Sean Roberts
Wednesday 2:00-4:50 pm
Spring 2011
AHIS 512: Seminar in Renaissance Art:
Early Modern Cartography/Renaissance Geography
Though the study of early modern mapping and topographical description has
often been the exclusive province of historians of cartography, geographic knowledge
occupied an extraordinarily central place for Renaissance visual artists. Map historians
have often viewed the rapidly changing cartographic modes of fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Europe as “early modern” precursors to the projections of Mercator and the
Landsat imaging of the twentieth century. Instead, this seminar explores the
“retrogressive” elements of terrestrial knowledge for Renaissance practitioners,
examining space and place in early modern Europe and the diverse means by which
painters, mapmakers, poets, printers, and diplomats embodied this knowledge in visual
and textual form.
Requirements
Participants are responsible for all readings. Please also bring in questions and issues
posed by the readings. Participants will present an abstract of their proposed research
paper and a bibliography on the topic on X. We will meet on X for final paper
presentations and final papers are due at that time.
Mon 19: INtroduction
Patricia Emison, “Prolegomena to the Study of Italian Renaissance Prints,”
Word and Image, vol. 11, n. 1, 1995, 1-15.
Emison, “The Word Made Naked in Pollaiuolo’s Battle of the Nudes,” Art
History, 13, 1990, 261-275.
Emison, “The Raucousness of Mantegna’s Mythological Engravings,” Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, vol. 124, 1994, 159-176.
Sean Roberts and Tim McCall, “Taking the Lid Off the Cassone; Revealing Early
Modern Secrets,” from Giancarlo Fiorenza, McCall and Roberts eds.
Visual Rhetorics of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (forthcoming).
Wed The Rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography
Stephen J. Campbell, The Cabinet of Eros (New Haven, Yale University
Press, 2007), selection.
Campbell, “Giorgione’s ‘Tempest’ ‘Studiolo’ Culture and the Renaissance
Lucretius,” Renaissance Quarterly, 56, 2, 2003, pp. 299-332
Anthony Colantuono, “Dies Alcyoniae: The Invention of Bellini’s Feast of the
Gods,” Art Bulletin, 73, 2, 1991, pp. 237-256.
Maria Ruvoldt, "Sacred to Secular, East to West: The Renaissance Studiolo and
Strategies of Display" Renaissance Studies, 20, 2006, pp. 640-657.
Wed Geography, Painting, and Poetry
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1989).
Giorgio Chitollini, “The ‘Private,’ the ‘Public,’ the State,” in The Origins of the
State in Italy 1300-1600, ed. Julius Kirshner (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 34-61.
Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, “Introduction,” in Making Publics in Early
Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and
Paul Yachnin (New York, Routledge, 2010), 1-21 Maria Ruvoldt, "Sacred to Secular,
East to West: The Renaissance Studiolo and
Strategies of Display" Renaissance Studies, 20, 2006, pp. 640-657.
Tim McCall, “The Signore Hidden and Revealed,” from Fiorenza, McCall,
Roberts eds. Visual Rhetorics of Secrecy (forthcoming).
Wed: The Geography of the Sacred: Painting and Mapping the Holy Land
Maria Ruvoldt, "Michelangelo's Dream." Art Bulletin, 85, 2003, pp. 86-113.
Ruvoldt, “Michelangelo’s Open Secrets,” in Fiorenza, McCall, Roberts, Visual
Rhetorics of Secrecy (forthcoming).
Alexander Nagel, “Gifts for Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonna,” Art Bulletin, 79,
1997, pp. 647-668.
Cammy Brothers, Michelangelo, Drawing and the Invention of Architecture (New
Haven, Yale University Press, 2008), selection.
Wed: Prints, Maps and Technologies
Francis Ames Lewis, Drawing in the Italian Renaissance Workshop (London,
Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983), selection.
Suzanne Boorsch, “Mantegna and his Printmakers,” in Jane Martineau et al. eds.
Andrea Mantegna, exh. cat. London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1992, 5666.
