I Tatti Studies最新文献

{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Jane Tylus","doi":"10.1086/702664","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702664","url":null,"abstract":"Bartolomeo Bulgarini’s panel in the Berenson Collection exemplifies what was by the mid-fourteenth century the well-established genre of the Crucifixion: suffering Christ at the center, soldiers and high priests to the right, anguished disciples and mother to the left (fig. 1). St. Francis’s embrace of the foot of the cross soaked in blood is less standard and a marked departure from Bulgarini’s most direct source, a triptych executed in the workshop of his great fellow Sienese painter, Duccio, now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. But surely one of the most touching aspects of the Duccio has been retained by Bulgarini, virtually intact: the tender gaze directed by the apostle John and a female disciple at Mary, as they delicately support her swooning body. Mary’s own eyes are fixed steadily on her son, who in turn directs his fading sight toward her. Thus the gesture of love—of, I would argue, compassion—takes place without Mary’s acknowledgment. John and this unknown woman, along with a Mary Magdalene in red at the top of the group, are simply reaching out for an exhausted Mary as she is locked in silent, mournful conversation with her son. Bulgarini’s painting resonates with a contemporary work that the opening cluster of essays argues is equally concerned with representations of compassion: the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio, written roughly a decade after Bulgarini painted his lamentation for a Franciscan devotee. The title of Gur Zak’s essay quotes from the first sentence of Boccaccio’s influential masterpiece: “umana cosa è aver compassione.” Zak opens his own article discussing patristic theories of compassion and contrasting them with the Stoic tendencies of Boccaccio’s most important influence, Petrarch—a Petrarch who tended to define manliness as emotional control. As he goes on to consider two novelle from Day 4, Zak suggests that Boccaccio “offers an alternative vision of humanism, one that underscores human vulnerability and the value of expressions of compassion between friends.” Such friendship could be said to be demonstrated in Bulgarini’sCrucifixionwith respect toMary and her companions—and aMary, moreover, who was depicted as a model of maternal compassion throughout the late medieval period, while Jesus was increasingly depicted as “a","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89350563","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Francesco Borromini and the Spanish Church of Santi Ildefonso e Tommaso da Villanova in Rome","authors":"Pablo González Tornel","doi":"10.1086/702647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702647","url":null,"abstract":"THE CONVENT OF SANTI ILDEFONSO E TOMMASO DA VILLANOVA , the Roman headquarters of the Spanish Order of Discalced Augustinians, lies on Via Sistina, close to the palace housing the Spanish Embassy to the Holy See. The order was under Spanish patronage from its foundation, and in 1611 King Philip III wrote to his ambassador in Rome in order to grant his protection to the Discalced Augustinians. The history of the monastery began in 1619 with the license granted by Cardinal Giovanni Garzia Mellini, and its construction concluded in 1672 with the consecration of the church. The foundation was proud of its Spanish allegiance, which was underscored by having the names of Pope Clement IX and King Charles II of Spain chiseled onto its cornerstone. At the end of the century, the monks refused to place the tombstone of Juan Zamorra inside their building, arguing that it had been constructed by and for Spain and, therefore, that only the name of the nation could be represented. Moreover, this Spanish vocation was confirmed in the twentieth century by Elías Tormo, who included the monas-","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82380237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Umana cosa è aver compassione”: Boccaccio, Compassion, and the Ethics of Literature","authors":"Gur Zak","doi":"10.1086/702551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702551","url":null,"abstract":"THE EMOTION OF COMPASSION has been at the center of scholarly attention of several disciplines in recent years: history, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and literary studies all have taken interest in this emotion and its ethical, political, and poetic implications. For thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and Stephen Pinker, compassion, defined as “a painful emotion directed at another person’s misfortune or suffering,” is the “basic social emotion,” the glue that holds humans together and serves as the basis of a democratic and just society. For both, moreover, it is literature—and especially literature with a strong tragic component— that serves as the primary means of cultivating this essentially humane trait. The empathetic identification with the hardships of literary characters, they argue, develops our ability to recognize our shared human vulnerabilities and thus become compassionate and caring people in real life. This view regarding the value of compassion—and the power of literary fictions to cultivate it—is not without