Cultural Patronage Research Articles

Linaje, poder y cultura de la nobleza de Guadalcázar. Aproximación al eclesiástico Luis Fernández de Córdoba y Portocarrero

La presente comunicacion pretende analizar la interesante personalidad de Luis Fernandez de Cordoba y Portocarrero a traves de las empresas culturales que desarrolla. En este patronazgo, no solo advertimos connotaciones espirituales, sino tambien un componente de prestigio social.

The Piacevoli Notti of Giambattista Casali: diplomats and fairy tales in early modern Italy

Published at Venice between 1551 and 1553, Giovanfrancesco Straparola's collection of fairy tales, novelle, riddles and madrigals, Le piacevoli notti, proved a European best‐seller. In the collection's loose framing narrative, set during carnival in 1530s Venice, the first tale of the final night is recounted by English ambassador to Venice, Giambattista Casali (c.1494/95–1536). Straparola's frametale has been read chiefly to illuminate the fairy tales; this article employs it to trace a set of elite Venetian social institutions and networks into which Casali successfully interpolated himself over the course of his 1526–35 embassy. Casali's initially unlikely inclusion in the Piacevoli notti demonstrates the immense practical significance of those networks to his diplomatic credibility and efficacy. Crucial to Casali's diplomatic career was his building up of political credit through informal sociability and through brokering cultural patronage between Venice, his native cities of Bologna and Rome, and the courts of Mantua, England, or Hungary. In highlighting the value of informal sociability for Renaissance diplomats such as Casali, the article contributes to calls for a broader conception of politics in the historiography of early modern diplomacy.

Glorious Sounds for a Holy Warrior: New Light on Codex Turin J.II.9

Abstract The origins of codex Turin, Biblioteca Nazionale Universitaria J.II.9 are contested territory. While there can be little dispute that the repertory, a monumental collection of plainchant, polyphonic Mass settings, motets, and songs, is linked to the (Bourbon-)Lusignan court of Cyprus, this articles argues the north Italian origins of the manuscript. The key to solving the puzzle is the coat of arms prominently displayed on fol. 1r of the codex. Once its Brescian provenance is recognized and the relevant family's cultural, political, and religious history and patronage elucidated, the “Avogadro codex” emerges as part of a complex of “ars subtilior” sources including Chantilly, ModA, and Oxford 213, all now believed to have originated in Lombardy, Veneto, Romagna, perhaps Tuscany, or Rome, and either copied or still in use in the 1420–30s. The symbolic make-up of the manuscript reveals connections not only to the Avogadro but also to the cult of the Holy Cross in Brescia. Historical and paleographic evidence points to the possible involvement of Jean Hanelle, chapel master to the King of Cyprus, in the genesis of the manuscript around 1435. Hanelle may also have been responsible for taking the codex from Brescia to Savoy as early as 1436.

29. The Epistles of Princess Jelena Balšić : An Example of Female Cultural Patronage in the Late Medieval Balkans

Open Access29. The Epistles of Princess Jelena Balšić : An Example of Female Cultural Patronage in the Late Medieval BalkansAlexandra VukovichAlexandra VukovichSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:Jan 2019https://doi.org/10.7767/wjk-2012-0133SectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail About Previous article Next article FiguresReferencesRelatedDetailsCited byCosmography, Asceticism and Female Patronage in Late Byzantine and Slavic MiscellaniesAlmagest, Vol. 8, No. 2 Download book cover ISSN: 0083-9981eISSN: 2307-2962HistoryPublished online:January 2019 Information© 2014 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Co.KGThis work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.PDF download

The Fuggers of Augsburg: pursuing wealth and honor in Renaissance Germany

As the wealthiest German merchant family of the sixteenth century, the Fuggers have attracted wide scholarly attention. In contrast to the other famous merchant family of the period, the Medici of Florence, however, no English-language work on them has been available until now. The Fuggers of Augsburg offers a concise and engaging overview that builds on the latest scholarly literature and the author's own work on sixteenth-century merchant capitalism. Mark Haberlein traces the history of the family from the weaver Hans Fugger's immigration to the imperial city of Augsburg in 1367 to the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648. Because the Fuggers' extensive business activities involved long-distance trade, mining, state finance, and overseas ventures, the family exemplifies the meanings of globalisation at the beginning of the modern age. The book also covers the political, social, and cultural roles of the Fuggers: their patronage of Renaissance artists, the founding of the largest social housing project of its time, their support of Catholicism in a city that largely turned Protestant during the Reformation, and their rise from urban merchants to imperial counts and feudal lords. Haberlein argues that the Fuggers organised their social rise in a way that allowed them to be merchants and feudal landholders, burghers and noblemen at the same time. Their story therefore provides a window on social mobility, cultural patronage, religion, and values during the Renaissance and the Reformation.

