Renaissance Florence

Nella letteratura italiana dal XIV al XVIII secolo ha discreta fortuna e circolazione il tema della sconfitta del dio dell’amore, umiliato e privato delle proprie armi soprattutto dalle donne. A partire dalle fonti classiche dell’episodio, rintracciabili nell’epigrammatica alessandrina e nel "Cupido cruciatus" di Decimo Magno Ausonio, si ricostruiscono il significato e le molteplici declinazioni del soggetto nella produzione letteraria italiana, dal "Triumphus Pudicitie" di Francesco Petrarca alla poesia in ottava rima di Luigi Pulci e Angelo Poliziano, dalle raccolte di emblemi ed imprese ai poemetti encomiastici cinquecenteschi in lode di donne, dalle opere di Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinelli alla letteratura morale settecentesca (con particolare attenzione per l’"Amore disarmato" attribuito a Jacopo Durandi). Ripercorrere le tappe della ricezione, tra riscrittura e risemantizzazione, del topos di Cupido punito e disarmato significa andare oltre un’indagine puramente tematica, per ricostruire la fortuna, letteraria ma anche iconografica, di un motivo di lunga durata.
Questo libro ha vinto il Premio Tesi di Dottorato istituito dalla Sapienza Università di Roma, nell’edizione 2013."

Scopo dichiarato dell’ordine dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano, fondato nel 1561 da Cosimo I de’ Medici anche per motivi di legittimazione dinastica, fu la difesa della cristianità dalla minaccia ottomana. La politica aggressiva nei confronti dei Turchi, praticata attraverso la guerra di corsa e gli attacchi per mare alle piazzeforti ottomane in vari punti del Mediterraneo, praticata in modo ancora moderato da Cosimo e Francesco de’ Medici, venne ripresa con forza da Ferdinando I, che ne fece un fiore all’occhiello del Granducato nel confronto con le analoghe attività delle altre potenze europee, e poi soprattutto da suo figlio Cosimo II e suo nipote Ferdinando II. In coincidenza con i tre granduchi l’uso di strumenti di comunicazione e propaganda relativi alle imprese navali dei cavalieri, relativamente poco presente fino alla fine del Cinquecento, divenne un progetto sistematico che vide nella prima metà del Seicento la pubblicazione di numerose relazioni, la loro ristampa in altre città italiane, e la loro traduzione, ristampa, o ripresa anche in altre nazioni europee (soprattutto in Spagna), con il coinvolgimento nella veicolazione complessiva dei contenuti anche di intellettuali come il poeta Gabriello Chiabrera. Il saggio mette in rilievo il carattere sistematico della produzione di relazioni sulle imprese dei cavalieri di Santo Stefano contro i Turchi nel corso del Seicento, illuminandone gli aspetti produttivi e il successo editoriale, ed evidenziandone anche i rapporti con la produzione di tipo più letterario.

Most modern historians perpetuate the myth that Giuliano de' Medici (1479-1516), son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was nothing more than an inconsequential, womanizing hedonist with little inclination or ability for politics. In the first sustained biography of this misrepresented figure, Josephine Jungic re-evaluates Giuliano’s life and shows that his infamous reputation was exaggerated by Medici partisans who feared his popularity and respect for republican self-rule.

Rejecting the autocratic rule imposed by his nephew, Lorenzo (Duke of Urbino), and brother, Giovanni (Pope Leo X), Giuliano advocated restraint and retention of republican traditions, believing his family should be “first among equals” and not more. As a result, the family and those closest to them wrote him out of the political scene, and historians - relying too heavily upon the accounts of supporters of Cardinal Giovanni and the Medici regime - followed suit. Interpreting works of art, books, and letters as testimony, Jungic constructs a new narrative to demonstrate that Giuliano was loved and admired by some of the most talented and famous men of his day, including Cesare Borgia, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Niccolò Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael.

More than a political biography, this volume offers a refreshing look at a man who was a significant patron and ally of intellectuals, artists, and religious reformers, revealing Giuliano to be at the heart of the period’s most significant cultural accomplishments.

