Republican Florence: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael

Reading Assignments

Vasari, Lives of the Artists, vol. I: Life of Raphael; Life of Michelangelo; vol. II: Life of Fra Bartolommeo of San Marco (L)(R)

Wolfflin, Classic Art, chapter III: Michelangelo ("Early Works"); chapter IV: Raphael (through "The Florentine Madonnas"); chapter V: Fra Bartolommeo (L) (R)

Suggested Reading

Johannes Wilde, "The Hall of the Great Council of Florence," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 65- 81; reprinted in Renaissance Art, ed. Creighton Gilbert (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 92-132

For Further Reference

Michelangelo

Michael Hirst and Jill Dunkerton, The Young Michelangelo: The Artist in Rome 1496-1501 (London: National Gallery Publications, 1994): on the problematic panel paintings

(But cf. James Beck, "Is Michelangelo's Entombment in the National Gallery Michelangelo's?" Gazette des Beaux-Arts 127 [May-June 1996]: 181-198)

Howard Hibbard, Michelangelo (New York: Harper & Row, 1974=Icon Editions paperback)

Herbert von Einem, Michelangelo (London: Methuen, 1973)

Raphael

James H. Beck, Raphael (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1976)

Luitpold Dussler, Raphael: A Critical Catalogue... (London: Phaidon, 1970): just that--a catalogue with basic information

Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983): good illustrations, better on Roman archaeology than on the paintings

John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael (New York: New York University, 1970): focussing on particular topics and problems, this is probably the most readable text on the artist

Fra Bartolommeo

Chris Fischer, Fra Bartolommeo: Master Draughtsman of the High Renaissance, exhibition catalogue (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-Van Beuningen, 1990): although focussed on drawings, this catalogue contains discussion and color illustrations of some key paintings

Ronald M. Steinberg, "Fra Bartolommeo, Savonarola and a Divine Image," Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 18 (1974): 319-28

Ronald M. Steinberg, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, Florentine Art, and Renaissance Historiography (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977)

An Essential Voice

Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (1528), trans. Charles Singleton (New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1959): much, much more than a handbook of courtly behavior, this is one of the most eloquent representations of Renaissance culture--in all its complexities and contradictions

Two Nineteenth-Century Classics

Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: Penguin Books, 1990): still the richest and most suggestive study of Renaissance culture, in the broadest sense

George Eliot, Romola (1863): a seriously researched and beautifully crafted novel set in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century--a wonderful read

Historical and Social Context

Nicolai Rubinstein, The Palazzo Vecchio 1298-1532: Government, Architecture, and Imagery in the Civic Palace of the Florentine Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

Peter Burke, Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy, 1420-1540, (London: B.T. Batsford, 1972): chapters on cultural and social history

Gene A. Brucker, Renaissance Florence (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983): although focused on 15th-century Florence, the epilogue, "The Last Years of the Republic," is particularly relevant

Eric Cochrane, ed., The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525-1630 (London: Macmillan, 1979): a collection of studies on various topics in history and historiography, religious, cultural, intellectual, political

Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973): book I, "Florence in the 1540s," deals with the transformation of the republic into a Medici duchy

Janet Cox-Rearick, Dynasty and Destiny in Medici Art: Pontormo, Leo X, and the Two Cosimos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984): a rich investigation of the use of art as dynastic propaganda in the Medici rise to absolute power in Florence

Additional suggestion re: Circa 1500

Jan Bialostocki, "The Renaissance Concept of Nature and Antiquity," in Studies in Western Art, II. The Renaissance and Antiquity (Acts of the Twentieth International Congress of the History of Art), Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 19-30: on the concepts of natura naturata and natura naturans and their significance for Renaissance aesthetic thought and artistic practice