Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance
Subtitle: The Legacy of the Natural History
By: Sarah Blake McHam
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013
Language: eng
Number of pages: 450
ISBN-13: 9780300186031
Subjects: Sources; Renaissance Art; Italian Aesthetics; Renaissance Aesthetics; Appreciation
Description: "Pliny's Natural History (AD 77-79) served as an indispensable guide to and exemplar of the ideals of art for Renaissance artists, patrons, and theorists. Bearing the imprimatur of antiquity, the Natural History gave permission to do art on a grand scale, to value it, and to see it as an incomparable source of prestige and pleasure. In Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance, Sarah Blake McHam surveys Pliny's influence, from Petrarch, the first figure to recognize Pliny's relevance to understanding the history of Greek art and its reception by the Romans, to Vasari and late 16th-century theorists. McHam charts the historiography of Latin and Italian manuscripts and early printed copies of the Natural History to trace the dissemination of its contents to artists from Donatello and Ghiberti to Michelangelo and Titian. Meanwhile, benefactors commissioned works intended to emulate the prototypes Pliny described, aligning themselves with the great patrons of antiquity. This is a richly illustrated, comprehensive reference work of social history, myth making, iconography, theory, and criticism."--book jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The art history of a book on science; title: Pliny's career and the scope of the Natural history; its reception in antiquity and the middle ages; title: Pliny on ancient art: the contents of the Natural history, books 33-37; title: Petrarch's Pliny; title: Following Petrarch: the widening influence of Pliny on fourteenth-century readers and artists; title: Illuminating, collecting and critiquing the Natural history in fifteenth-century Italy; title: Alberti, Ghiberti and the early Florentine response to Pliny; title: Pliny as an inspiration for fifteenth-century humanists, educators, patrons and artists in north Italy; title: Pliny in print and in stone; title: Mantegna and Leonardo strive to be a new Apelles; title: Pliny helps spur the development of new subject matters; title: The Plinian signature as a badge of prestige; title: Pliny and the formation of art collections in Florence; title: Laocoön, or Pliny vindicated; title: Beyond Laocoön: Plinian anecdotes as inspiration for subjects and commissions; title: Pliny's influence on early sixteenth-century theoretical treatises; title: Vasari and Pliny as historians of art; title: Pliny's influence on theoretical treatises after Vasari; title: Summing up Pliny's legacy.