The round painting known as the Doni tondo, now in the Uffizi Gallery, is the only existing panel painting completed by Michelangelo, whose authorship has never been questioned. There is also a general consensus that Michelangelo painted it for a friend, Agnolo Doni. The tondo is, nevertheless, controversial in many other respects. Michelangelo is thought to have painted it when he was in Florence in either or , but the dates of both the commission and the execution of the work are, so far, undocumented. Furthermore, its iconography presents some decided novelties, namely the unusual pose of the Virgin and the even stranger presence of five nude figures in the background. These and other details have been subjected to many interpretations. The painting, however, still lacks an explanation which brings all its elements together and which is fully consistent with both its genre and its function. This article is based on the assumption that a closer investigation of the personal and devotional context in which the painting was produced, and of Doni family history, might shed new light on the making of the tondo, and perhaps also on its controversial date. Several scholars have indeed already insisted on both the private character and the devotional function of this work. Nevertheless, they have not really questioned the traditional reading of the painting, which (as we shall see) is not entirely consistent with the function of a painting of this kind—that is, a Marian tondo. Following this line of enquiry, I propose that the study of other pictures which are possibly related to the Doni tondo, in genre or iconography, may prove fruitful.

Nicholas Eckstein's Painted Glories: The Brancacci Chapel in Renaissance Florence extricates this intensely studied monument from preoccupations characteristic of traditional art history: patronage, connoisseurship, style, conservation history, technique, and materials. This is notable because all these topics have prompted an extensive scholarship. Giorgio Vasari oriented the chapel to the future and drew a line from the Brancacci frescoes to those by Michelangelo at the Sistine chapel, marking a new tradition of excellence and modernity in Florentine art. Eckstein's orientation is to the past, and his goal is to understand the chapel as an expression of the multifaceted identity of the Carmelite order in Florence well before the painting of the mesmerizing frescoes in the 1420s and 1480s. His chapters seek to reconstruct not only the (much­altered) church of Santa Maria del Carmine as it stood in the fifteenth century but also the neighborhood around it. Felice Brancacci, patron of the decorative program, appears as an early focal point, but the book progressively widens its lens to consider the chapel as the possession of many communities. Eckstein does not attempt to penetrate the walls of the chapel and explore a new spatial clarity and psychological intensity in narrative painting. Rather, his analysis encompasses a wide range of ways that contemporaries approached, regarded, and used the chapel. The Brancacci chapel is for him a means to gain insight into the spiritual life of San Frediano, a gritty, working­class neighborhood, and the frescoes are the product of monks and artisans, patrician families, and widows of modest means. In fact the book's title does not reference the frescoes at all, but is rather a metaphor Felice Brancacci used to describe the Sultan's court in Cairo. The first chapter traces the origins and history of the Carmelite order in Florence and highlights the status of Peter as the apostle to whom contemporaries looked as an exemplar of bedrock faith but also fear and self­doubt. Eckstein reconstructs the interior of the Carmine chapel by chapel as a network of devotional micro­zones, with a fine­ grained attention to family patronage. The modern tourist makes a beeline for the Masaccio frescoes through a separate entrance. Eckstein is at pains to demonstrate how deeply imbricated the Brancacci chapel was within the interior of the Carmine, where many sacred spaces interpenetrated and overlapped. While the Carmelites could not ask for a clearer symbolic expression of their deep identification with the Roman papacy, the Brancacci frescoes also operated within an elitist ideology of leading citizens asserting their authority and control. Eckstein argues, not altogether persuasively, that the compelling scenes of Peter healing the sick and ministering to the socially marginal would have been for the Brancacci a reassuring alternative to the threat of social chaos and revolt. Virtues of the book—its widely dispersed attention and refusal to grant a privileged voice to the artists, order, or the patron in generating meaning—also hamper the advancement of a propulsive and coherent argument. Major claims about how the Brancacci frescoes must have functioned within the cultural imaginary of Florence in the turbulent 1420s startlingly appear at the end of the first chapter but seem disembodied and poorly founded in the shadowy figure of Felice Brancacci, as if they have wandered in from another kind of book. The abrupt swerve into a hard­edged, socially oppositional interpretive mode of setting the frescoes against their orthodox Christian iconography departs as suddenly as it arrives, and the book resumes its stately pace and broad­based texture.

A book that combines politics, sex and religion is bound to be a bestseller, but it may come as a surprise to find that these topics form the core of an art book centred on Renaissance Florence, and one aimed directly at art tourists. Guidebooks are usually written for those who intend to travel but don't know where to start. In the past, those unversed in academic art history and seeking an authority that would direct them to the most prized art in Florence had to turn to the broader base of tourist guides, or those that are specifically focused on a single gallery with explanations of the art pieces held in its collection. The reasoning of author Judith Testa, professor emerita in art history at Northern Illinois University, is simple. Art, she says, cannot be appreciated through the checklist approach.