Megan Holmes, “Copying practices and marketing strategies in a late fifteenthcentury painter's workshop” in Stephen J. Campbell and Stephen Milner
eds. Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance
City (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Gary Radke, “Lorenzo Ghiberti: Master Collaborator,” in Radke ed., The Gates of
Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece (New Haven and
London, Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 50-71.
Sean Roberts, “Tricks of the Trade: The Technical Secrecy of Early Italian
Engraving,” from Fiorenza, McCall, Roberts, Visual Rhetorics of Secrecy
(forthcoming).
Wed: Medieval Traditions
Meeting at the Getty Research Institute to view the exhibitions Leonardo da Vinci
and the Art of Sculpture and Printing the Grand Manner.
Lisa Pon, Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian
Renaissance Print (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004), chapter
one.
Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture
(Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 2001), selection.
James Grantham Turner, “Marcantonio’s Lost Modi and their Copies,” Print
Quarterly, 21, 2004, pp. 364-384
Pat Simons, “Reading Agostino Carracci’s Lascivie,” (forthcoming).
Rudolph M. Bell, How To Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1-16, 279-283.
Wed: Landscapes and Topographies
Cristelle Baskins, Cassone Painting, Humanism and Gender in Early Modern
Italy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), selection.
Jacqueline Musacchio, “Imaginative Conceptions in Renaissance Italy,” in
Picturing Women in Renaissance and Baroque Italy (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Ann Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance
Italy (University Park, Penn State University Press, 2010), selection.
Browse Exhibition Catalogs:
Cristelle Baskins, The Triumph of Marriage, Isabella Stewart Gardener,
2008.
Andrea Bayer, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 2008.
Wed: A Geography of Renaissance Sculpture
Helen Ettlinger, ‘Visibilis et Invisibilis: The Mistress in Italian Renaissance
Court”
Tim McCall, “Traffic in Mistresses: Sexualized Bodies and Systems of
Exchange in the Early Modern Court” in Alison Levy ed. Sex Acts
(Alershot, Ashgate, 2010).
McCall, “Visual Imagery and Historical Invisibility: Antonia Torelli, her
husband, and his mistress in fifteenth-century Parma,”
Renaissance Studies, 23, 3, 2009.
Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, “The Topography of prostitution in Renaissance
Ferrara,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 60, 4, 2001.
Wed: Mapping Heaven and Hell
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, selection.
Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, selection.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1990),
selection.
Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink and Gold (Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 2005), selection
Patricia Simons, Masculinity and the Body in Premodern Europe (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), introduction.
Wed Perspective and Mapping
Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Ressurection of the
Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (London, Aldershot Scholar Press,
1997), selection “Vesalius: the revival of Galenic Anatomy,” pp. 88-142
Sean Roberts, “The Renaissance of Geography,” from Cartography Between
Cultures: Prints, Maps and the Mediterranean World (in progress).
Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999),
selections.
Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (Cambridge,
MA, Zone, 2010), selections.
Wed: Mapping East and West
Patricia Simons, “Lesbian (In)Visibility in Italian Renaissance Culture: Diana and
Other Cases of donna con donna in Whitney Davis ed. Gay and Lesbian
Studies in Art History (Harrington Park Press, 1994), 81-122.
Cristelle Baskins, “Gender Trouble in Italian Renaissance Art History: Two
Case Studies,” Studies in Iconography, 16, 1994.
Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in
Renaissance Florence (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), selection.
James M. Saslow, “Michelangelo: Sculpture, Sex and Gender,” in Sarah Blake
McHam ed. Looking at Italian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1998), 223-245.
Adrian Randolph, Engaging Symbols: Gender, Politics and Public Art in
Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002),
selection “Homosocial Desire and Donatello’s Bronze David,” 139-192.
Wed. Colonialism and Territory
Wed. Seomthing old something new: Adaptations and Emulations
Wed, 25 Final Meeting for Paper
Resources:
Strabo
Pliny
Mela
Bergren and Jones