Petrarca, Francesco (1304–74)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Monfasani
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Moral Philosopher

With Dante and Boccaccio, Petrarca (known as Petrarch) made the fourteenth century the most memorable in Italian literature. He was also the first great humanist of the Italian Renaissance. He brilliantly and self-consciously exemplified humanism’s classical, rhetorical, literary, and historical interests; with him the movement came of age. He was a proponent not only of classical Rome (‘What else is history,’ he once asked, ‘than the praise of Rome?’), but also of contemporary Rome, constantly calling for the popes at Avignon to return to their proper See and urging restoration of Rome as the seat of the Empire, even if that meant supporting the visionary Roman revolutionary Cola di Rienzo. He came to see himself also as a moral philosopher. His ethical interests were closely tied to his cultural interests and personal situation as a lay moralist (though technically he was a cleric). His outlook and method differed from that of contemporary Aristotelians, whom he attacked on a broad cultural front, sounding many of the themes that would become common in subsequent conflicts between humanism and scholasticism in the Renaissance.

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Bowe
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Literary Tradition ◽  
Guittone D'arezzo ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Perspective

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d’Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante’s works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy before and contemporary with Dante. The second part of the book uses this reconstruction to demonstrated Dante’s engagement with and indebtedness to the dynamics of exchange that characterized the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument of the book, for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition, is underpinned by a conceptualization of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini’s Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’, and as sense of ‘performative’ speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts (such as Dante’s Commedia).

On Some Italian Renaissance Caskets with Pastiglia Decoration

1946 ◽  
Vol 26 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 123-137
Author(s):  
W. L. Hildburgh
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Outer Surface ◽  
Plastic Material ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Level Surface ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Repeated Pattern ◽  
The Rich

The minor arts of the Renaissance in Italy included the ornamentation of small wooden boxes with reliefs moulded in a plastic material which was applied while yielding and hardened subsequently to the firmness of a soft stone. Although persons of a romantic turn of mind like to call such boxes ‘jewel-caskets’, it would seem more probable that they were made for the use of persons of moderate means, as substitutes for the caskets of precious materials such as were used by the rich, to contain trinkets and small oddments rather than gems or jewellery. In the fourteenth century and during a great part of the fifteenth the pastiglia covered the whole, or almost the whole, of the outer surface of its wooden foundation, was in most cases modelled smoothly in gentle gradations of relief, and was painted with colours which accentuated the forms of its comparatively large figures and supplied details of the decoration. In the second half of the fifteenth century, and continuing into the sixteenth, the decoration, in both its figures and its conventionalized ornament, was on a much smaller scale and in much sharper relief, and was applied to a level surface which might itself be a kind of pastiglia, either plain or marked all over with a regular repeated pattern.

The Rise of Modern Science: When and Why?

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Hooykaas
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
High Middle Ages

When did modern science arise? This is a question which has received divergent answers. Some would say that it started in the High Middle Ages (1277), or that it began with th ‘via moderna’ of the fourteenth century. More widespread is the idea that the Italian Renaissance was also the re-birth of the sciences. In general, Copernicus is then singled out as the great revolutionary, and the ‘scientific revolution’ is said to have taken place during the period from Copernicus to Newton. Others would hold that the scientific revolution started in the seventeenth century and that it covered the period from Galileo to Newton. Sometimes a second scientific revolution is said to have occurred in the first quarter of the twentieth century (Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.), a revolution which should be considered as great as the first one.

The Italian connection in Juan de Valdés’ Diálogo de la lengua

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-283
Author(s):  
Angelo Mazzocco
Keyword(s):  
Italian Literature ◽  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Seminal Work

Summary The article reassesses the connection between Juan de Valdés’ (c.1495–1541) Diálogo de la lengua (1535) and the Italian Renaissance by demonstrating that Valdés was thoroughly familiar with the Italian literature on language and the concept of its possible rebirth. It is shown that the Italian humanist Pietro Bembo’s (1470–1547) argument, as laid down in his seminal work Prose della volgar lingua (1525), that great writers contribute significantly to the normalization and enrichment of a language constitutes the frame of Valdés’ work from which flow the author’s concerns about culture and linguistic theory. Valdés’ appropriation of and reaction to the Italian literature on language reflect the views prevalent in the intellectual circles of Europe at the time.

Vittoria Colonna

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Vittoria Colonna ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Spiritual Friendship ◽  
Literary Model ◽  
New Research ◽  
Cultural Historiography

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna’s influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women’s place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

Vittoria Colonna

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Book History ◽  
Italian Literature ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
Vittoria Colonna ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Spiritual Friendship ◽  
Literary Model ◽  
New Research ◽  
Cultural Historiography

This edited collection presents fresh and original work on Vittoria Colonna, perhaps the outstanding female figure of the Italian Renaissance, a leading Petrarchist poet, and an important figure in the Italian Reform movement. Until recently best known for her close spiritual friendship with Michelangelo, she is increasingly recognized as a powerful and distinctive poetic voice, a cultural and religious icon, and an important literary model for both men and women. This volume comprises compelling new research by established and emerging scholars in the fields of literature, book history, religious history, and art history, including several studies of Colonna's influence during the Counter-Reformation, a period long neglected by Italian cultural historiography. The Colonna who emerges from this new reading is one who challenges traditional constructions of women's place in Italian literature; no mere imitator or follower, but an innovator and founder of schools in her own right.

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