Antiquity and Its Interpreters

by Payne, Alina; Kuttner, Ann; Smick, Rebekah

• ISBN13: 9781107403857
• ISBN10: 1107403855
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-05-30
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

This book was first published in 2000. Antiquity and Its Interpreters examines how the physical and textual remains of the ancient Romans were viewed and received by writers, artists, architects, and cultural makers of early modern Italy. The importance of antiquity in the Renaissance has long been acknowledged, but this volume reconsiders the complex relationship between the two cultures in light of recent scholarship in the field and a new appreciation and awareness of the act of history writing itself. The case studies analyze specific texts, the archaeological projects that made 'antiquity' available, the revival of art history and theory, the appropriation of antiquities to serve social ideologies, and the reception of this cultural phenomenon in modern historiography, among other topics. Demonstrating that the antique model was itself an artful construct, Antiquity and Its Interpreters shows that the originality of Renaissance culture owed as much to ignorance about antiquity as to an understanding of it. It also provides a synthesis of seminal work that recognizes the reciprocal relationship of the Renaissance to antiquity.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Inhabiting History

Historical self-definition

Imitation

P. Petrarch and the broken city

Acquiring a classical past: historical appropriation in Renaissance Venice

Ordering history and style: Georgio Vasari on the art of history

Historical continuities

Renaissance and real estate: the medieval afterlife of the Temple of Diana in Nimes

Imaginary architecture and antiquity: the fountain of Venus in Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Antiquity consumed: transformations at San Marco, Venice

Cultural Pursued

The heritage of Zeuxis: painting, rhetoric and history

Mind's passion: conjugating rationality and sensuality in neo-platonic interpretations of Italian Renaissance art Julia

The transformation of ancient landscape through the ideology of Christian reform

The (re)emergence of the aesthetic

Ut poesis architectura: Gherardo Spini and Italian archietectural criticism circa 1570

Viewing the art of Michelangelo: visual metaphor in the art critical tradition of the Renaissance

The body and antiquity in Alberti's art theoretical writings

Patterns of transumption in Renaissance architectural theory

Culture Produced

Textual exegesis

Pliny's laocoon?

Symmetry and eurythmy: classical theory in architecture from Vitruvius to Bernini to the present day

Appropriation contexts: decor, Furor Bacchicus, Convivium Phyllis

Si come dice Vetruvio: images of antiquity in early Renaissance theory of architecture

Coda

Antiquity and the Renaissance from the outside

Remaking antiquity in eighteenth-century Seville Catherine

Winckelmann and Warburg: contrasting attitutudes toward the instrumental authority of ancient art

Figural speculations

Writing history, viewing art: the question of the humanist's eye

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