Bücher der Reihe Studies in Early Modern European Culture / Studi Sulla Cultura Europea Della Prima Eta Moderna

This book offers an innovative approach to the altarpieces of Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) by discussing them within the intellectual context of the first half of the eighteenth century. Tiepolo occupies a particular position in the history of art: firmly embedded in the eighteenth century, he is one of the last great painters of the classical tradition, and, at the same time, one of the precursors of modernity. Why has Tiepolo's religious art often been misunderstood? How can the abbreviation and absence of key symbols in the images be explained and why is this rhetoric of absence so utterly modern? Deliberately concentrating on what is not painted, rather than what is in the picture, the book deals with Tiepolo's lacunism as an eighteenth-century phenomenon anticipating modernity. It discusses four different forms of rhetoric: iconic, narrative, silent, and visionary. Each discourse calibrates the images within their contemporary religious and philosophical context, which promote this type of rhetoric as highly innovative.

What significance did the Lex Regia De Imperio Vespasiani bear for the Dutch philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Did it simply define a question of law and its ancient use? Was it responsible for the definition of a scholarly exercise in literary-rhetorical regulae? New Studies on Lex Regia explores these questions as the dispute on a non-literary source (the Lex Regia) is exemplary for the way in which philological research came together with interpretations of the Roman law and the political conclusions drawn from them. Situated between philosophy and philology, this book attempts to rehabilitate a debate on the fides historica in Cartesianism and post-Cartesian Pyrrhonism. It focuses on the role that modern historiography on Rome plays in the construction of the politico-cultural model between republicanism and absolutism in the works of the Dutch thinkers Gronovius, Ulrik Huber, Perizonius, Noodt and Barbeyrac.