Head Trips: An Intertextual Analysis of Later Architecture and Sculpture Under Saddam Hussein

In Iraq at the end of the twentieth century, Saddam Hussein commissioned many monuments imbued with formal and epigraphic references to distant structures and cities and to important historical figures. This intertextual networking of architecture, sculpture and personae was part of a concerted effort to bolster late Bacathist cultural-political discourses with powerful visual rhetoric. Some of the most indica-tive examples of this practice were produced in the last decade of his regime and were misidentified or destroyed shortly after the US invasion of 2003. The essay scrutinizes two sets of busts on palaces in Baghdad, and, after unravelling the meanings of their formal elements, uses these as comparative references to clarify the significance of other contemporary examples of Saddam's patronage and expand on others' analyses of earlier works as well. The examination of these monuments illustrates how Saddam sought to use cultural patronage as a means to create trans-temporal and trans-national narratives in order to stabilize his regime domestically and secure support from abroad. These conflations of historical and mythological references in sculpture and architecture could nevertheless prove susceptible to misinterpretation or be used for purposes unintended by the patron.

Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art and Culture in Early Modern Italy (review)

Reviewed by: Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art and Culture in Early Modern Italy Carolyn James De Vries, Joyce, Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Farnham, Ashgate, 2010; hardback; pp. xviii, 303; 82 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £65.00; ISBN 9780754667513. The dramatic and controversial life of Caterina Sforza (c. 1463–1509) was first comprehensively analysed by Pier Pasolini in a three-volume study of 1893. Joyce de Vries draws on the hundreds of archival sources, mainly letters, which Pasolini published in one of these volumes, for her own well-written and engaging account of Caterina’s tumultuous biography. The illegitimate daughter of the duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Caterina married Girolamo Riario, favourite nephew of Pope Sixtus IV, in 1477 and became regent of Imola and Forlì when her husband was assassinated in 1488. As a female ruler, who famously dared to defy the threats of Cesare Borgia during his siege of Imola in December 1499, she attracted both praise and blame from her contemporaries. Niccolò Machiavelli featured her in the Discourses as an exemplum of fortitude and virtù who defied the conventional limitations of her sex, while Iacopo Foresti represented her much more ambiguously in his late fifteenth-century anthology of famous women, praising her learning and magnificence but also comparing her to the Assyrian queen Semiramis, whose voracious sexuality made her a doubtful heroine. Caterina’s reputation was also tarnished by her failure to adhere to a chaste widowhood. Indeed, she had children by two lovers and through her relationship with Giovanni di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici was the grandmother of Cosimo I de’ Medici, grand duke of Florence in the mid-sixteenth century. De Vries’s main focus in this monograph is not the political and diplomatic exploits of her subject but rather Caterina’s cultural patronage. De Vries demonstrates the ways in which an intelligent and resourceful woman maintained a princely lifestyle and projected herself as a learned [End Page 260] and magnificent patron of the arts, despite limited funds, through a careful attention to pageantry and courtly display, and by encouraging community support for her architectural and other civic projects. Caterina also invested thriftily in artefacts such as medals and coins which reinforced her public image and subtly reflected her changing political identities. The self-conscious and canny manipulation of her image allowed her to project a powerful but still conventional persona that smoothly accommodated her changing roles as a wife, mother, widow, and regent over the course of her life. Much of the evidence regarding Caterina’s patronage has vanished. Architectural commissions have been irreparably altered since her time, or destroyed. Her always tight budget, and an awareness of the fragility of power, prompted her to invest in commodities such as fine jewellery, silver plate, tapestries, books, and luxurious clothing, which could be liquidated easily in an economic or political emergency, rather than to collect paintings and sculpture by the best masters. Few of these objects have survived the passage of time. De Vries carefully retraces their existence through the documents that mention them, above all the many letters that Caterina wrote and received. This is an interesting and persuasive book that throws light on the central importance of luxury goods in the construction of nobility and the pursuit of status in early modern Europe. De Vries’s very welcome analysis of Caterina Sforza’s cultural self-fashioning whets our appetite for a new assessment of her unusually autonomous political role in a very troubled period of Italian history. Carolyn James School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies Monash University Copyright © 2012 Carolyn James

Joyce de Vries . Caterina Sforza and the Art of Appearances: Gender, Art and Culture in Early Modern Italy . (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2010. Pp. xviii, 303. $124.95.

