Bücher der Reihe Visual Culture in Early Modernity

Concentrating largely on the ''middle ranks'' of society in Renaissance Italy - artisans, merchants, and professionals such as bankers and lawyers - this book focuses on new social subjects, new documents and unusual objects. Using innovative methods of inquiry and interdisciplinary analytical tools, contributors explore a little-known but pervasive erotic culture in which sexually explicit artefacts, games and gestures were considered essential to a number of rituals and social occasions. At the same time, they demonstrate how a burgeoning market for erotica, along with a cultural tradition of allusion and innuendo, played an increasingly important role in the Italian peninsula between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This volume fills some pervasive lacunae in both Renaissance studies and the history of sexuality through a series of critical engagements with material culture and social custom. It reflects recent scholarly interest in interdisciplinary areas such as the material Renaissance, visual communications, urban sociability in the domestic context, and court records regarding marital disputes.

Claudia Goldstein mines a rich, interdisciplinary mix of sources to shed new light on the cultural history of sixteenth-century Antwerp. Recontextualizing some of Bruegel's work within the cultural nexus of the dining room.

This book encourages the rethinking of collecting not as an elite, often aristocratic pursuit, but rather as a vital activity that has engaged many different groups within society.

Emphasizing on the one hand the reconstruction of the material culture of specific residences, and on the other, the way in which particular domestic objects reflect, shape, and mediate family values and relationships within the home, this volume offers a distinct contribution to research on the early modern Italian domestic interior. Though the essays mainly take an art historical approach, the book is interdisciplinary in that it considers the social implications of domestic objects for family members of different genders, age, and rank, as well as for visitors to the home. By adopting a broad chronological framework that encompasses both Renaissance and Baroque Italy, and by expanding the regional scope beyond Florence and Venice to include domestic interiors from less studied centers such as Urbino, Ferrara, and Bologna, this collection offers genuinely new perspectives on the home in early modern Italy.

Exploring how we can reconceptualise the High Renaissance in a way that reflects how we research and teach today, this volume proposes new approaches to the art of the period. Contributors focus on Rome, the paradigmatic centre of the High Renaissance narrative, as they question notions of periodisation, reconsider the Renaissance relationship with classical antiquity, and ultimately reconfigure our understanding of 'high Renaissance style'.