Renaissance Self-Fashioning

After the Montefeltro dynasty’s demise in 1508, the Della Rovere family assumed power in the geo-strategically and culturally important Duchy of Urbino. The first dynasty of papal nephews able to preserve successfully the territory conferred by their family popes beyond the pontifical term, they became a model for upcoming papal families. As ‘new princes’, they needed to legitimise their new rank and membership of princely society, and also to establish for their subjects the lawful circumstances of their succession. In 1504, Pope Julius II della Rovere had urged the childless Guidobaldo da Montefeltro to adopt their joint nephew, Francesco Maria della Rovere, son of Guidobaldo’s sister, Giovanna da Montefeltro, and the Pope’s brother, Giovanni della Rovere. This article reviews the basis of this adoption in Roman and Canon law, and shows how it affected contemporaries’ belief in the legitimacy of the Della Rovere’s succession and was used prominently in the dynasty’s self-fashioning.

Despite the wealth of material and textual evidence attesting to the practice of Christian pilgrimage throughout history, comprehending an individual's understanding of pilgrimage in relation to his or her own identity has always proved challenging. Pilgrimage studies scholars have tended to look to travel accounts, chronicles, and collected pilgrim souvenirs to discern how pilgrims were affected by and responded to their experiences. One form of source material that has gone largely under-examined in this regard is the genre of portraiture. This paper explores how and why the concept of pilgrimage could be incorporated into the self-fashioned images of patrons in medieval and early modern Europe. Building on foundational but geographically and temporally specific studies of Jerusalem confraternity portraits, it aims to consider both overt and subtle iconographic references to pilgrimage to broaden our understanding of what constitutes a pilgrim portrait. By engaging with the flexibility of pilgrimage iconography and the multifaceted motivations behind invoking it in a permanent likeness, this paper argues for the dual faculties of memory and imagination present in portraits that manifest allusions to an individual's pilgrim identity. Furthermore, it paves the way for future studies of pilgrimage iconography generally, and specifically of pilgrim portraits in a more abstract, allegorical sense.

Prefaces are among the most conspicuous “places” where translators’ voices can be heard. They provide a stage to perform authorship, a privilege rarely extended to translators, who cannot claim intellectual ownership of the book they rewrote in a new language. Unless, of course, the translation is a self-translation, carried out by the author of the original. This paper focuses on Early modern Europe, where the preface as we know it came about as a by-product of the print medium, but raises issues that remain relevant for the study of translation and self-translation in today’s post-colony and global marketplace. Miniature masterpieces of rhetoric, Renaissance prefaces are spectacular (and specular) sites of what Stephen Greenblatt has termed “self-fashioning”. Using the Iberian example of Bernardino Gómez Miedes’ twin “mirrors for princes” (1582-1584), written in Latin and subsequently translated by himself into Spanish (for two different sons of King Philip II of Spain), I will show how the exercise of self-translation enabled this ambitious clergyman to position himself as an agent. Turning his seemingly uncomfortable situation as an Aragonese in between realms and languages into a key-position as a go between, Gómez Miedes succeeded in fashioning himself as the ultimate middleman, most notably in the prologue to his Spanish self-translation.

To be portrayed in biblical, mythological or legendary roles was particularly popular in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. Such portrait paintings are known as portraits historiés. In the Amsterdam City Archives there is a notarial deed of 15 October 1668 concerning a commission for such a portrait. More precisely, it describes a double portrait in which Gregorius van Kermt and his wife wished to be immortalized as the classic figures Scipio (Africanus) and Pallas (Athena; Minerva). The document gives a brief description of the requirements and thus information about how the painting should be made. This is an exceptional agreement between the painter Jan Andrea Lievens (1644-1680) - son and student of the famous Jan Lievens (1607-1674) - and his client "Sr. Gregorius van Kermt, living on 't Rockin', who was also his creditor. Although the portrait piece has not surfaced so far and there are no further indications that it was ever finished, it is nevertheless worthwhile to elaborate on this curious portrait commission. After all, this is the only assignment known to us of a seventeenth-century portrait historié that was recorded and fortunately preserved. The type of subject, exceptional in its kind, is indicative of the taste of the portrayed clients, who must be situated in the intellectual circle of Amsterdam book printers and publishers.