Despite the recent surge in scholarship on the political agency and cultural patronage of Renaissance court women, such figures (for example Isabella d'Este of Mantua and Caterina Sforza of Imola and Forlı`) have not until very recently been subjects of modern, critical, monographic treatment. The publication of Joyce de Vries's study on Sforza helps to close this gap with respect to one of the most well-known but, as the author makes clear, least understood female figures of the period. Its treatment of the totality and power of court culture, which interwove the arts and patronage, ceremony and ritual, and policymaking, strongly recalls Gregory Lubkin's A Renaissance Court: Milan under Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1994). Unlike Lubkin, de Vries focuses on a peripheral rather than central and female-rather than male-centered courtly environment. Although not strictly speaking a biography, de Vries treats Sforza (the illegitimate daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza) as both wife of Girolamo Riario (1477–1488) and later widow/regent (1488–1500) of his territories in chapters on court ceremony, architecture, the splendor of material culture, and religious and literary patronage. Crucially, de Vries shows in several examples how these categories worked in tandem to foster courtly magnificence, illustrating that the plastic arts of silver, ceramics, jewels, and textiles formed a significant portion both of the culture of display, and of the overall financial value of goods. Further, as she shows, such materials, together with painting, sculpture, and architecture, set the stage for rituals of power: weddings, funerals, and entrances.

Henrietta Maria: Piety, Politics and Patronage, ed. Erin Griffey

Erin Griffey's contributors reconsider the practices of Caroline queenship in the three realms of the book's title: religious faith, political and national affiliation, and artistic and cultural patronage. The editor concludes (and it would be hard to disagree) that religious faith was the determining factor behind the interconnected cultural and political activities of Henrietta Maria, Charles I's French Catholic consort, and the collection explores her political and dynastic affiliations, her patronage of theatre, craftsmen, artists and musicians, her self-representation and her religious practice. Building on the work of scholars such as Erica Veevers, Sophie Tomlinson, Karen Britland and Melinda Gough, this collection brings together historians, art historians, and scholars of drama, literature and music in an engaging blend of established and emerging scholars. As a French queen of England, Henrietta Maria's patronage and politics are obvious subjects for investigation from a transnational, European angle. This collection takes such an approach very seriously, with productive results. At the outset of his chapter exploring the Queen's domestic and international religious, familial and courtly alliances, Malcolm Smuts immediately sets the young Henrietta Maria's marriage and her factional negotiations against the context of the Thirty Years War. Essays by Jessica Bell on Marian imagery in the self-representation of Marie de Medici and Henrietta Maria, and by Griffey on the depiction of religious jewellery in the Queen's portraiture, unpick a maternal, religious and politicised thread of influence. Sarah Poynting identifies the writer Walter Montague as a pivotal international intermediary, moving between courts and scripting a theatrical production for his queen. Karen Britland examines the Queen's theatrical patronage and spectatorship, positioning Whitehall productions of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess and Shakespeare's Richard III in the early 1630s against what she calls ‘a reformatory project’ which presented ‘a new moral standard both for dramatic productions and courtly behaviour’ (p. 64) which emerged from the households of both the King and Queen. Equally though, Britland argues, Henrietta Maria's keen sense of the political nature of such patronage is demonstrated by the support she offered the itinerant French playing company led to London by the actor Floridor in 1634–5 and the Queen's rejection in the same season of a travelling Spanish troupe. The collection concludes with Jonathan P. Wainwright's argument that ‘the most up-to-date Italian music by contemporaries of Monteverdi was performed at the queen's devotions’ (p. 199) at her chapel in Somerset House. In this way, the collection brings to light the European influences of this counter-reformation English queen.

The Sea and the World of theMutasaddi:A profile of port officials from Mughal Gujarat (c. 1600–1650)

AbstractThis article seeks to trace the profile of the governors (mutasaddis) of the main port-cities (especially Surat and, to a lesser extent, Cambay) of the Mughal province of Gujarat in the first half of the seventeenth century. My research on the careers of individualmutasaddis – based mainly (but not exclusively) on existent Portuguese materials – allows us to better understand the social world of those occupying key positions in the ‘waterfront’ of the Mughal Empire and its dealings extensively with the European powers (Portuguese, Dutch and English). Hence, the analysis of the professional and personal trajectories of the Indian Muslim doctor Muqarrab Khan and the Persian Mir Musa Mu'izzul Mulk presented here demonstrate how far business, politics and cultural patronage were often entangled in the career of a Mughalmutasaddiof Gujarat.

