Tita Rosenthal
University of Southern California, Italian, Department Member
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Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson Acknowledgments Introduction 1: Satirizing the Courtesan: Franco's Enemies 2: Fashioning the Honest Courtesan: Franco's Patrons Appendix: Two Testaments and a Tax Report 3: Addressing Venice:... more
Foreword by Catharine R. Stimpson Acknowledgments Introduction 1: Satirizing the Courtesan: Franco's Enemies 2: Fashioning the Honest Courtesan: Franco's Patrons Appendix: Two Testaments and a Tax Report 3: Addressing Venice: Franco's Familiar Letters 4: Denouncing the Courtesan: Franco's Inquisition Trial and Poetic Debate Appendix: Documents of the Inquisition 5: The Courtesan in Exile: An Elegiac Future Notes Works Cited Index
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Research Interests: Art History, Art, Textiles, Painting, Portrait, and 8 moreVenice, Clothing, Italian Renaissance, Oil painting, Woodcuts, Cesare Vecellio, Veronese, and Woodcut
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Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart... more
Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman ...
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Cesare Vecellios' guide to the dress and customs of the world first appeared in his native Venice in 1590, and was a publishing sensation. It brought together vivid descriptions and depictions of the costumes of the different... more
Cesare Vecellios' guide to the dress and customs of the world first appeared in his native Venice in 1590, and was a publishing sensation. It brought together vivid descriptions and depictions of the costumes of the different countries of the world throughout history, from Ancient Rome to Vecellios day, and of people of all ranks from kings down to gravediggers, beggars and orphans. This is the first time that the entire text has been translated into English and presented with its original illustrations. Packed with enchanting descriptions of the costume and habits of the peoples of the world as seen in the late 16th century, this book will appeal to all those interested in the history of dress, travel, antiquarian books, Renaissance art and cultural history.
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Against a system of gender ideologies that defined a woman's social position and intellectual pursuits as private, devoted to domestic concerns and the moral welfare of her family, the emergency of the cortigiana onesta, the... more
Against a system of gender ideologies that defined a woman's social position and intellectual pursuits as private, devoted to domestic concerns and the moral welfare of her family, the emergency of the cortigiana onesta, the intellectual courtesan, dramatically calls into question the humanists’ injunction against women's public status and speech. How did Veronica Franco, the foremost example of the cortigiana onesta in sixteenth-century Italy, succeed in infiltrating the “academy of learned men“? Were any restrictions placed upon her professional activities when she vied with men for public recognition and literary commissions? How did social forces contain or compel the courtesan's cultivation of a literary identity in Venetian society? And finally, what were the maneuvers, both personal and professional, that the cortigiana onesta adopted when she obtained entrance into an elite literary circle and allied herself with powerful male patrons and intellectuals?
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The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the... more
The essays in this volume analyze strategies adopted by contemporary novelists, playwrights, screenwriters, and biographers interested in bringing the stories of early modern women to modern audiences. It also pays attention to the historical women creators themselves, who, be they saints or midwives, visual artists or poets and playwrights, stand out for their roles as active practitioners of their own arts and for their accomplishments as creators. Whether they delivered infants or governed as monarchs, or produced embroideries, letters, paintings or poems, their visions, the authors argue, have endured across the centuries. As the title of the volume suggests, the essays gathered here participate in a wider conversation about the relation between biography, historical fiction, and the growing field of biofiction (that is, contemporary fictionalizations of historical figures), and explore the complicated interconnections between celebrating early modern women and perpetuating popu...
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Cesare Vecellios' guide to the dress and customs of the world first appeared in his native Venice in 1590, and was a publishing sensation. It brought together vivid descriptions and depictions of the costumes of the different... more
Cesare Vecellios' guide to the dress and customs of the world first appeared in his native Venice in 1590, and was a publishing sensation. It brought together vivid descriptions and depictions of the costumes of the different countries of the world throughout history, from Ancient Rome to Vecellios day, and of people of all ranks from kings down to gravediggers, beggars and orphans. This is the first time that the entire text has been translated into English and presented with its original illustrations. Packed with enchanting descriptions of the costume and habits of the peoples of the world as seen in the late 16th century, this book will appeal to all those interested in the history of dress, travel, antiquarian books, Renaissance art and cultural history.