Chap. 1. The subject of this study is the biblical portrait historié, a portrait type in which a person is depicted as a figure from the bible, as it flourished in the Netherlands of the 16th and 17th centuries. In art history, the term portrait historié is used for a subset of both history painting and portraiture in which an individual is portrayed in the guise of a historical, religious, mythological or legendary figure. The description “portrait in the guise of a biblical figure” can cover a wide variety of works of art. A person may be portrayed as protagonist of a biblical story (as David with the head of Goliath) or as biblical figure in a non-biblical narrative scene (as Luke the Evangelist painting the Virgin). The individual(s) depicted could have a main role, actively or passively engaging in the biblical act or hallowed proceding, or appear as an anonymous, secondary but relevant figure in the margins of a multifigured painting. The specific role of the sitter can be identified by analysing the iconography (the sitter’s attributes and/or the narrative context). The term portrait historié is an ambiguous one since it can be used both for a work of art itself, whether it be a proper history piece or an autonomous portrait, and for a portrait figure that is inserted in a narrative scene. The latter portraits are also known as cryptoportraits (i.e. hidden portraits), although these portraits are in no way intended to remain hidden. As an alternative, the description “integrated portraits historiés” is introduced here for those non-autonomous portraits.

1. Tussen portret en historiestuk 13
1.1. Inleiding: afbakening en methodologie van het onderzoek 13
1.2. Kunsthistorisch begrippenapparaat en stand van onderzoek 20
1.3. Werkdefinitie en terminologische afbakening 27
1.4. Formele onderverdeling van het autonome portrait historié 30
1.5. Geïntegreerd portrait historié en assistentieportret 34
1.6. Formele onderverdeling van het geïntegreerde portrait historié 37
1.7. Genrematige grensgevallen: De Verloren Zoon en eigentijdse Bathseba’s 40

Le florentin Gabriele Simeoni est surtout connu pour le rôle de passeur qu’il joua, dans les nombreux domaines de son érudition multiforme, au cours d’un très long séjour en France. L’étude que j’ai consacrée à son recueil Le tre parti del campo dei primi studi (1546) propose une caractérisation critique de son écriture littéraire en même temps qu’elle essaie de définir le positionnement culturel et les intentions stratégiques de cet auteur. Si ce recueil est fortement marqué par la poétique de la varietas – la diversité des formes, des registres, des modèles y est en effet exceptionnelle pour l’époque – l’étude attentive de l’imitatio de Simeoni révèle son attachement profond à la littérature florentine de la fin du Quattrocento. Cette célébration peut s’interpréter comme un message ambigu adressé au destinataire du recueil, Côme de Médicis, dont Simeoni exalte la lignée tout en le rappelant à des valeurs et à des pratiques culturelles que celui-ci semble avoir quelques peu délaissées. L’assemblage composite de ce recueil révèle en tout cas l’intention de proposer une image idéale de l’auteur, qui serait exemplaire autant par sa « dottrina » que par sa « pratica del mondo », dans une demande de reconnaissance qui semble avoir perdu ses interlocuteurs concrets et trouver désormais dans l’écriture sa seule issue possible. On peut donc voir dans le Campo de Simeoni un exemple de cette tendance autobiographique qui a souvent été interprétée comme une réponse à la situation de crise que vivent de nombreux lettrés et artistes du Cinquecento.

In the present paper I analyse the Milanese Academy of the Blenio Valley, founded in 1568 by the engraver Ambrogio Brambilla, through the idea of the construction of the artist's identity in the so-called Renaissance. By using the grotesque-realism mechanism, this group of artists and artisans adopted a carnival-like mask, the facchino, a peasant character drawn from the Milanese everyday life. In their grotesque poetry, the academics make it clear that this ignoble character was nothing more than an outermost encasement of a noble inner essence. Merging the carnival mask and Neoplatonic thought through the translation of carnival elements into a more intellectual form, that is to say, the Platonic text, the academics constructed and reinforced their divine status on a par with poets.

