On the Importance of Being an Individual in Renaissance Italy : Men, Their Professions, and Their Beards / Douglas Biow.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Biow, Douglas, Author.

Series:

Haney Foundation series.

Haney Foundation Series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Renaissance--Italy.

Renaissance.

Beards--Social aspects--History--17th century.

Beards.

Beards--Social aspects--History--16th century.

Masculinity--Italy--History--17th century.

Masculinity.

Masculinity--Italy--History--16th century.

Individualism--Italy--History--17th century.

Individualism.

Individualism--Italy--History--16th century.

Italy--Civilization--1559-1789.

Italy.

Italy--Civilization--1268-1559.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (324 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2015]

Language Note:

English

Summary:

In recent decades, scholars have vigorously revised Jacob Burckhardt's notion that the free, untrammeled, and essentially modern Western individual emerged in Renaissance Italy. Douglas Biow does not deny the strong cultural and historical constraints that placed limits on identity formation in the early modern period. Still, as he contends in this witty, reflective, and generously illustrated book, the category of the individual was important and highly complex for a variety of men in this particular time and place, for both those who belonged to the elite and those who aspired to be part of it.Biow explores the individual in light of early modern Italy's new patronage systems, educational programs, and work opportunities in the context of an increased investment in professionalization, the changing status of artisans and artists, and shifting attitudes about the ideology of work, fashion, and etiquette. He turns his attention to figures familiar (Benvenuto Cellini, Baldassare Castiglione, Niccolò Machiavelli, Jacopo Tintoretto, Giorgio Vasari) and somewhat less so (the surgeon-physician Leonardo Fioravanti, the metallurgist Vannoccio Biringuccio). One could excel as an individual, he demonstrates, by possessing an indefinable nescio quid, by acquiring, theorizing, and putting into practice a distinct body of professional knowledge, or by displaying the exclusively male adornment of impressively designed facial hair. Focusing on these and other matters, he reveals how we significantly impoverish our understanding of the past if we dismiss the notion of the individual from our narratives of the Italian and the broader European Renaissance.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1. Professionally Speaking: The Value of Ars and Arte in Renaissance Italy—Reflections on the Historical Reach of Techne

Chapter 2. Reflections on Professions and Humanism in Renaissance Italy and the Humanities Today

Chapter 3. Constructing a Maverick Physician in Print: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Leonardo Fioravanti’s Writings

Chapter 4. Visualizing Cleanliness, Visualizing Washerwomen in Venice and Renaissance Italy: Reflections on the Peculiar Case of Jacopo Tintoretto’s Jews in the Desert

Chapter 5. Facing the Day: Reflections on a Sudden Change in Fashion and the Magisterial Beard

Chapter 6. Manly Matters: Reflections on Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio, and the Theatrical and Social Function of Beards in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jun 2020)

ISBN:

9780812290509

081229050X

OCLC:

903620902