The Medici Archive Project is offering a new online educational program in Italian paleography and archival studies for the A.Y. 2015 – 2016. The course is comprised of two components: an online course, which is divided into three modules, and an onsite seminar in Florence.
Reflecting increased interest from scholars at every stage of their careers, but especially the needs of students attempting archival research in Italy for the first time, our new modular program will provide students with both a firm introduction to working in Italian archives and the confidence to read, understand, and use archival material as an integral part of their research.
The current offer is a redesign and expansion of our previous educational courses. For the first time, students can now pick and choose from diverse modules suited to their interests. Moreover, students will be taught using our new online teaching tool developed with funding from the Samuel H. Kress
Foundation that allows students to collaborate online in the transcription of high quality digital reproductions of archival documents. The Fall semester will conclude with a standalone two-week seminar in Florence.

The syllabus can be found at: www.medici.org/educational-programs

Questions and queries should be addressed to education@medici.org

Some financial aid may be available to successful applicants undertaking most or all of the four modules.

Medici patronage in quattrocento Florence plays a pivotal role in the aesthetic articu-lation of the analogy between horticulture and culture. As an acorn fortunately planted may grow to an oak tree, a seed of an idea properly cultivated may grow to wisdom. One may replant branches of ancient wisdom and see them resprout. As one cultivates vines of grapes in the countryside, one may also plant and cultivate learning in a studiolo. Humanist horticulture is most explicit in a no longer extant studiolo-an inner room of valuables in the Medici Palace, Via Larga, Florence. The horticultural decor of the ceiling of Piero de' Medici's study is early evidence of a taste for vegetative imagery and symbolism within the Medici dynasty.

This paper examines Francesco Guicciardini's various efforts to engage, evade or protest Machiavelli's arguments concerning social class, the constitution of liberty and preferable forms of tyranny in his "Considerations on Machiavelli's Discourses" [1530].1 As a prominent Florentine ottimato and a dutiful servant of Medici princes, Guicciardini might be fully expected to resist or refute Machiavelli's frequent endorsements of the moral, cognitive and even pragmatic superiority of peoples over nobilities and princes. Additionally, Guicciardini's antipopular orientation may have been inflamed at the time that he wrote the "Considerations" since

The essay is focused on some official letters written during the  chancellorship of Carlo Marsuppini in Florence (1444-1453), and is divided into two parts: first, i t concerns t he request made by the the Signoria fiorentina to the Venetian Republic in order to receive as a
special gift some relics of santi Innocenti, so that the Florentine Comune could justify the name given to the new hospital built in Florence (1446). Secondly, the paper reports a new case of the so-called pittura infamante in Florence at the beginning of the XVth century.

In 1436, Leon Battista Alberti wrote a letter to Filippo Brunelleschi, which he attached to a manuscript of his recently completed treatise on painting, De pictura. In it, Alberti lauded some of the Florentine artists of his day, singling out Brunelleschi for particular praise on account of the unprecedented engineering feat of constructing the cupola of the Florentine cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. This article undertakes a close reading of some parts of the letter, focusing especially on the link that Alberti draws between great intellects (ingegni) and giants. Exploring the cultural traditions that might have informed Alberti's thinking—in particular, canto XXXI of Dante's Inferno— -the article considers how the giants introduce an element of moral jeopardy, significantly complicating what might otherwise appear to be a purely celebratory text. This sense of ambivalence is further explored in relation to the 'long exile' from which Alberti says that his family (banished from Florence for nearly three decades, until 1428) had recently returned. Similar phrases appear in Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and consideration of these poems, it is argued, might further inflect our understanding of Alberti's words in the letter. In this way, the article investigates how Alberti employed sophisticated literary means in order to express his own feelings regarding Brunelleschian ingegno and technical mastery; feelings that were both highly nuanced and, ultimately, unsettled.

