Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence
- ISBN-10
- 0674249216
- ISBN-13
- 9780674249219
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 288
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2009-01-31
- Publisher
- Harvard University Press
- Author
- Dale Kent
Description
The question of whether true friendship could exist in an era of patronage occupied Renaissance Florentines as it had the ancient Greeks and Romans whose culture they admired and emulated. Rather than attempting to measure Renaissance friendship against a universal ideal defined by essentially modern notions of disinterestedness, intimacy, and sincerity, in this book Dale Kent explores the meaning of love and friendship as they were represented in the fifteenth century, particularly the relationship between heavenly and human friendship. She documents the elements of shared experience in friendships between Florentines of various occupations and ranks, observing how these were shaped and played out in the physical spaces of the city: the streets, street corners, outdoor benches and loggias, family palaces, churches, confraternal meeting places, workshops of artisans and artists, taverns, dinner tables, and the baptismal font. Finally, Kent examines the betrayal of trust, focusing on friends at moments of crisis or trial in which friendships were tested, and failed or endured. The exile of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1433 and his recall in 1434, the attempt in 1466 of the Medici family’s closest friends to take over their patronage network, and the Pazzi conspiracy to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici in 1478 expose the complexity and ambivalence of Florentine friendship, a combination of patronage with mutual intellectual passion and love—erotic, platonic, and Christian—sublimely expressed in the poetry and art of Michelangelo.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2009-01-31
- 268 pages
- Paperback
- Harvard University Press
Similar books
-
Friendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence
By Dale V. KentFriendship, Love, and Trust in Renaissance Florence
-
Befriending the Commedia dell'Arte of Flaminio Scala: The Comic Scenarios
By Natalie Crohn SchmittIn reality, coastal areas and ships in the Mediterranean were subject to “Turkish” pirate raids and abductions to an extent hard to imagine. Pirates and privateers came from the Ottoman East and from North Africa, where the Barbary ...
-
The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence
By Brian MaxsonThe Humanist World of Renaissance Florence offers the first synthetic interpretation of the humanist movement in Renaissance Florence in more than fifty years.
-
Renaissance Politics and Culture: Essays in Honour of Robert Black
By Jonathan Davies, John MonfasaniThe attack came, the chronicler Piero Parenti records, on 22 September at Marradi, on the road from Florence to Faenza. Giuliano and “a large contingent ... 3 Alison Brown, Piero di Lorenzo de' Medici and the Crisis of Renaissance Italy ...
-
Women, Philosophy and Science: Italy and Early Modern Europe
By Gianni Paganini, Sabrina EbbersmeyerThis book sheds light on the originality and historical significance of women’s philosophical, moral, political and scientific ideas in Italy and early modern Europe.
-
Architecture and the Language Debate: Artistic and Linguistic Exchanges in Early Modern Italy
By Nicholas TempleMancini, G., Vita di Leon Battista Alberti (Rome: Bardi Editore, 1971), reprint of 1911 edition. Mandowsky, Erna, and Charles Mitchell (eds.), Pirro Ligorio's Roman Antiquities: The Drawings in MSXIII.B.7 in the National Library in ...
-
Gendering the Renaissance Commonwealth
By Anna BeckerThe civic and the domestic in Aristotelian thought -- Friendship, concord, and Machiavellian subversion -- Jean Bodin and the politics of the family -- Inclusions and exclusions -- Sovereign men and subjugated women.
-
Friendship
By A. C. GraylingHeyking, John von and Avramenko, Richard, 2008, Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought, Notre Dame, ... Kent, Dale V., Friendship, Love and Trust in Renaissance Florence, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
-
Discourses and Representations of Friendship in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700
By Maritere LópezThe third involves representations which create the sense of there being a historical transition from one model of ... there is in a sense nothing really novel about this novelty, since nearly all the early modern writing witnessing ...
-
Florence and Beyond: Culture, Society and Politics in Renaissance Italy : Essays in Honour of John M. Najemy
By John M. NajemyAnne Jacobsen Schutte , Thomas Kuehn , Silvana Seidel Menchi . Kirksville , MO : Truman State University Press , 2001 . Kirshner , Julius and Anthony Molho . “ The Dowry Fund and the Marriage Market in Early Quattrocento Florence .