The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory

by Patricia Emison

Overview

Why did Renaissance art come to matter so much, so widely, and for so long? Patricia Emison's answer depends on a recalibrated view of the long Renaissance – from 1300 to 1600 – synthesizing the considerable evolution in our understanding of the epoch since the foundational 19th-century studies of Burckhardt and Wölfflin. Demonstrating that the imitation of nature and of antiquity must no longer define its limits, she exposes Renaissance style's self-consciously modern aspect. She sets the art against the literary and political interests of the time, and analyzes works both of very familiar artists – Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael – and of lesser-known figures, including Cima and Barocci. An understanding emerges of both the period's long-standing fame and its various historical debts. Moving beyond the Renaissance, Emison unfolds the varying and layered significance it has held from the Old Master era through Impressionism, Modernism, and Post-Modernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107005266
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/31/2011
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	264
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 5.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Patricia Emison is Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of several books, including Creating the 'Divine' Artist: From Dante to Michelangelo, The Shaping of Art History: Meditations on a Discipline, The Simple Art: Printed Works on Paper in an Age of Magnificence, Low and High Style in Italian Renaissance Art, and The Art of Teaching: Sixteenth-Century Allegorical Prints and Drawings.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; 2. A historiographical overview; 3. Not only rebirth; 4. Truth and likeness; 5. Visualizing ideas; 6. Why did the high Renaissance happen?; 7. Revolutionary norms of beauty; 8. 'Genius'; 9. Epilogue.