RENAISSANCE TAFFERIA Lessons of Morality for a Renaissance Bride

Open Arts Journal, 2015

The Florentine Dominican preacher Fra Giovanni Dominici (1355-1419) warned his female reader of the dangers to which the senses, and sight in particular, exposed the soul, reminding her of how Eve was led to sin by looking at the apple, Samson by looking at Delilah, and David in looking at Bathsheba. The Franciscan preacher Fra Bernardino da Siena (1380-1444) warned against what was evidently a common practice, that of running to kiss the altar, or the sacred stone, chalice or paten, and reminded his listeners that they were to consider themselves unworthy of such privileges. The sense of touch was often instrumental in obtaining cures, as well as fulfilling ritual requirements. Yet, as the preachers show, the senses, whose site is the body, can be agents of temptation. This essay explores a range of ways in which holy images were 'sensed' by women in renaissance Tuscany. My concern, in particular, is with the relationship between the sense of touch and images, especially small panel paintings.

2021

The Italian urban society of the Renaissance era, a period of rebirth, cultural development, and intellectual growth, embodied an increasing appreciation for culture, and it is particularly known for the proliferation of art, its forms and production. An Italian Renaissance humanist, author and artist Leon Battista Alberti described the contemporary artist’s attitudes towards the depiction of reality in his treatise as: “ No one will deny that things which are not visible do not concern the painter, for he strives to represent only the things that are seen”. Art created in the Renaissance reflects the values and ideals of contemporary Italian society and culture, and searches for an ideal within nature and their society, rather than reflecting its norms and realities. The life of an individual in Renaissance society was determined by two aspects: social rank of family they were born into, and gender. Women in this era were considered less noble creatures, inferior to men legally and socially, as men were viewed as the centre of the family and women were considered as the “legal” objects of their fathers or husbands. Women were not permitted to practice law or hold any professional positions, they were taught to be humble, hardworking, and obedient. They were common subjects within Renaissance art forms that reflected the realities of Italy in a philosophical sense. The representation of women in Italian Renaissance artworks served as an embodiment of particular sets of aesthetic and social values that were shared by the artists and patrons, and the ideals within the society in which they belonged to. Gender, and social status, affected the functions of portraits directly. There were multiple functions of female representations in art — commemorative works, donor portraits, and images of ideal beauty. Commemorative representation of women was used to legitimise marriages during this time period and to display lineage and wealth, often portraying women upon their betrothal or in honour of marriage. Women were also portrayed in public religious paintings as donors, and many depictions of women were also made posthumously, commemorating the life of the deceased. These functions of female representations in the art can be found and demonstrated when looking at the Renaissance Florentine frescoes of Domenico Ghirlandaio at the Cappella Tornabuoni in Santa Maria Novella, and Sandro Botticelli at Villa TornabuoniI, today also known as Villa Lemmi. The Tornabuoni family was one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in the quattrocento Florence, with close connections to the Medici family forged through marriage, business and political concerns. Giovanni Tornabuoni, the head of the family at the time, was an Italian merchant, banker and patron of the arts, and his sister Lucrezia was the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent and married to Piero de Medici. Unlike other Florentine patrician families, the Tornabuoni family did not only celebrate their wealth, reputation, alliances and identity, but also the Tornabuoni women. This essay will analyse the way the Tornabuoni women were represented in fresco cycle that can be found in Santa Maria Novella and the Villa Tornabuoni in Florence. To what extent does the setting of these fresco cycles influence the representation of Tornabuoni women, and what ideals and values did they represent?

