Renaissance Florence Research Articles

Review: Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence: Screens and Choir Spaces, from the Middle Ages to Tridentine Reform

Review: <i>Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence: Screens and Choir Spaces, from the Middle Ages to Tridentine Reform</i>

Religion Counts: Faithful Realism and Historical Representation in George Eliot’s Romola

This article explores the importance of faith in the Victorian historical novel, with a particular focus on George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863), and rethinks past secularist approaches to the genre. Romola was arguably the most meticulously researched historical novel of the nineteenth century. Set in Florence from 1492 to 1498, the novel traces the rise and fall of the Dominican friar, Girolamo Savonarola, as he pursued the spiritual and political reform of the city, leading to his excommunication and martyrdom. Despite the religious setting of the novel, Eliot’s painstaking effort to imagine a realistic historical representation of Florentine society has often been approached in secular terms as a tour de force of the author’s humanist vision of a progressive march towards modernity. Building on recent work in postsecular studies, this essay rethinks the novel’s historical realism in terms of Christian faith. Centering on the spiritual journey of the protagonist, Romola de’ Bardi, the novel presents a faithful depiction of Renaissance Florence by imagining historical representation as an act of faith. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s essay, “Faith and Knowledge”, the article analyzes how Eliot frames the significance of the novel’s historical representation as an act of faith that one’s life is bound meaningfully to those of others.

From Cult to Culture. The Orsanmichele Madonna Between Art and Devotion

This paper constitutes an encompassing account of the Madonna of Orsanmichele in all its historical instances. As source of the first miracle ever recorded in the city state of Florence, in 1292, the Orsanmichele Madonna generated a cult that lasted centuries. Considering the extravagant artistic commissions on the site of the granary turned church, Orsanmichele became a place of religious worship, and, more importantly, grown into being equated with the political and spiritual identity of Florence. The panel b y Bernando Daddi and the tabernacle designed by Andrea Orcagna have generated, I argue, a parallel cult one revering the exquisite artistic draughtsman ship of the painting and that of its monumental shrine. In this paper I aim to present the dialogue be tween the Marian cult located at Orsanmichele, starting in the thirteenth century, and the artistic patronage prompted by the popularity of the miracle making image of the Virgin. My study represents a critical re visitation of the prominent book by Megan Holmes, The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence, published in 2013.

Brick and Mortar, Paint and Metal: Architecture and Craft in Renaissance Florence and Beyond

It is well known that many figures who rose to prominence as architects were initially trained as sculptors, metalworkers, carvers or painters, from Filippo Brunelleschi, who first learned the goldsmith trade, to Andrea Palladio, who started his career as a stonecutter. Yet how exactly their careers evolved and how their training informed their practice as architects remains an underexplored subject in architectural history. This article explores the social, intellectual and practical implications of craftsmanship in 15th- and 16th-century Italy, probing the relationship between painting, sculpture, metalwork and architecture by problematising the theoretical framework of disegno and interrogating measuring practices. In shedding light on the narrative potential of buildings and the broad cultural significance of architectural forms beyond three-dimensional, large-scale buildings, this research underscores how the historiographical gap between art and architectural history has hindered our understanding of craft and the contribution artists made to architectural practice.

James Harper. Review of "Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi" .

James Harper. Review of "Botticelli and Renaissance Florence: Masterworks from the Uffizi" .

Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentazioni of Renaissance Florence. By Nerida Newbigin. 2 volumes, continuously paginated. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2021. vii–xxxvi, 37–1039 pp.; tables, appendices, bibliography, index. $85.00 paperback.

Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentazioni of Renaissance Florence. By Nerida Newbigin. 2 volumes, continuously paginated. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2021. vii–xxxvi, 37–1039 pp.; tables, appendices, bibliography, index. $85.00 paperback.

Shelley E. Zuraw. Review of "Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence: Screens and Choir Spaces, from the Middle Ages to Tridentine Reform" by Joanne Allen.

Shelley E. Zuraw. Review of "Transforming the Church Interior in Renaissance Florence: Screens and Choir Spaces, from the Middle Ages to Tridentine Reform" by Joanne Allen.

New Books across the Disciplines

New Books across the Disciplines

Florentine Streetscapes and their Role in Revisiting Palazzo Rucellai’s Urban façade Hypotheses

The facciata double meaning as façade and outer appearance embodies the Italian city-state’s political, cultural, and social values that Leon Battista Alberti outlined in his famed De re aedificatoria libri decem (1485). This concept lies at the heart of Florence’s urban fabric: one of the early cradles of Renaissance architecture that originated from the artistic expenditure of prosperous families including, the Medici, Strozzi, and Rucellai. In this context, the Palazzo Rucellai (c.1446-66) marks an important historical moment in history as its façade, with its three superimposed orders and well-proportioned urban composition, was the first of its kind in Renaissance Florence. However, the palazzo’s unfinished façade sparked a debate regarding its finished appearance which the paper revisits by positioning a 3D digital twin onto the façade’s historic urban context and by applying through Space Syntax to explore its relationship to the urban fabric.

Sharon T. Strocchia. Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy.

