This volume retraces the history, art and culture of the city of Florence through three unique festivities: the festival of New Year ab Incarnatione Domini and those celebrating the figures of Saint Anne and of Saint Reparata. All these festivals with their sacred connotations have been characterised, since ancient times, by political, civic or secular values. As Florentine citizens, curious about the world and in love with our city, the authors would like to underline how these values have continued to be vigorously represented up to the present day in new forms, and have also contributed to forming the distinctive character of the city of the lily. In this book, the reader will find both very famous and lesser-known artists and works of art that will allow them to better understand the history of this Tuscan city.

This volume retraces the history, art and culture of the city of Florence through three unique festivities: the festival of New Year ab Incarnatione Domini and those celebrating the figures of Saint Anne and of Saint Reparata. All these festivals with their sacred connotations have been characterised, since ancient times, by political, civic or secular values. As Florentine citizens, curious about the world and in love with our city, the authors would like to underline how these values have continued to be vigorously represented up to the present day in new forms, and have also contributed to forming the distinctive character of the city of the lily. In this book, the reader will find both very famous and lesser-known artists and works of art that will allow them to better understand the history of this Tuscan city.

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

The marriage in 1589 of Grand Duke Ferdinando de' Medici and the French princess Christine of Lorraine was a landmark event in Renaissance art and architecture, theater, music, and political ceremonial. Celebrated by a month of elaborate pageantry that required a full year of preparations, the wedding mobilized the combined artistic, intellectual, and administrative forces of Tuscany at the zenith of its wealth, power, and cultural prestige. This book combines art and social history to present the first comprehensive reconstruction of the Medici wedding and in the process provides a fascinating narrative of Florentine culture during the Renaissance. James Saslow draws on a rich trove of visual and archival sources to describe the jousts, plays, musical-dramatic intermedi, processions, and tournaments that celebrated the wedding; the artists, musicians, and architects who created and organized the events; and the bureaucratic administration that sustained this Renaissance "theater of the world." His sources include producers' daily logbooks and detailed records of the design process, staff, payments, and logistics, as well as eighty-eight set and costume drawings, paintings, and prints, which appear in a catalogue included in the book. Saslow's study will be of interest to practitioners and historians of theater, dance, music, and the visual arts, as well as to students of political and economic history and cultural studies.

For both producers and consumers of theatre in the early modern era, art was viewed as a social rather than an individual activity. Emerging in the context of new capitalistic modes of production, the birth of the nation state and the rise of absolute monarchies, theatre also proved a highly mobile medium across geolinguistic boundaries. This volume provides a comprehensive and interdisciplinary overview of the cultural history of theatre from 1400 to 1650, and examines the socioeconomically heterodox nature of theatre and performance during this period. Highly illustrated with 48 images, the ten chapters each take a different theme as their focus: institutional frameworks; social functions; sexuality and gender; the environment of theatre; circulation; interpretations; communities of production; repertoire and genres; technologies of performance; and knowledge transmission.

The relationship between music and painting in the Early Modern period is the focus of this collection of essays by an international group of distinguished art historians and musicologists. Each writer takes a multidisciplinary approach as he or she explores the interface between music performance and painting, or between music and art theory. The essays reflect a variety and range of approaches and offer methodologies which might usefully be employed in future research in this field. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, an art historian who worked extensively on topics related to art and music, and who participated in some of the conference panels from which many of these essays originate. Three of Professor Camiz's own essays are included in the final section of this volume, together with a bibliography of her writings in this field. They are preceded by two thematic groups of essays covering aspects of musical imagery in portraits, issues in iconography and theory, and the relationship between music and art in religious imagery.

A comprehensive account of music in Florence from the late Middle Ages until the end of the Medici dynasty in the mid-eighteenth century. Florence is justly celebrated as one of the world’s most important cities. It enjoys mythic status and occupies an enviable place in the historical imagination. But its musico-historical importance is not as well understood as it should be. If Florence was the city of Dante, Michelangelo, and Galileo, it was also the birthplace of the madrigal, opera, and the piano. Music in Golden-Age Florence, 1250–1750 recounts Florence’s principal contributions to music and the history of how music was heard and cultivated in the city, from civic and religious institutions to private patronage and the academies. This book is an invaluable complement to studies of the art, literature, and political thought of the late-medieval and early-modern eras and the quasi-legendary figures in the Florentine cultural pantheon.