The essays in Visualizing the Past in Italian Renaissance Art address a foundational concept that was as central to early modern thinking as it is to our own: that the past is always an important part of the present. Written by the friends, students, and colleagues of Dr. Brian Curran, former professor of Art History at the Pennsylvania State University, these authors demonstrate how reverberations of the past within the present are intrinsic to the ways in which we think about the history of art. Examinations of sculpture, painting, and architecture reveal the myriad ways that history has been appropriated, reinvented, and rewritten as subsequent generations—including the authors collected here—have attained new insight into the past and present.
Contributors: Denise Costanzo, William E. Wallace, Theresa A. Kutasz Christensen, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Cutler, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Louis Alexander Waldman, Elizabeth Petersen Cyron, Stuart Lingo, Jessica Boehman, Katherine M. Bentz, Robin L. Thomas, and John Pinto.
Jennifer Cochran Anderson, Ph.D. (2012, Pennsylvania State University) is an independent art historian working in Austin, Texas. She is currently preparing a book project on the historical “afterlives” of Ireland’s wooden devotional sculptures dating to the Lordship (1177–1542) and Suppression (1535–1800) eras.
Douglas N. Dow, Ph.D. (2006, Pennsylvania State University) is Associate Professor of Art History at Kansas State University. He is the author of Apostolic Iconography and Florentine Confraternities in the Age of Reform (2014); his next book examines Bernardino Poccetti’s religious paintings.
Preface and Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Brian Curran, Past, Present, Place Douglas N. Dow and Jennifer Cochran Anderson
Publications by Brian A. Curran
1 Horrors and Heroes, Renaissance and Recent: Rome as Architecture School Denise R. Costanzo
2 Michelangelo’s Columns William E. Wallace
3 Allegory, Antiquities, and a Gothic Apollo: Queen Christina of Sweden and the Manufacture of Cultural Identity Theresa A. Kutasz Christensen
4 The Atlantic Visions of Giorgio Grognet de Vassé (1774–1862), Maltese Forger, Architect, and Antiquarian Ingrid Rowland
5 Drawing the Elephant: On the Natures of Naturalism before and in the Cinquecento Anthony Cutler
6 A Faun in Love: The Visual Sources Marilyn Aronberg Lavin
7 Marco del Buono Giamberti’s 1478 Testament and New Evidence about Paolo Uccello Louis Alexander Waldman
8 The Architecture of Civic Virtue in Donatello’s Saint George and the Dragon Elizabeth Petersen Cyron
9 American Bodies, Aztec Feathers, and Artistic Invention in Sixteenth-Century Europe Stuart Lingo
10 Cafà’s Saint Rose of Lima as Effigy Jessica M. Boehman
11 Gardens, Air, and the Healing Power of Green in Early Modern Rome Katherine M. Bentz
12 The Guglie of Naples and the Visual Rhetoric of Height Robin L. Thomas
13 Nicola Michetti’s Facade of the Palazzo Colonna in Rome (1731–1735) John Pinto
Tabula in Memoriam Craig Zabel
Index
This book is intended for an academic audience of both professionals and students, with special appeal to scholars of early modern Italy. Keywords: Italy, Renaissance, Baroque, Painting, Sculpture, Patronage, Antiquarianism, early modern history.