This essay addresses the importance of self-fashioning for the construction of ideals in the civic humanism of the Renaissance. It shows how self-fashioning is promoted as a necessary route to glory, favour, or power. It addresses the implications of performative self-fashioning upon authenticity when the inside of man is turned outward in Castiglione’s 'The Book of the Courtier', and Machiavelli’s 'The Prince' with reference to Leon Battista Alberti’s ‘Self-Portrait of a Universal Man’ and Erasmus.

WONDER WOMEN: SOFONISBA ANGUISSOLA, LAVINIA FONTANA AND ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF RENAISSANCE AND BAROQUE SELF-PORTRAIT PAINTING BY FEMALE ARTISTS

by Rosa Lena Reed Robinson

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts in Art History at
Studio Art Centers International
Florence, Italy

2017


This  thesis is focused on the self-portrait painting practice by three female artists from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods: Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana, and Artemisia Gentileschi. Chapter I introduces the self-portrait as it developed specific to the Renaissance and in relation to a Greco-Roman classical ideal. The chapter focuses on Renaissance concepts of art and the very role of the artist. Chapter II studies the numerous self-portraits of Sofonisba Anguissola, the first great Renaissance female artist to have an international career. The artist’s self-portraits both became a foundation for those of later female artists and self-consciously expressed the new elite status achieved by this Lombard artist of noble lineage who worked as court portraitist for the Spanish monarchy. Chapter III examines the self-portraits and innovative identity self-portraiture of Lavinia Fontana of Bologna. It is demonstrated how her two early self-portraits built on the precedent established by Sofonisba, and yet, are of somewhat greater iconographic complexity. While in her maturity the artist developed self-portraiture into the identity self-portrait through the subject of Judith and Holofernes. Within her treatments of the theme in some examples she put herself into the figure of Judith and in others into Judith’s maid Abra. Lavinia Fontana’s final masterpiece, the improbable painting Minerva Dressing done at the end of her extensive career was likewise arguably an identity self-portrait. Minerva Dressing constitutes the first female fully nude figure painted by a female artist. Chapter IV focuses on Artemisia Gentileschi. This thesis designates the artist’s Pommersfelden Susanna and the Elders as both Artemisia’s first exact self-portrait and the first female full-length nude self-portrait painted by a female artist. The work is also an identity self-portrait. This chapter continues with a discussion of both versions of Artemisia’s infamous Judith and Holofernes (Capodimonte/Uffizi). Both works are arguably exact self-portrait paintings and identity self-portraits. Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting in London, often referred to as a self-portrait in scholarship, is suggested a perhaps better understood as an ideal identity self-portrait rather than a literal self-representation. The Allegory of Painting is considered together with other attributed self-portraits and portraits of the artist. A major theme in Chapter IV is the transition from literal self-representation to allegorical and ideal portrayal of the self. This thesis suggests that, as the artist’s career advanced, Artemisia Gentileschi did continue to paint both the exact and the ideal self-portrait. Finally, in the Conclusion, the legacy of the self-portraits of the Wonder Women, to adopt a phrase from Giorgio Vasari, is considered in reference to future female artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Angelica Kauffmann, Elisabeth Vigée Le-Brun and Paula Modersohn-Becker.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the role that Alfonso Fontanelli played in Gramigna’s book as a “courtly authority” and how Fontanelli’s experience and musical-literary wisdom was portrayed in order to highlight them as beneficial qualities for a secretary.

Niccolò Machiavelli, as it is commonly believed, is a thinker who founded the ‘realist’ approach of the Modern political theory. The article questions that view, analyzing the several concepts of Machiavellian “Prince” which very likely alluded to the traditions of humoral medicine, astrology, sympathetic magic, and alchemy. I argue that in concern to the “fox” and “lion” the author presumes not the direct imitation of their habits, but a fairly elaborated ‘secret’ doctrine or even “technique of the self” (Michel Foucault). Very likely, the images of “lion” and “fox” were to be grasped by the reader through the interplay of the literary, profane, and even "secret" contexts of the Renaissance knowledge.
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Принято считать, что Никколо Макиавелли был одним из тех мыслителей, которые заложили основы «реалистического» подхода, свойственного политической теории Модерна. В исследовании Ю.Руднева, опирающегося на достижения современной интеллектуальной истории, представлена и обоснована альтернатива такой точке зрения. Анализируя некоторые концепты языка «Государя», отсылающие к традициям гуморальной медицины, астрологии, симпатической магии и алхимии, автор приводит аргументы в пользу того, что, говоря об уподоблении лисе и льву, Макиавелли имел в виду не просто подражание их качествам, но определенную «тайную науку» или же «технику себя», как ее понимал Мишель Фуко. По его заключению, «лев» и «лиса» – это образы, которые должны были раскрываться потенциальному читателю трактата именно за счет игры контекстов (более явных и «тайных»), к которым он был причастен как человек эпохи Возрождения.