Women’s active role in diverse areas of premodern medical practice has been well established over the last decades. As far back as 1989, Monica Green challenged the notion that “women’s health was women’s business” and provided strong evidence that men and women treated both men and women in a variety of ways. More recent studies of recipes, domestic healing, and early modern patients demonstrated the central importance of the household as a site for medical practice, the high value placed on medicinal recipes and pharmaceutical interventions in illness, and the involvement of women in these overlapping arenas. Sharon T. Strocchia’s superb Forgotten Healers, the first full-length study of women medical practitioners in early modern Italy, both reinforces and adds important new aspects to this existing scholarship. With a focus on Renaissance Florence, Strocchia draws on rich archival sources to study a range of female healers, particularly noblewomen, nuns, and hospital workers. Together, these examples offer a picture of how women of various walks of life, all working outside the male-centered guild structure, managed to exercise authority in the medical marketplace.

Trinita Kennedy. Review of "Augustinian Art and Meditation in Renaissance Florence: The Choir Altarpieces of Santo Spirito 1480–1510" by Antonia Fondaras.

Trinita Kennedy. Review of "Augustinian Art and Meditation in Renaissance Florence: The Choir Altarpieces of Santo Spirito 1480–1510" by Antonia Fondaras.

The threshold of the marketplace

Linen was a major commodity in pre-industrial societies. Despite this material being broadly used among all social ranks of Renaissance Florence, the linen industry has received scant attention by scholars who have instead mostly focused on the manufacture of high-quality woollen and silk cloth. An in-depth study of the household account books of several patrician families dating from the 15th and 16th centuries has allowed me to shed light on the importance of women in processing, exchanging and caring of flaxen fabrics. Drawing on a broad sample of unexplored women’s practical writings, this article will show how these economic activities were not just oriented to self-consumption and domestic use, but were often directed towards local and regional markets. I will also argue that women’s participation in this sector of textile production has been a determining factor allowing them to acquire a complex set of management skills within the household economy.

Florence decked in rustic garb: pietra serena in sixteenth-century Tuscan sculpture and the Etruscan revival in the Medici garden of the Villa di Castello

The use of sandstone for sculpture is recorded as far back as classical sources such as Vitruvius and Pliny. In Renaissance Florence, artists prolifically employed pietra serena and pietra bigia, two variants of the so-called macigno of Fiesole. Re-examining Vasari, Borghini, Del Riccio and others provides a more precise sense of the nomenclature and an understanding of how the materials were used. From devotional sculpture to secular (coats of arms, fireplaces, basins, etc.), the local stone, already employed by Donatello and his followers, invaded the garden in the sixteenth century. In 1538, for the Medici villa at Castello, Niccolò Tribolo, on the wave of the nascent Etruscan revival and his interest in Serlio, associated macigno sculpture with rusticity, the perfect vehicle for the Tuscan order. His collaborators there (Pierino da Vinci, Antonio Lorenzi, Valerio Cioli and Francesco Ferrucci del Tadda) would go on to have lasting reputations for sculpting in the local stone.

Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentzioni of Renaissance Florence by Nerida Newbigin

Making a Play for God: The Sacre Rappresentzioni of Renaissance Florence by Nerida Newbigin

Gallstones: The thing in itself.

Content available: Audio Recording.

Walter Bruno Gratzer (1932–2021): In his own words, as far as possible

Miranda Robertson commemorates the life, remarkable times and witty and erudite writing of protein chemist and biophysicist Walter Gratzer.

Incarnating Image

Abstract This essay examines the significance of Frederic Leighton’s illustrations of George Eliot’s historical novel of Renaissance Florence, Romola (1862–1863). Leighton’s illustrations form a crucial part of Eliot’s vision of her heroine’s movement toward spiritual liberation. Eliot and Leighton together figure this evolution as a pilgrimage that takes us from the Old Testament to the Gospel of John, concluding with one of the most significant moments in the life of Christ: his encounter with the Woman at the Well. Leighton’s depictions of the heroine and Eliot’s narrative powerfully combine to show how Romola’s connection to sacrificial love is combined with increasing authority, as she becomes imagined as the force who unites both the prophetic Old Testament with the manifestations of the New. Romola thus uniquely underscores the place of a complex Victorian aesthetic and print culture within a genealogy of cultural renderings of female agency and mobility.

The Representation of Children’s Deaths in Florentine Family Books. A Methodology of Researching Emotions in Renaissance Florence

The article investigates the death of children and its emotional depiction in Florentine family books of the Tre- and Quattrocento. Following Barbara Rosenwein’s theory of emotional communities, as well as William M. Reddy’s emotives, the essay will present excerpts from the source material to examine the extent to which authors used emotions or “emotional language” to describe their own experiences and events and, if necessary, to communicate “emotionally” with the audience of their texts. Is it possible to identify similarities and differences in the narrative of children’s deaths and, if so, to what degree can these be interpreted? Furthermore, Philippe Ariès’ thesis of emotionally detached relationships of parents regarding their infants will be addressed and questioned.

Hierarchies of Value: The Medallist’s Work in Sixteenth-Century Art

Hierarchies of Value: The Medallist’s Work in Sixteenth-Century Art

Immersive Renaissance Florence: Research-Based 3-D Modeling in Digital Art and Architectural History

Immersive Renaissance Florence: Research-Based 3-D Modeling in Digital Art and Architectural History