This illustrated book explores the social and economical background to marriage in Renaissance Florence and discusses the objects such as paintings, sculptures, furniture, jewellery, clothing, and household items associated with marriage and ongoing family life.

This book examines a Renaissance Florentine family's art patronage, even for women, inspired by literature, music, love, loss, and religion.

In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes – her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.

Why marry? The personal question is timeless. Yet the highly emotional desires of men and women during the period between 1450 and 1650 were also circumscribed by external forces that operated within a complex arena of sweeping economic, demographic, political, and religious changes. The period witnessed dramatic religious reforms in the Catholic confession and the introduction of multiple Protestant denominations; the advent of the printing press; European encounters and exchange with the Americas, North Africa, and southwestern and eastern Asia; the growth of state bureaucracies; and a resurgence of ecclesiastical authority in private life. These developments, together with social, religious, and cultural attitudes, including the constructed norms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, impinged upon the possibility of marrying. The nine scholars in this volume aim to provide a comprehensive picture of current research on the cultural history of marriage for the years between 1450 and 1650 by identifying both the ideal templates for nuptial unions in prescriptive writings and artistic representation and actual practices in the spheres of courtship and marriage rites, sexual relationships, the formation of family networks, marital dissolution, and the overriding choices of individuals over the structural and cultural constraints of the time. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.

Based on three hundred civil and criminal cases over four centuries, Elizabeth W. Mellyn reconstructs the myriad ways families, communities, and civic and medical authorities met in the dynamic arena of Tuscan law courts to forge pragmatic solutions to the problems that madness brought to their households and streets. In some of these cases, solutions were protective and palliative; in others, they were predatory or abusive. The goals of families were sometimes at odds with those of the courts, but for the most part families and judges worked together to order households and communities in ways that served public and private interests. For most of the period Mellyn examines, Tuscan communities had no institutions devoted solely to the treatment and protection of the mentally disturbed; responsibility for their long-term care fell to the family. By the end of the seventeenth century, Tuscans, like other Europeans, had come to explain madness in medical terms and the mentally disordered were beginning to move from households to hospitals. In Mad Tuscans and Their Families, Mellyn argues against the commonly held belief that these changes chart the rise of mechanisms of social control by emerging absolutist states. Rather, the story of mental illness is one of false starts, expedients, compromise, and consensus created by a wide range of historical actors.

The Middle Ages were marked by dramatic social, economic, political, and religious changes. Diverse regional and local conditions, and varied social classes - including peasant, artisan, merchant, clergy, nobility, and rulers - resulted in differing needs for furniture. The social settings for furniture included official and private residences both grand and humble, churches and monasteries, and civic institutions, including places of governance and learning, such as municipal halls, guild halls, and colleges. This volume explores how furniture contributed to the social fabric within these varied spaces. The chronological range of this volume extends from the fall of the Roman Empire through to the early Renaissance, a period which exhibited a wide array of types, styles, and motifs, including Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance. Rural and regional styles of furniture are also considered, as well as techniques of furniture manufacture. Drawing upon a wealth of visual and textual sources, this volume presents essays that examine key characteristics of the furniture of the period on the themes of Design and Motifs; Makers, Making, and Materials; Types and Uses; The Domestic Setting; The Public Setting; Exhibition and Display; Furniture and Architecture; Visual Representations; and Verbal Representations.

"Garrard, one of a small handful of truly distinguished feminist art historians, presents a detailed and visually convincing account of the relationship between nature and art in all its fraught and gendered cultural meaning from antiquity on. Brunelleschi's Egg constitutes an exemplary feat of interdisciplinary study that requires no specialized theoretical baggage to follow and emulate."--Mieke Bal, author of Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art "Mary Garrard's discerning eye and deep knowledge of Renaissance art informs this fascinating book. She offers a sophisticated exploration of a rich artistic conversation on the relationship of nature and art, describing the central role of gender in structuring artists' complex and changing attitudes toward nature. Brunelleschi's Egg is so much more than a history of style; it maps the changing mindsets of Renaissance society in the several centuries during which scientific developments gradually seized masculine authority, relegating both art and nature to mastered femininity. This book provides new perspective on Italian Renaissance masterworks; it will be central to future discussion of Renaissance art." --Margaret R. Miles, author of A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750 "In this sweeping study, the magnum opus of one of feminist art history's founding mothers, Mary Garrard extends the gendered critique of art into the realms of philosophy and science, psychology and myth. Her eloquently prophetic and richly detailed synthesis chronicles western culture's increasing feminization of nature and art, and its parallel masculinization of the human mind (both male and female), as a Renaissance tragedy on an epic scale. The book is a must-read for historians of the early modern period, with a theme also of urgent contemporary concern."--James M. Saslow, author of Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality and Art "A completely new and thoroughly convincing way of looking at the major monuments of the Italian Renaissance. The ideas in Brunelleschi's Egg are so compelling that it is hard to imagine a reader who would not be drawn into the analysis."--Jacqueline Marie Musacchio, author of Art, Marriage, and Family in the Italian Renaissance Palace "Garrard offers an unprecedented perspective on an amazing plethora of seminal works. Written beautifully, Brunelleschi's Egg is nothing but exemplary."--Yael Even, University of Missouri, St. Louis

A look into the tantalising secrets of Florence's Palazzo Rucellai. When Italian Renaissance professor Allison Levy takes up residency in the palazzo of her dreams – the Palazzo Rucellai in Florence – she finds herself consumed by the space and swept into the vortex of its history. She spends every waking moment in dusty Florentine libraries, exploring the palazzo's myriad rooms seeking to uncover its secrets. As she unearths the stories of those who have lived behind its celebrated façade, she discovers that it has been witness to weddings, suicides, orgies, the dissection of a 'monster', and even a murder. Entwining Levy's own experiences with the ghosts of the Palazzo Rucellai's past, House of Secrets paints a scintillating portrait of a family, a palace and one of the most iconic cities in the world.

In Renaissance and early modern Europe, various constellations of phenomena-ranging from sex scandals to legal debates to flurries of satirical prints-collectively demonstrate, at different times and places, an increased concern with cuckoldry, impotence and adultery. This concern emerges in unusual events (such as scatological rituals of house-scorning), appears in neglected sources (such as drawings by Swiss mercenary soldier-artists), and engages innovative areas of inquiry (such as the intersection between medical theory and Renaissance comedy). Interdisciplinary analytical tools are here deployed to scrutinize court scandals and decipher archival documents. Household recipes, popular literary works and a variety of visual media are examined in the light of contemporary sexual culture and contextualized with reference to current social and political issues. The essays in this volume reveal the central importance of sexuality and sexual metaphor for our understanding of European history, politics and culture, and emphasize the extent to which erotic presuppositions underpinned the early modern world.

Lorenzo Lotto's Portrait of Andrea Odoni is one of the most famous paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Son of an immigrant and a member of the non-noble citizen class, Odoni understood how the power of art could make a name for himself and his family in his adopted homeland. Far from emulating Venetian patricians, however, he set himself apart through the works he collected and the way he displayed them. In this book, Monika Schmitter imaginatively reconstructs Odoni's house – essentially a 'portrait' of Odoni through his surroundings and possessions. Schmitter's detailed analysis of Odoni's life and portrait reveals how sixteenth-century individuals drew on contemporary ideas about spirituality, history, and science to forge their own theories about the power of things and the agency of object. She shows how Lotto's painting served as a meta-commentary on the practice of collecting and on the ability of material things to transform the self.