The Densities of Modernism

This essay looks at the career of pioneering Senegalese painter Iba N'Diaye and his relation to now well-established narratives of modernism in Senegal. Typical accounts of the mid-twentieth century equate the modern with the cultural patronage, Négritude writings, and state-sponsored visual arts movement that flourished under the first president of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor. N'Diaye, as one of the first instructors at an art academy founded at Senghor's request, is often featured in the beginnings of this narrative, only to be marginalized when he chooses to relocate permanently to France and pursue alternative aesthetic horizons. As a result, the subtleties of his long career, the means through which his practices “belong to the modern,” and the cartographies and densities of a complex, cosmopolitan artistic life are lost in either overdetermined histories of African modernism or narrow accounts of European art history. This essay is not concerned with securing a place for him within the mainstream history of modernism but rather investigating how models of “alternative modernities” might enable us to foreground the dialogical attitudes and practices that characterized often overlapping, interdependent, and contingent experiences of modernity and expressions of modernism. How do re-evaluations of the spatio-temporal parameters of the modern enable us to shift accounts of the Senegalese story (and readings of N'Diaye's oeuvre)? Does N'Diaye's career enable us to challenge increasingly standardized narratives of modernism in many parts of Africa that link it primarily with reverse discourses, resistance narratives, and political independence to suggest more fluid approaches to modernist subjectivity and attention to the varied “tenses” for the modern?

Review: Frank Pick, Interviewed by John Gloag and Frank Pick, Lecture

Frank Pick, Interviewed by John Gloag . Design in the Street, part VIII of Design in Modern Life, BBC radio broadcast, London, 6 June 1933, 20 min. Frank Pick, Lecture . Meaning and Purpose in Design, part XI of Design in Modern Life, BBC radio broadcast, London, 27 June 1933, 22 min. 7:30 p.m., 6 June 1933, Britain: The stylish sound box on the cabinet, with state-of-the-art speakers, as well as the home-made radio set, delicately balanced to keep its batteries from leaking, are bursting into song. The crash of the stock market has been very good for the culture of listening. The years 1930 to 1932, the bottom of the Depression, have seen a rise in the sales of radio sets, while the consumption of all other household goods has dropped sharply. Radio has become a source of consolation for 2.3 million license holders and uncounted home-made set owners. The British Broadcasting Corporation, which legislatively enjoys total monopoly over the airwaves, has taken this trend as an auspicious sign. It has strengthened its resolve to replace the familial small talk at the hearth with purposeful and high-minded conversations that would prepare everyone, across classes, for participatory democracy and cultural patronage.1 Storytelling——which had loomed big in the atomized and monotonous world of agriculture and artisanship before print and industry——has found a place for itself once again, but now, in an age of anxiety and distractions. Ideally everyone on that warm Tuesday evening has settled, after dinner and cleanup, into their armchairs with a crossword puzzle or knitting project when the vivacious voice of the interviewer, John Gloag, and the electrifying presence of his subject, Frank Pick, fills the air. They are deeply embroiled in a tug of war on the character of a street. > Pick: All sorts of things are dumped into the street without order and without planning by a whole lot of public utility undertakings or departments of local authorities, until the street becomes thoroughly untidy, as you say. Let our listeners go out and use their eyes on the main street outside their homes, and just list the …

Haydn’s Judaizing of the apothecary

As the first Italian opera to grace the stage of the new opera house at Eszterháza, Lo speziale (1768) afforded Kapellmeister Haydn, and the singers and orchestral musicians under his direction, the opportunity to revel in comedic performance. The revised libretto translated well to the rural court of Prince Nicolaus, whose tastes and cultural patronage extended to opera buffa. As Matthew Head has argued ( Cambridge Companion , 2005), Sempronio, the apothecary of the title whose fascination with the exotic makes him an easy target for duping, is also a harbinger of difference. And this “difference,” I contend, is the sign of Sempronio’s main character flaw — his Jewishness. Like other theatrical stereotypes on the mid-eighteenth-century stage, Jews came with a recognizable set of characteristic traits, all of which could readily be exploited in comedic contexts. How the apothecary’s profession and characterization, including aspects of voice, body and gesture, are linked to Jewish representation, is explored in this article through the analysis of a couple of representative scenes from the opera, among them the final Turkish scene, in which a confrontation between Orientalist Others creates semiotic overload. By characterizing the apothecary as Jewish, Haydn was able to demonstrate his complicity in the ideological agenda operative under the terms of his employment — i.e. that of re-inscribing the needs, desires and dominating authority of Prince Nicolaus. In Lo speziale , the prince’s penchant for theatrical works featuring Jewish characters and caricatures was transferred from Wanderntruppe to Operntruppe .

