Making the History of the Towns: “Urban Histories” from the Renaissance to the Baroque in the Iberian Peninsula (2024)

The Renaissance Society of America. Annual Meeting, Berlin 2015

New Perspectives on Quattrocento Painting in Venice: Lazzaro Bastiani and his Workshop

Lazzaro Bastiani distinguishes himself as one of the most interesting yet less considered fifteenth-century Venetian painters. Noted in San Lio since 1456, where he seems to have settled with his workshop, Lazzaro enjoyed widespread appreciation among his contemporaries, as demonstrated by the importance of commissions and documentary evidence. Nevertheless, scholarly focused on rival artistic families, such as those of Vivarini and Bellini, academics have not sufficiently stressed the importance of Bastiani’s course for the development of Venetian painting in the second half of the Quattrocento. This paper deals with a reexamination of the artist’s career from the seventh to the ninth decade of the fifteenth century, specifying some new aspects regarding style and chronology and discussing the relationship between some autographs pieces and bottega works, with particular attention to the reuse practice of the same cartoons for different oeuvres. As a result, archaisms and medieval legacy seem to confirm the workshop culture in which Bastiani’s painting arose.

"'Habemus paulum': Reconstructing the Florentine Church of San Paolino", Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America (Berlin, March 2015)

Scholars of Botticelli's Munich Pietà, which is known to have come from the Florentine church of San Paolino, often noted the lack of information concerning the fabric of the church prior to its destruction in the second half of the seventeenth century. In light of Poliziano's and Lorenzo de' Medici's active involvement, this lacuna has been particularly regrettable. Based on newly discovered archival documents, this paper will reconstruct this important Florentine priory. Investigating the architecture, interior decoration and patronage networks, it will reinstate San Paolino within its urban context and shed new light on the setting of the high altarpiece.

"Between Cartography and Cosmogony. The Sala della Creazione (ca. 1580) in the Palazzo Besta of Teglio", 61st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, March 26, 2015, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin

The Sala della Creazione is the main room of the palazzo Besta of Teglio. Neither the artist nor the exact date are known and, for those reasons, the cycle remained largely ignored by art historians. The decoration is based on the Old Testament, especially the Creation, and on astrological and cartographic maps. Regarding the iconography of the Creation and the cartographic production, the Sala della Creazione appears as a unicum which combines the imagination of the origins and the one of maps. This paper wants to trace the roots of such an invention, which is linked to a deep meditation on the role of man in the order of cosmos. The poetic way of the artist and the empirical way of the cosmographer are here combined in a common goal: expose, to the eye of the spectator, the history of the world, from the Creation to present times.

Producing Classicism, motif by motif (Renaissance Society of America Conference)

This paper considers the emergence of French academic classicism in architecture alongside several legally sanctioned building practices in late 17th-century Paris, including newly regulated methods of funding, construction, and speculation. As opposed to the representational dictates of French Classicism, which granted intellectual authority to historical precedents and mathematical principles, these procedures tested, quantified, and gambled on architecture as a material reality. As a construction site, the Place des Victoires (1685-1694) by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, among others, proves a particular potent case study: Proposed and partially funded by the Duke of La Feuillade to house a royal sculpture by Martin Desjardins, the project involved a complex web of architects, sculptors, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs practicing throughout the speculatively developing quarter of the Butte St.-Roch. That the place royale – circular in form and ordered in its ensemble of details – was frequently subject to theoretical analysis proves its engagement with the classical model. This paper, therefore, examines the means by which the period’s regulated practices of construction and finance (a process that might best be described as “classicism-in-production”) continually interacted and intervened in the conceptualization and edification of classicism at the end of the Grand Siècle.

27.03.2015: “Sculture sciocchissime – Sculture excellentissime”. Style and Classical Viewpoints Concerning Urban Roman Battle Reliefs

Berlin, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America: Panel “Renaissance Transformations of Antiquity VII: Allelopoietic Transformations of Roman battle scenes”

[2015] The Rhetoric of Movere in Post-Tridentine Theories of the Sacred Image

Rhetoric and religious imagery were often coupled during the Renaissance: the first resorted to the second in order to move and excite the emotions of the public; and the image, for its part, benefited from the direction and commentary provided by sermons. Of the three aims of classical rhetoric, movere was the most sought after by orators and art theoreticians alike. Through this ‘emotive rhetoric’ (in Aby Warburg’s words) that appealed to the senses, the preacher interacted with altarpieces and individual images with the aim of provoking feelings, and some devotional texts taught the devout to compose mental images to the point of visualising themselves as witnesses. This proposal aims to underline the existence of this cross-breeding Hispanic-Italian theory of the sacred image, which can explain the mechanisms of the invention, control and reception of religious art in the Roman Catholic Church in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Memorializing the Individual in Renaissance Florence: the altana frescoes in Palazzo Rucellai

Bentvueghels on Display. Genesis of Domenicus van Wijnen’s Paintings representing the Netherlandish Schildersbent in Rome, session “Rome and Visual Culture I”, The Sixty-First Annual Meeting of the RSA (Renaissance Society of America), Berlino, 26 marzo 2015.

The Palazzo Reale of Naples’ Galleria: Roman Features for an Ephemeral Display of Art

Built at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the viceregal palace of Naples has been considered as a privileged place for the consolidation of viceroys’ authority. Nevertheless, the original building project by Domenico Fontana, did not include explicitly the presence of a galleria. The gallery creation was rather the result of a long process of renovations developed by the Spanish nobility who succeeded in the mandate viceregal, to satisfy the needs of self-representation. The aim of this paper is to focus on the development and organization of the galleria Palazzo Reale, casting light on how the model of Roman palace was reflected in the viceregal gallery by choosing and displaying magnificent collections of paintings, sculptures, tapestries, and antiquities. Through a cross reading of archival documents travel journals and notices, it examines how this model was carried to extremes to satisfy viceroys’ strategy of their personal exaltation.