Rinascimento Conteso: Florence's Early Modern Art Reframed

Catalog description

Against the persistent myth of a triumphant Renaissance and the teleological interpretations of a supposedly optimistic period, this course focuses on the artistic production of fifteenth to sixteenth-century Florence as paradigmatic of the tensions, anxieties, and eccentric trends that emerged in Europe's visual culture during the Early Modern Age. If traditional conceptualizations of the Florentine Renaissance described it as the rebirth of naturalism, which set the canon of Western classicism, recent critical voices have revealed the tensions, ruptures, and erosions that were active underneath that surface, with profound consequences on artmaking and the world of images. Building on such debate, through direct experience and close observation of the context, these classes will propose a different narrative of mainstream Renaissance Florence. By looking with fresh eyes to painted, sculpted, and architectural works, they will reframe early modern Florentine art as a profoundly polyphonic one, which sheds light on many unsettling aspects of modernity: materialism, and the germs of historical pessimism; technology and capitalist modes of production; the fragility of nature; sensuality, tactility, and the private life of objects; the otherness of uncanny bodies; religious tensions as the expression of the individual's anxiety; the colonial appropriation of a newly expanded world. With an interest for the contaminated and the intermediate, by privileging continuities over oppositions, the course will thus offer a new understanding of the period in order to deconstruct any elitist interpretation and instead reveal its lively, diverse nature.