Celtic Countries from the Perspective of Polish Romantics and Exiles

In this piece on the Polish Romantic travellers confronted with Celtic cultures and countries, I have tried to show the way they reacted and how their imaginations worked. Probably some of their reactions were not different to those of all other Celtophiles. The special role of the Czartoryskis’ cultural patronage needs to be highlighted. In the nineteenth century Poland, nobody ever attempted to gather so many books about Celtic history and culture again, even after the emergence of Celtic Studies as an academic discipline later in the nineteenth century. The predictable result was that, with time, knowledge of Celtic cultures diminished among the Polish writers. The literary revival in early twentieth century Ireland, associated with Yeats and his contemporaries, did not elicit widespread reaction from Polish librarians and academics. This failure to respond to new developments in Ireland is probably to be explained in terms of the economic and socio-political conditions in the divided Poland of that time. One of the many negative results of the partitions at the end of the eighteenth century was that a large number of important Polish writers moved abroad, as well as that their relations and impressions were affected by this emigration. Being a political émigré was not always helpful in so far as the exploration of new cultures was concerned, both from the point of view of the psychological trauma of being away from home and of various everyday constraints. Generally, it was personal interests and earlier studies, and not finances or place of living that influenced some Polish authors’ choice to write on Celtic themes.

Political Decay and Cultural Achievements: The Politics of Cultural Patronage During the Phanariot Administration of the Romanian Principalities

Abstract : Political Decay and Cultural Achievements : The Politics of Cultural Patronage During the Phanariot Administration of the Romanian Principalities. The study presents some observations regarding the diligent cultural activity of the Phanariot governors in the Romanian Principalities (1711/ 1716-1821), in response to the necessity to gradate with notes and details the general negative overview of the scholars regarding the cultural achievements of the Southeastern Europe and particularly of the Romanian Principalities in this late period of political decay, i. e. of accentuation of the Greek political dominance against the Romanian people in the times of Ottoman economics’ and ideas’ decadence.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHORSHIP OF VOLTAIRE'S LA FETE DE BELESBAT

On 15 May 1760 Voltaire wrote to the historian and parlementaire Charles-Jean-François Hénault: ‘Songez vous bien, mon illustre confrère, que de tous ceux qui assistèrent à l'extrême onction que je donnai au curé et à cette fête que vous embellîtes, il n'y a que vous et moi qui soyons en vie?’1 The nostalgic recollection of La Fête de Bélesbat, performed by and for madame de Prie's circle in the autumn of 1725, establishes a solidarity between the two survivors, and the term ‘confrères’, often used between fellow académiciens,2 (disingenuously) insists upon their similar literary status. The recent appearance of La Fête de Bélesbat in the ongoing edition of Voltaire's Complete Works prompts a re-examination of the play's authorship.3 Voltaire's precise role in the composition of the work is contested, notably by the editors of the Kehl edition (1785): ‘Tous les vers, à beaucoup près, ne...

Le cinquecentine della Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze by Sara Centi (review)