its critics, however. Some contemporary scholars challenge the social and political merits of compassion, claiming that it leads hu-","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78923139","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Music and the Book of Nature: Vincenzo Galilei on the Conundrum of Musical Consonance","authors":"Brandon Konoval","doi":"10.1086/702719","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702719","url":null,"abstract":"FEW FIGURES HAVE DRAWN more scholarly attention to the relationship between Renaissance musical humanism and early modern science than Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1520/30–1591)—lutenist, composer, notorious polemicist in musical affairs, and the father of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), notorious polemicist in scientific affairs. Vincenzo has been conventionally portrayed as delivering a decisive conclusion to significant concerns regarding the relationship between music and mathematics: from the Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581) through the late discourses inmanuscript (ca. 1589–91), the acoustic investigations and theoretical contributions of Vincenzo have been understood to represent the defeat of numerology and the disenchantment of a traditional Pythagorean or Neoplatonic worldview. Where the source documents themselves strikingly diverge from such an account, the discrepancies have been correspondingly portrayed as clear departures from an empirical orientation, and as wholly extraneous for that very reason to Vincenzo’s genuine findings and fundamental intentions.","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78591445","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Library of Julius II and Raphael’s Art of Commentary","authors":"Tracy Cosgriff","doi":"10.1086/702710","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/702710","url":null,"abstract":"DEAR LITTLE BOOK: You who were obscured for some time In a gloomy and miserable place, And were submerged in Lethaean forgetfulness By the envy of spiteful men, Are now restored to light and splendor, And are returned to the hands of the learned. Eminent Giuliano has given this to you, He who commands the name and renown Of his uncle Sixtus to be eternal, And who prophetically extends the green branches Of his tree across the whole world with his deeds, This is what that great Giuliano has given to you.","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2019-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77382970","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editor’s Note","authors":"Jane Tylus","doi":"10.1086/699815","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699815","url":null,"abstract":"The new Met Breuer opened in 2016 with an exhibit called Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculptures from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries. It featured Rembrandt, Turner, Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, and contemporary artists, as well as Dürer, Perino del Vaga, and Francesco di GiorgioMartini. The exhibit convincingly demonstrated that since the Renaissance, there has been something of a cult of the unfinished, especially in art—as though, as Leah Whittington puts it in the opening essay of this volume, there is something powerful in being able to see the “ultima mano” of the artist, allowing us to situate ourselves at the heart of the creative process. Michelangelo’s “non finito” has become one of the most compelling aspects of this artist’s legacy, and Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, recently returned to the Uffizi after extensive restoration, offers a tantalizing peek into Leonardo’smodus operandi, with its etching of characters in the background who seem to carry with them the specter of a pagan past that Jesus’s birth put to rest. At the same time, while the unfinished work may have acquired an aura of its own thanks to the very Renaissance with which the exhibit opened, early modernity experienced no little anxiety in its desire to exact completeness where it found something wanting. One can speak of the stigma as well as the fascination of the incomplete. This is, in fact, the focus of the four essays that have been selected as part of this issue’s cluster, “Unfinished Renaissances.”Whether it is the apparently (to a modern eye) misguided attempt to finish what seems to be the most perfect of poems from classical antiquity, Virgil’sAeneid; Angelo Poliziano’s attempt to render an authentic, integral self even as he left his poetic masterpiece, Stanze per la giostra, incomplete and whose quote “As if art were always something begun and unfinished” was featured in the Met Breuer catalogue; the ambitious desire of a Claudio Tolomei to formulate an educational project leading to the complete mastery of ancient architecture; or the equally ambitious desire of the polymath Athanasius Kircher to crown his distinguished career with a work that would unlock the secrets of Etruscan language and culture: there is, in all of these projects, a discomfort with the incomplete, a desire for totalizing texts and structures of thought, not least because of what was perceived as antiquity’s fragmentary nature. Or as Whittington notes in her opening pages, which could easily have served as the