A pair of folding screens produced around 1600 in Japan by the Jesuit painting school offers an intriguing case of transcultural appropriation. One screen depicts a world map, the other a scene from the battle of Zama adapted from a set of tapestries produced for François I's court. The pairing of military conquest with cartographic knowledge effects a visual rhetoric of authority for a recently converted Christian ruler. I argue that these folding screens performed the equivalent function to Renaissance court tapestries, as large-scale formats for political statements. Further parallels emerge with Francois I's patronage for Dieppe cartographers: scenes of Brazilian cannibalism are featured both in Rotz's Boke of Idrography and on the cartographic folding screen. My analysis of this unique transplant of ‘Renaissance self-fashioning’ to an East Asian context mutually enlightens the dynamic role of cartography and visual formats in the political discourse of the late Renaissance.

Filarete placed an unprecedented number of self-portraits and signatures on the bronze doors he made for St. Peter’s in the Vatican, including an enigmatic relief on the reverse depicting himself and his assistants celebrating their achievement. Recent scholars have assumed that the representation conceals allegorical or esoteric meaning. However, careful examination of the relief’s iconography, inscriptions, physical characteristics, and relation to the larger project suggests that Filarete, in the hope of increasing his social standing at the papal court, conceived the work as a clever play on rituals used by the contemporary elite to express status and honor.

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""تاریخ¬گرایی نو: پیدایش، اصول و پیامدها
بهنام میرزابابازاده فومشی
دانشجوی دکتری ادبیات انگلیسی دانشگاه شیراز
چکیده
در حال حاضر توجه به تاریخ در پژوهش¬های ادبی بسیار جدّی است. تاریخ می¬تواند، با نگاهی ساده¬لوحانه، به عنوان مجموعه¬ای از حقایق در نظر گرفته شود. امّا این نگاه سنّتی با نشر اندیشه¬های فوکو دست¬خوش تغییر شد. این تغییر در پژوهش¬های ادبی نیز بروز و ظهور پیدا کرد که نمونه کامل آن تاریخ¬گرایی نو  است. گرچه این رویکرد  چندان نو نیست و زمان قابل توجهی از پیدایش آن می¬گذرد اما در ایران رویکرد تازه¬ای به شمار می-رود. یکی از دلایل این تازگی، کمبود منابع فارسی نظری در این حوزه است. با نگاهی به پژوهش¬های کاربردی انجام شده در این حوزه به این نتیجه می¬رسیم که علاقه به این رویکرد و عدم درک صحیح آن به دلیل کمبود منابع فارسی نظری موجب کج¬فهمی¬هایی شده است. پژوهش حاضر کاملاً نظری و در راستای بازشناسی تاریخ¬گرایی نو است که پس از بررسی ارتباط تاریخ و ادبیات به پیدایش تاریخ¬گرایی نو، اصول و پیامدهای آن می¬پردازد.
New Historicism: Its Emergence, Tenets, and Consequences
Abstract
History is now a major concern in literary studies. From an unsophisticated viewpoint, history can be considered truth. This traditional viewpoint has changed through Foucault’s ideas. The change can be traced in literary studies, particularly in new historicism. Even though this approach is not a very recent one, it is a novelty in Iran. One of the reasons behind this novelty is lack of sufficient theoretical source in the field. A glance on the practice of new historicism reveals the interest in the field along with the lack of sufficient theoretical source has led to some misunderstanding. The present paper is a purely theoretical work to reintroduce new historicism. It covers subject such as the relation between history and literature, the emergence of new historicism, its tenets and consequences respectively.
Key words: literary criticism, new historicism, history, literature, power, discourse, Greenblatt

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