800 Reviews that this is a work of reinterpretation, employing English-related examples which are already familiar to scholars. However, as Saygin wishes to read more nuanced messages into these case studies than did Sammut or Roberto Weiss earlier, so she requires increased precision from her sources. Unfortunately, the evidence is rarely so helpful, and in some cases it is downright awkward. To give one example, Saygin's analysis of one set of humanists' contacts with Humfrey is based on the assertion that those contacts were confined to 1437 (Chapter 13, especially p. 160). However, in the case of one of those humanists, Antonio Pacini, the evidence for his link with Humfrey is a presentation manuscript (Oxford, Magdalen College, MS 37(A)) that cannot date from earlier than mid-1439. Such matters of detail do not, of course, upset her theoretical framework; they are, however, all the more problematic in her firstsection, on Humfrey himself. In Saygin's interpretation, Humfrey's career provides the archetype for the sort of 'integrative approach' she advocates: his cultural and political activities are said to have existed in 'a dialectic relationship' (p. 17) in which the Duke consciously linked the patronage of particular texts with specific events. Yet this is often, at best, case not proven: a work like The Serpent of Division is so difficultto place in a particular context that any interpretation will be hedged around by 'ifs' (pp. 41-45). All the same, some of her speculations are intriguing, like the suggestion that Humfrey may have invited Leonardo Bruni to come to England as a royal tutor (pp. 66-67). Leaving such details aside, there are larger issues at stake. Crucially significant is the question of Humfrey's own involvement in the processes both of cultural patronage and of political presentation. Whether or not Humfrey himself was 'a discerning connoisseur ' (p. 136) is not of the firstimportance; more critical is whether Humfrey, working as the fulcrum of a court, was able to make individual decisions or whether they were, rather, corporate activities. Saygin's thesis assumes the former,but if (as I suspect) they were the latter,this has significance not just forher reading of Humfrey's career but also for her analysis of patronage: with whom were the middlemen brokering? Were they in a power relationship or was it a matter of back-scratching amicitia? Dr Saygin has commendably complicated the models we use?but perhaps she has not made them complex enough. Corpus Christi College, Oxford David Rundle Le cinquecentinedella Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze. Ed. by Sara Centi. (Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali. Indici e Cataloghi, nuova serie, XIV) Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato. 2002. 2 vols. xxxvi + 733 pp.; 41 illus. ?200. ISBN 88-240-3521-3. The Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, housed in the precincts of the church of San Lorenzo and approached by a staircase designed by Michelangelo, was originally the family library of the Medici, but is best known to classical scholars and students of Renaissance culture as containing most of what remains of the historic collection of Latin and Greek manuscripts put together in Florence in the firsthalf of the fifteenth century by Niccolo Niccoli, and presented to Cosimo de' Medici, who placed the books in the public library which he had instituted in the friary of San Marco. In the sixteenth century most of the treasures of this collection were transferred by the Medici dukes to their own library. Subsequent donations and purchases have added to the importance of the manuscript collection, both forclassical and for ltalian stud? ies. However, its printed collection is largely a product of the last two centuries, as in 1783 most of the printed books then in its possession were transferred to another Florentine library as part ofa process of rationalization, and are now in the Biblioteca MLR, 99.3, 2004 801 Nazionale Centrale. Its present small but distinguished printed collection has two main components: the library of firsteditions of classical authors presented to the Laurenziana in 1818 by Count Angelo Maria d'Elci and, by an ironic twist of fortune, those printed books still left in the library of San Marco, acquired...

Entrepreneurship or Cultural Darwinism? Privatization and American Cultural Patronage

The concept of the entrepreneur as an artsadministrator is developed as a person serving as a contractual intermediary,bringing together the government, the private sector, and the public for acultural good. The arts administrator functions as an entrepreneur who mediatesthe funding triad of earned income, philanthropic donations, and governmentsubvention. Using empirical evidence from both American and Australian systems ofpatronage, the role of philanthropy and the perils of privatizations arediscussed, given some uncritical approaches to privatization such as: theuniqueness of philanthropy in the American system of cultural patronage; thelimited potential for increase in Australian philanthropy, calling for themaintenance of all parts of the funding triad; the risk that commercializationmay dictate aesthetic decisions when profit becomes an end in itself; and theinevitability of Cultural Darwinism without public support. The cultural entrepreneur, as an advocate for culture, should function as acultural intermediary, facilitating a dialogue between art and society, artistand public, arts, organizations, and government, artistic production and publicfinance, aesthetics and politics.(CBS)

Paduan culture in Venetian care: the patronage of Bishop Pietro Donato (Padua 1428–47)

The paper discusses the cultural patronage of the Venetian Pietro Donato, bishop of Padua, concentrating particularly upon his work at Padua's duomo and Studium. Donato presents a useful example of a prolific patron of the arts in a period which currently lacks documented case studies; his artistic commissions bridge the gap between the fall of the Carrara dynasty in 1405 and the flourishing Paduan art market which emerged in the late 1440s. The Council of Basel is identified as having played a key role in the formation of Paduan culture from the early 1430s. Throughout his Paduan office, the bishop's cultural patronage took account of his roles as both father of the Paduan Church and representative of the Venetian authorities. The paper argues that, in both guises, his actions were consistently and strategically defined in relation to the patronage of the previous Carrara rulers in order to address the vacuum left by their sudden fall from power and to nullify their political significance.

Preface: The Social-Democratic Model of Cultural Patronage

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsKevin V. MulcahyKevin V. Mulcahy is a professor of political science and the humanities at Louisiana State University and an Executive Editor of The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society.