introduction to the","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87893684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bronzino’s Portrait of Antonio Lapi: A Hypothetical Identification with Considerations of Chronology and Costume in Bronzino’s Male Portraits","authors":"S. Wellen","doi":"10.1086/699814","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699814","url":null,"abstract":"AGNOLO BRONZINO (1503–72) was the most celebrated portrait painter in Florence of his generation, yet very few contemporary sources document and discuss this aspect of his work. In his discussion of the artists of the newly founded Accademia del Disegno, Giorgio Vasari praises Bronzino’s portraits as “all very natural, executed with incredible diligence, and finished so well, that nothing more could be desired” and as “so natural that they seem truly alive, and nothing is wanting in them save breath.” To modern eyes, however, Bronzino’s highly polished and sophisticated portraits hardly seem natural and lifelike. One critic has","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87449215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Things Left Unsaid","authors":"S. Butler","doi":"10.1086/699816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699816","url":null,"abstract":"PROBABLY NOTHING ANGELO POLIZIANO WROTE has more often been quoted than this: “Non exprimis, inquit aliquis, Ciceronem. Quid tum? Non enim sum Cicero! Me tamen (ut opinor) exprimo” (Someone says to me, “You don’t express Cicero.” So what? I’m not Cicero! All the same, as I see it, I express myself ). These sixteen words comprise roughly one-half hundredth of a percent of Poliziano’s published Latin and Greek works, and one suspects that their author would be dismayed to find his vast, rich oeuvre—and his brief but extraordinary life—so often reduced to a single epigram. And yet, there it is: abrupt, arresting, remarkable. One way or another, one cannot really reckon with Poliziano without reckoning with his most famous dictum, and this is especially true for the reader","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90059797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"New Light on Cimabue’s Lead White at Assisi","authors":"Holly Flora","doi":"10.1086/699666","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699666","url":null,"abstract":"SINCE THE AGE OF DANTE, Cenni di Pepo (ca. 1240–1302), better known as Cimabue, has been considered a forefather of Italian Renaissance painting. He is the first painter chronicled in Giorgio Vasari’s Vitae, there portrayed as a hero who set Florentine painters on a path to surpass the achievements of the revered classical past. Among the works praised in Vasari’s biography are the murals Cimabue painted in the upper church apse and transepts of the Basilica of Saint Francis at Assisi, likely executed between 1277–80. Depicting the Apocalypse, the Life, Death, and Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the Four Evangelists, and the Apostles, Cimabue’s murals are, unfortunately, in poor condition (fig. 1). They had already deteriorated by the time Vasari saw them in 1563; in his 1568 edition of the Vitae he described them as “consumed by time and dust.” Cimabue’s working","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87685541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Qui Succederet Operi: Completing the Unfinished in Maffeo Vegio’s Supplementum Aeneidos","authors":"Leah Whittington","doi":"10.1086/699711","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/699711","url":null,"abstract":"PLINY THE ELDER , in an anecdote repeated by Renaissance writers from Petrarch to Vasari, tells the story of the renowned Greek painter Apelles and his uncompleted painting of Venus of Cos. Apelles had intended this Coan Venus to surpass all his other paintings, including his earlier Venus Anadyomene, a picture of Venus rising from the sea, celebrated in poetry and so admired by the emperor Augustus that he dedicated it in the temple of his adopted father, the Divine Julius Caesar. But Apelles did not succeed in his intention. He died before he could finish the painting, and other painters were left to decide what to do with the partially executed panel. With a touch of hagiographic awe, Pliny recounts the inevitable outcome of the quest to find someone to bring the great artist’s work to completion: “nec qui succederet operi ad praescripta liniamenta inventus est” (no one could be found to carry on the task in conformity with the sketched outlines). Retelling Pliny’s story in hisDialogo di pittura (1548), Paolo Pino adds that when no wouldbe finisher presented himself, the unfinished painting was preserved by the people of Cos for many years after Apelles’s death “come cosa maravigliosa,” as a thing to be marveled at. Not only was the painting preserved exactly as Apelles had left it, but it was admired in its very incompleteness. Pliny’s anecdote and the play of its repetitions across the Renaissance in both words and images testifies to a powerful and persistent strain of Renaissance thinking about unfinished and incomplete works of art. In the hundreds of drawings of","PeriodicalId":42173,"journal":{"name":"I Tatti Studies","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83374844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}