: the Academy's confraternity and guild; Postscript; Reflections on the archive: the rule of the Academy; Appendix; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"The conceptual aim of The Florentine Academy is grand, and Karen-edis Barzman goes far toward achieving it...Barzman has provided an excellently organized and written, highly-illuminating study of the Florentine Accademia di Disegno - one that both details the fullness of its internal organization and reveals, within some limits, how it actually functioned in early modern Florentine society." Italian Politics and Society

"[Barzman] enlarges our understanding of innumerable historic and conceptual matters of great interest and importance. Her study is rooted in Florentine archival documents, many of which are used here for the first time...This book is a serious contribution to the field of early modern art history. It fills grievous and long-standing lacunae and opens many avenues for further exploration. It deserves to be widely read." CAA Reviews

From the Publisher