I Ricordi di Giovanni di Pagolo Morelli, da tempo noti agli storici, sono qui pubblicati per la prima volta in versione integra- le e linguisticamente fedele al testo originale del manoscritto. A questa nuova edizione critica si accompagna un lungo saggio introduttivo sull’autore, sugli intenti della sua opera e sugli esiti che essa ebbe presso gli eredi cui era destinata. I 74 anni vissuti da Giovanni Morelli dagli anni ’70 del Trecento alla metà degli anni ’40 del secolo successivo attraversano un arco temporale decisivo per la storia fiorentina, segnato da una forte mobilità sociale di cui i Morelli, famiglia dalle origini modeste, furono protagonisti. La lettura dei Ricordi, unita all’analisi della corposa documentazione superstite a carico dell’autore e della sua casa, aiutano a comprendere la forte spinta all’ascesa sociale che animò il Morelli e le ragioni dell’affermazione dei suoi discendenti nel panorama delle famiglie più in vista del tardo Quattrocento a Firenze.

Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy does not only illustrate the afterlife as a world theatre. In the course of its reception, this long narrative poem has also become an extraordinary media event. The 'verbal images' and the particularly imaginative visions designed by the Italian poet have resulted in a kind of iconic commentary on the Divine Comedy from the 14 th century to the present. On the one hand, these examples of a highly intermedial reception of Dante's poem refer to the original text, but on the other hand they transpose rather freely the poem into the visual medium, which leads further and further away from the 'sensus spiritualis' of the Divine Comedy. The paper traces this long tradition on the basis of representative examples, such as John Flaxman's as well as Pitt Koch's illustrations or Salvador Dalí's watercolours commenting on the Divine Comedy, Inferno XVII.

Il Coniurationis commentarium, l’unica opera storica composta da Angelo Poliziano, è la prima e la più importante fonte sulla Congiura dei Pazzi, il sanguinoso colpo di stato perpetrato contro i Medici a Firenze il 26 aprile 1478, che causò la morte del giovane Giuliano e il ferimento di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Poliziano, già intellettuale di primo piano della Firenze medicea e presente al tragico attentato in Santa Maria del Fiore, compose il suo racconto nel burrascoso scenario politico scaturito dal fallimento della cospirazione: una testimonianza storica autoptica, concepita come rapida e necessaria risposta sull’onda del clamore suscitato dal crimine e realizzata con le armi della più raffinata cultura umanistica, un ritratto intenso e coinvolgente degli eventi, che si distingue per la brevitas sallustiana e per la limpida potenza delle sue immagini. Da subito fatta circolare grazie ai nuovissimi mezzi della stampa, l’opera divenne uno dei pilastri più robusti su cui si edificò l’articolata propaganda medicea all’indomani della congiura.
Questa nuova edizione del Coniurationis commentarium, dopo l’edizione critica pionieristica curata da Alessandro Perosa nel 1958, si propone di offrire uno strumento di lettura più completo e aggiornato dell’opera, grazie a nuove indagini condotte in ambito filologico, storico e critico. Nuove acquisizioni sul Commentarium presentate in questo volume riguardano inoltre i modelli classici ai quali Poliziano si ispirò e le implicazioni e le prospettive storico-politiche dell’opera nel contesto della congiura. Il testo latino dell’edizione Perosa, riproposto qui con alcuni emendamenti scaturiti da un vaglio più completo della tradizione, è corredato di una nuova traduzione italiana e di puntuali note di commento, aggiornato ai più recenti studi e finalizzato all’illustrazione di personaggi ed eventi storici menzionati e della fitta trama di fonti classiche che sottendono l’opera.

