Courts, Patrons and Poets; The Renaissance in Europe: A Cultural Enquiry, Volume 2

by Edited by David Mateer

• ISBN13: 9780300082197
• ISBN10: 0300082193
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2000-07-11
• Publisher: Yale University Press

Summary

The princely courts of fifteenth-century Italy played a central role in the development of Renaissance art and culture. After a general introduction to the notion of court patronage, this book examines the phenomenon in detail through case studies of artists and musicians working in Milan under the Sforza (Leonardo, Filarete, and Josquin Desprez) and in Florence under the Medici.

Later chapters show how humanist ideas were imported from the Continent to Britain, where they were absorbed and ultimately metamorphosed into the glories of Tudor and Stuart poetry and drama. The result is a stimulating study of the position of artists in society and of their changing relation to, and interaction with, their patrons.

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Introduction	ix
David Mateer
Court culture in the Renaissance	1	(96)
Peter Elmer
Introduction: definitions and debates	1	(13)
Italian court culture: style and sensibility	14	(8)
Book illumination: advertising culture?	22	(4)
Italian court culture	26	(52)
The court of Matthias Corvinus of Hungary: a case study in reception	78	(19)
Artists at the Sforza court	97	(62)
Georgia Clarke
David Mateer
Peter Elmer
Nick Webb
Introduction	97	(1)
Filarete and his treatise on architecture	98	(18)
Music at the Sforza court	116	(12)
Leonardo da Vinci in Milan, 1482-99	128	(22)
Appendix	150	(9)
Fifteenth-century Florence and court culture under the Medici	159	(68)
Anabel Thomas
Introduction	159	(3)
Cultural activities in Florence under the Medici	162	(22)
`Courtly' artefacts: the role of the patron and the artist	184	(3)
Reconstructions of courtly space	187	(8)
Patronage as a cultural tool	195	(15)
Cultured taste and cultural exchanges	210	(2)
Establishing a Medicean mythology	212	(6)
Medici self-fashioning	218	(9)
Britain's Renaissance of letters	227	(70)
Ceri Sullivan
Early modern or Renaissance?	227	(3)
Reading the pastoral and Petrarchan modes	230	(17)
Political, economic and religious poetry	247	(20)
Print, education and the state	267	(6)
Concepts of poetry	273	(8)
Ben Jonson and the humanist poet-scholar	281	(12)
A British Renaissance?	293	(4)
The London stage	297	(64)
Richard Danson Brown
Introduction: dialogues with the dead	297	(3)
Social and historical contexts	300	(19)
New literary forms	319	(42)
Glossary	361	(7)
Acknowledgements	368	(1)
Index	369