Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art
Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art
Harry N. Abrams, Inc. | 1997 | ISBN: 0810927365 | English | 180 pages | PDF | 36.2 MB
The Italian Renaissance had its birth in Florence, a prosperous medieval banking and mercantile center. We know the artists whose genius flowered there - Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo - but what do we know of the city that bred and nurtured them? What was it about Florence itself that so stimulated creativity, spurring artists and their patrons to such heights of achievement? A. Richard Turner explores the art of Florence in the context of the city's own brilliant personality: Florence as a place whose unique political, social, and physical presence made its art different from any other. Moving chronologically and thematically, he surveys the city's history, its ceremonies, its powerful patrons (the bankers, the guilds, the church), its tensions and rivalries, its Roman heritage, and above all its superb sense of self.