Sgraffito as a decorative element of the exterior of 14th and 15th century Florentine buildings has long been known, although seldom granted much attention. The present dissertation, therefore, examines the phenomenon of sgraffito, a technique in which motifs are scratched into smoothened or whitewashed plaster. These decorations can be found as wall decorations on public and semi-public buildings, religious structures, and private dwellings. For the period in question 34 buildings with sgraffito decorations—preserved or otherwise accounted for—could be identified. They have been compiled into a catalogue of the objects under investigation in this study; their documentary value is assessed in a separate chapter. Since many of the sgraffito renderings have only been preserved fragmentarily, extensively restored, or reconstructed, the question of their testimonial value must be treated with caution. The chapter about the history of the technique explores its invention and further development. Scrutiny of the characteristics of the earliest known examples allows the origins of the sgraffito technique—unclear until today—to be traced back to stone work designs and masonry joints. Furthermore, the material suggests a dating of the adoption of grey coloring to the mid-quattrocento, connecting it with the design of the Palazzo Medici’s inner courtyard. The chapter on technology addresses how artists and artisans executed the decorations before and after the Palazzo Medici. Written sources and, most importantly, close study of the decorated objects are the foundation for a reconstruction of the technique in its different stages, taking materials, tools and the time taken to execute these steps into account. The fact that sgraffito decorations were used on both public and private buildings of importance suggests that they were intended to give the buildings a cachet of distinction. The chapter on the significance of sgraffito decorations examines which buildings were so decorated, and investigates who gave the work in commission and what their social standing was. The success of the inexpensive and uncomplicated wall decorations was owed above all to their inherent pictorial character, as the chapter Architektur/Bild argues on the basis of the first and simplest motif—the ashlar. The final chapter compiles examples of the technique’s dissemination from Florence. In particular Rome and Pienza, where many examples of sgraffito have survived, are key locations in this context.
Andreas Huth
Florentiner Sgraffito-Dekorationen des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts Erfindung, Technologie, Bedeutung
Abstract (Deutsch)
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht mit den Florentiner Sgraffito-Dekorationen des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts eine in der Forschung seit langem bekannte, aber wenig erforschte Form der Außengestaltung von Bauwerken. Mit Sgraffito wird eine Technik bezeichnet, bei der in die geglättete oder geweißte Oberfläche eines Putzes Motive eingeritzt werden. Sgraffito-Dekorationen sind an öffentlichen/halb-öffentlichen Bauwerken, Gebäuden in religiösem Kontext und privaten Wohnbauten zu finden. Für die Arbeit wurden für den Untersuchungszeitraum insgesamt 34 Bauwerke ermittelt und in einem Katalog erfasst. Die erhaltenen und nachweisbaren Sgraffito-Dekorationen bilden das Untersuchungsmaterial, dessen dokumentarischer Wert im einleitenden Kapitel diskutiert wird, da viele der Wandgestaltungen nur fragmentarisch, stark restauriert oder als Rekonstruktionen überliefert sind. Ein Kapitel zur Geschichte nimmt die Erfindung und die weitere Entwicklung der Technik in den Focus. Mit Blick auf die Charakteristika der frühesten bekannten Dekorationen wird die bislang unbekannte Herkunft der Sgraffito-Technik aus Formen der Mauerwerks- und Fugengestaltung erklärt. Darüber hinaus kann der Zeitpunkt der Einführung der Grau-Färbung auf Mitte des Quattrocento eingegrenzt und mit dem Innenhof des Palazzo Medici verbunden werden. Wie Handwerker und Künstler Sgraffito-Dekorationen vor und nach den Palazzo Medici ausführten, behandelt ein Kapitel zur Technologie. Auf Basis von schriftlichen Quellen, vor allem aber Beobachtungen an den Objekten wird hier die Technik in ihren Einzelschritten und unter Berücksichtigung der verwendeten Materialien und Werkzeuge sowie der Ausführungszeit rekonstruiert. Der Einsatz von Sgraffito-Dekorationen für bedeutende öffentliche und private Gebäude erlaubt die Annahme, dass es sich bei ihnen um eine besondere Form der Aus- und Kennzeichnung der Bauwerke handelt. Ein Kapitel zur Bedeutung der Sgraffito-Dekorationen fragt, welche Gebäude verziert wurden, wer die AuftraggeberInnen waren und welchen gesellschaftlichen Status sie besaßen. Der Erfolg der kostengünstigen und technisch wenig aufwändigen Wanddekoration verdankt sich vor allem ihrem bildlichen Charakter, wie das Kapitel ‚Architektur/Bild‘ anhand der Quaderung als dem ersten und einfachsten Motiv zu zeigen versucht. Das letzte Kapitel versammelt Beispiele für die von Florenz ausgehende Verbreitung der Sgraffito-Dekorationen. Hierbei kommt vor allem Rom und Pienza eine Schlüsselstellung zu, wo sich zudem zahlreiche Bauwerke mit Sgraffito-Gestaltungen erhalten haben.

Referring to the disunion between the plebs and the roman senate which constituted the very propelling source of the republican freedom, in his Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio Niccolò Machiavelli contested the traditional cult of civic concordance assuming conflicts and turmoils as necessary fundament for the state power. In this sense a city that aimed at extending its hegemony over the neighbouring states had to rely both on the faithful support of a popular army and on the art of government of its prince, whose virtuosity should have been aimed at controlling the intestine humores and the territorial extension of the conquered provinces through an organic deployment of political and economical institutions.

