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

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: Haney Foundation SeriesPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2015]Copyright date: ©2015Description: 1 online resource (328 p.) : 56 illusContent type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812246711
  • 9780812290509
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 331.6/3/96073
LOC classification:
  • E185.5 .R3 no. 15
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- PART I. PROFESSIONALISM -- 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 -- PART II. MAVERICKS -- 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 -- PART III. BEARDS -- 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
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.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Introduction -- PART I. PROFESSIONALISM -- 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 -- PART II. MAVERICKS -- 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 -- PART III. BEARDS -- 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

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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.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 30. Aug 2021)