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In this essay, we discuss words and images in sixteenth-century Venice in two forms: the prose commentary and woodcuts in Cesare Vecellio's Degli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice, 1590), and the paintings... more
In this essay, we discuss words and images in sixteenth-century Venice in two forms: the prose commentary and woodcuts in Cesare Vecellio's Degli habiti antichi et moderni di diverse parti del mondo (Venice, 1590), and the paintings of Paulo Veronese from 1550 to 1578. Our theoretical framework is the analysis of ideology as it is materialized in the making, wearing and representation of clothing. We study three kinds of dress in Venice: the red silks worn by wealthy merchants, the black wool and velvet worn by patrician men, and the white and gold brocades worn by noblewomen. Differences in medium, technique and scale separate Vecellio and Veronese, but they both invoke ancient history and present-day mercantilism to affirm the myth of Venice as a paragon of political order and man-made beauty. That is, the printmaker-writer and the painter share a common rhetorical purpose: through clothing, to celebrate their city as a center of textile wealth and social harmony. In spite of ...
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“A woman’s greatest and most hard-won asset is an education.” With steelyeyed defiance, the onscreen personification of Veronica Franco, the sixteenth-century Venetian poet and courtesan, delivers the line to a roomful of the Venetian... more
“A woman’s greatest and most hard-won asset is an education.” With steelyeyed defiance, the onscreen personification of Veronica Franco, the sixteenth-century Venetian poet and courtesan, delivers the line to a roomful of the Venetian Republic’s noble wives. But she might have been espousing the virtues of learning to a group of Hollywood producers: Dangerous Beauty is a rare case of a film being adapted from an academic source. Dangerous Beauty (Warner Bros.) was released in 1998, directed by Marshall Herskovitz, with a screenplay by Jeannine Dominy. The film tells the story of Veronica Franco (Catherine McCormack) and makes the claim that she hopes to rise above her family’s impoverished social status by marrying the man she loves, the aristocrat and senator Marco Venier (Rufus Sewell) (Fig. 1). Though he returns Veronica’s love, his family forces him into a useful but loveless marriage with a woman from the ruling elite (Naomi Watts). Veronica’s shrewd mother ( Jacqueline Bisset) introduces her daughter to the courtesan’s profession by telling her it is the only way to “have” Marco — as well as to support herself, and by extension, the family. Veronica embraces the freedom to write poetry and mingle openly with powerful men. Yet they use her as a scapegoat when it suits them: ultimately, Maffio Venier (Oliver Platt), Marco’s cousin and nephew to Veronica’s patron Domenico Venier (Fred Ward), accuses her of witchcraft,
Clothing evolved into a system of fashionable dress in early modern Venice because frequent changes in taste, novelty in designs, and innovative methods in the manufacturing of textiles were supported by an unprecedented institutional... more
Clothing evolved into a system of fashionable dress in early modern Venice because frequent changes in taste, novelty in designs, and innovative methods in the manufacturing of textiles were supported by an unprecedented institutional flexibility. New patterns of production, merchandizing, and consumption in the creation and dissemination of Venetian textiles for clothing also changed how Venetians selected and acquired goods to form their identities. Fashion throughout this long period refers to the act of transforming textiles into clothing in new ways, according to its cut and shape, and, moreover, its ability to introduce change in social and gender practices. Two published costume books, one by Cesare Vecellio in the 16th century and the massive, encyclopedic work of the 18th century by Giovanni Grevembroch, depict the dress codes and collective modes of socialization and representation of Venetian men and women. Keywords: Cesare Vecellio; clothing; costume; fashion; Venetian textiles; Venice
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... di Padova 4 (1971): 49 – 69; and Le università dell'Europa dal Rinascimento alle riforme religiose, ed. Gian Paolo Brizzi and J ... nei diplomi dell'Università di Padova,” in Diplomi di laurea all'Università di Padova... more
... di Padova 4 (1971): 49 – 69; and Le università dell'Europa dal Rinascimento alle riforme religiose, ed. Gian Paolo Brizzi and J ... nei diplomi dell'Università di Padova,” in Diplomi di laurea all'Università di Padova (1504 – 1806), ed. Giovanna Baldassin Molli, Luciana Sitran Rea ...
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Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart... more
Veronica Franco (whose life is featured in the motion picture Dangerous Beauty) was a sixteenth-century Venetian beauty, poet, and protofeminist. This collection captures the frank eroticism and impressive eloquence that set her apart from the chaste, silent woman ...