For these reasons, the two fundamental forms of Renaissance utilitarian architecture were military constructions, which paralleled the innovations of fire-arms technologies, and the building of bureaucratic apparatuses, related to the progressive capital accumulation managed by what Weber defined a new rising army devoid of condottieri. Deeply influenced by the reiterative modularity of the medieval Procuratie Vecchie in Venice while distant from the authoritarian nobleness of Bramante’s Palazzo dei Tribunali in Rome, Giorgio Vasari’s Uffizi in Florence and Loggia in Arezzo could be considered as two radical paradigmatic projects generated to frame the economical and political context of Cosimo I de’ Medici dukedom (1537-1574) which was characterised by large defence investments and by a marked proliferation of specific ‘immaterial’ professions such as banking, trading, administrative and forensic activities.

If the Uffizi reversed the logic of the architectural ‘objecthood’ by modulating the irregularity of urban texture around the negative void of the strada nuova, the Loggia provided a subtle infrastructure for the trade businesses taking place in the overlooking Piazza grande, hosting shops, offices rooms and residential units for the Monte di Pietà, the Chancellery and the Customs House functionaries within a single building devoid of ornaments, a continuous multi-functional slender slab able to mediate the complex topographical conditions without compromising the overall equilibrium of the massive preexisting buildings.

While the first, as a modern epicentre for the citygovernment, exerted its control over the continuous field of the urban production by structuring the different guilds and magistracies through a unique spatial office module and interiorizing the public soil as a propelling element of the building itself; the latter, conceived as a strategical financial outpost at the confines of Tuscany, acted as homogeneous stable background to control the internal productive activities and commercial exchanges between the princedom and the outer bordering states, in linewith the close Medicean Fortress and the bastioned walls.

The present essay aims to shed new light on the complex meanings underpinning the portrait medal that depicted one of the most prominent humanists and men of letters in the Florence of Cosimo I Medici, Benedetto Varchi. The work of the medallist, sculptor and poet Domenico Poggini, the medal represents an important testimony of the interdisciplinary exchanges between artists and intellectuals that were typical of that milieu. At the same time, close investigation of its genesis, of its poetic and figurative models, of its iconography and motto confirms that this kind of object, traditionally neglected by literature scholars, can in fact provide us with valuable insight into the literary scene of the age.

House of Secrets tells the remarkable story of Palazzo Rucellai from behind its celebrated façade. The house, beginning with its piecemeal assemblage by one of the richest men in Florence in the fifteenth century, has witnessed endless drama, from the butchering of its interior to a courtyard suicide to champagne-fueled orgies on the eve of World War I to a recent murder on its third floor. When the author, an art historian, serendipitously discovers a room for let in the house, she lands in the vortex of history and is tested at every turn—inside the house and out. Her residency in Palazzo Rucellai is informed as much by the sense of desire giving way to disappointment as by a sense of denial that soon enough must succumb to truth. House of Secrets is about the sharing of space, the tracing of footsteps, the overlapping of lives. It is about the willingness to lose oneself behind the façade, to live between past and present, to slip between the cracks of history and the crevices of our own imagination.

For more information and to read an excerpt, please visit houseofsecretsbook.com

Esiste una "maturazione", conseguente alla saggezza derivante dall'età, nelle opere di due dei più grandi artisti di tutti i tempi?
Questo breve lavoro prende in considerazione alcune opere per valutare se e in che modo la "saggezza" dell'età si rifletta nelle opere stesse.

Giuliano de’ Medici (1453 – 78) is one of the most prominent yet understudied figures of the Quattrocento, his importance forgotten and legacy reduced to being the assassinated younger brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. A series of posthumous portraits of the youth painted by Sandro Botticelli in the aftermath of the Pazzi Conspiracy, however, are some of the most celebrated panels of the Renaissance. Giuliano's likeness, as depicted by Botticelli, has been utilized to locate the young man in other works across the painter's oeuvre. Idealized giovani of his general physical "type" abound in sacred as well as secular compositions, indicating, to various scholars, that Giuliano is present in these scenes. This paper will reconsider these traditional identifications by looking more broadly at the "Giuliano type," thereby interrogating the appearance of idealized young men in Botticelli's oeuvre as well as their connection to broader conceptions of male beauty in Florence.   
(Session: Belli, Bravi e Giovani - Male Beauty and the Accoutrements Thereof in Renaissance Italy)

This study is a documentary contribution to the history of aesthetics in Argentina. It collects, comments, and contextualizes the programs of the courses taught by Mariano Antonio Barrenechea as Professor of Aesthetics at the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the University of Buenos Aires between 1922 and 1930.