Renaissance Quarterly, 2005

'self', filmy enough on its own, evaporates into 'individuality' and 'interiority'. Verbal entities are multiplied recklessly, as in the five selves of his various chapters, and are involved in shadowy cultural agencies. And still Martin seems a sensible man, driven to theorize partly by the silliness of post-modern talk about the self. An odd effect of his sensibleness is that the 'radically different' self-concerns that he says preoccupied Renaissance people turn out to be ones that most readers will recognize as their own, however altered their context: the feeling of identity given by family, place and job, the desire to be open, the need for prudence, the theatrical or symbolic representation of one's resentment or utopian longings; as for his 'porous self', minds are still troubled by being possessed, if not by demons and astral influences, by things like beauty, drugs, power, powerful people, war, post-modernist ideas and so on. University of Stirling D avid Reid 20 1 Original Article Reviews of books Reviews of books REVIEWS OF BOOKS

2008

Cassoni is the Italian word for the chests, painted with scenes from myth and literature, central to upper-class weddings of the 15th century. Little known today, cassoni deserve recognition as masterworks of the Renaissance. Botticelli, Pesellino and other superlative artists painted them, and they are precious early examples of the mythopoetic subjects that would form the core of European art until the 20th century. The essays in this book shed new light on the meaning of cassoni through informative discussions of Renaissance wedding rituals, male-female relations and daily domestic life. A catalogue section on cassoni in the exhibition that this book accompanies provides a unique guide to the stories of love, marriage and politics depicted on these sumptuous objects.

2014

The history of women's participation in religious movements during the Early Modern period in Europe has long been less commented upon in modern scholarship than that of their male counterparts. This project will enlarge our understanding of the participation of women in the visual program of the Counter-Reformation in the Papal State of Bologna. 1 The study focuses on Bologna since the city had an unprecedented large group of active women artists as well as being a crucial site of Catholic reform. Knowledge of Bologna's women is still incomplete; therefore this dissertation is structured as a series of interlinked case studies, some of which rescue forgotten artists, while others add a new dimension to better-known figures. This research thus takes a necessarily broad approach, combining aspects of iconography, patronage, gender studies, and reception studies; it also integrates media neglected in previous studies such as prints and embroidery. The goal is to insert these artists into the larger philosophical and theoretical context of the city's intellectual history, first by investigating the links between religion, science, and naturalism; and second, by unpacking critical terms from the historiography of style that came to bear on their work. Lastly, the project explores the city's concern with women's virtue, as it is a constant thread woven into visual imagery of all media,

2021

This article is concerned with the way in which women and men were represented in 14th and 15th century Italian art. Due to the fact that the practice of the “works of mercy” is a central dogma of Christianity, poverty and illness, as well as the charitable acts responding to them, were generally a frequent subject of art at this time. Here, however, the emphasis is on pictorial programs of hospitals and brotherhoods. Conventions of representation tend to be transported and transformed over very long periods of time. They have the potential to unmask historical structures and also to actively contribute to processes of societal transformation. Hence, it is important that the visual self-representation of the Max Planck Society should reflect a gender-equal society. The history of art as a discipline is concerned with describing, attributing, dating and interpreting works of art, with research into artistic creativity and its embedding in and impact on social and cultural development...

3

The Perception of female beauty: The standars of beauty set by the Florentine society during the Renaissance era, 2023

Throughout time, there has always been the same question: What is beauty? But one thing we know for sure is that perceptions of beauty continue to change over time and across cultures. For us to know what the standards of beauty are, all we have as evidence is the writings and paintings that have survived until our time. To grasp the concept of beauty in the Renaissance era, we have to look back at their archives, more specifically the representation of women in painting. Since the Renaissance times, women lived hidden from the world and the most common representations we have of them are through sculptures or side portraits; aside from these more common examples, the only glimpse of female beauty was in representation, more usually either biblical or mythological themes. What this essay aims to convey is an analysis of the stereotypical beauty of Renaissance times with the help of paintings as a base and in doing so understand which were the qualities that made a woman beautiful in this period starting from the physical characteristics such as complexion, hair and eyes colour, and the beauty tricks that women of Florence submit themselves to appear more attractive.

to the preceding negotiations, demonstrating the financial prestige and respectability of the houses involved. The display of splendid items such as gowns and jewels symbolized the social condition of individuals and groups as did any ostentation of monetary wealth; but unlike the latter, body ornaments had an additional value as they reflected cultural and aesthetic sensibility.