ARTH 309: Italian Renaissance Art & Architecture

The Renaissance in Italy continues to exercise a powerful hold on the popular imagination and on scholarly enquiry. This Companion presents a lively, comprehensive, interdisciplinary, and current approach to the period that extends in Italy from the turn of the fourteenth century through the latter decades of the sixteenth. Addressed to students, scholars, and non-specialists, it introduces the richly varied materials and phenomena as well as the different methodologies through which the Renaissance is studied today both in the English-speaking world and in Italy. The chapters are organized around axes of humanism, historiography, and cultural production, and cover a wide variety of areas including literature, science, music, religion, technology, artistic production, and economics. The diffusion of the Renaissance throughout Italian territories is emphasized. Overall, the Companion provides an essential overview of a period that witnessed both a significant revalidation of the classical past and the development of new, vernacular, and increasingly secular values.

Richly illustrated, and featuring detailed descriptions of works by pivotal figures in the Italian Renaissance, this enlightening volume traces the development of art and architecture throughout the Italian peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A smart, elegant, and jargon-free analysis of the Italian Renaissance - what it was, what it means, and why we should study it Provides a sustained discussion of many great works of Renaissance art that will significantly enhance readers' understanding of the period Focuses on Renaissance art and architecture as it developed throughout the Italian peninsula, from Venice to Sicily   Situates the Italian Renaissance in the wider context of the history of art Includes detailed interpretation of works by a host of pivotal Renaissance artists, both well and lesser known

In this brilliant and widely acclaimed work, Peter Burke presents a social and cultural history of the Italian Renaissance. He discusses the social and political institutions which existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and analyses the ways of thinking and seeing which characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity. Developing a distinctive sociological approach, Peter Burke is concerned with not only the finished works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and others, but also with the social background, patterns of recruitment and means of subsistence of this 'cultural elite'. New to this edition is a fully revised introduction focusing on what Burke terms 'the domestic turn' in Renaissance studies and discussing the relation of the Renaissance to global trends. He thus makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Italian Renaissance, and to our comprehension of the complex relations between culture and society. This thoroughly revised and updated third edition is richly illustrated throughout. It will have a wide appeal among historians, sociologists and anyone interested in one of the most creative periods of European history.