Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City

Description

Considering the reception of the early modern culture of Florence, Rome, and Venice in other centers of the Italic peninsula, this book reexamines the Renaissance as a form of translation of a past culture. It assumes that the Renaissance attempted to assimilate the lost, or fragmentary, worlds of the Roman emperors, the Greek Platonists, and the ancient Egyptians. These essays, accordingly, explore how the processes of cultural self-definition varied between the Italian urban centers in the early modern period, well before the formation of a distinct Italian national identity.

'... a book with ambitions. ... The editors are to be congratulated for bringing together essays that are in the main of an extremely high standard. The collection manages to focus on many intriguing objects that have tended to be neglected in traditional art history. ... this is a valuable book. ... it is to [the editors] credit that they have put together a thought-provoking group of essays which displays a zest for the exploration of methodologies, of previously little-studies centres, objects and artists and which act as a kind of manifesto for the current vivacity and ambition of Renaissance art history.' The Burlington Magazine