Abstracts

Panel I – Cross Cultural Exchanges

1)      Maria Pavlova,  St. Hilda’s College, Oxford

Italian Renaissance literature and the Islamic world: the portrayal of Islamic culture in heroic poems (1450-1532)

The paper will examine a little-explored yet fascinating area of the Italian Renaissance studies: the representation of Islamic culture in vernacular literature, in particular in the chivalric tradition. The recent decades have seen a growing amount of studies on Western attitudes towards Islam in the early modern period, but most scholarly attention has been focused on humanist works. I shall show that chivalric poems (the ‘soap operas’ of the Renaissance) provide important insights into the ways in which the West perceived the East. The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the emergence of a strong Ottoman state reignited the Italians’ interest in the Islamic world. There is good evidence to suggest that it was the vibrant relations between Italy and the Islamic East that breathed a new life into the chivalric tradition which started to flourish in the mid-fifteenth century, becoming increasingly independent from the chansons de geste. My paper will analyze a selection of poems composed in different city states between 1450 and 1532, focusing on, but not limiting itself to, Inamoramento de Orlando, Ciriffo calvaneo, Trabisonda, Mambriano and Orlando furioso. I shall investigate the use of words of Oriental origin and highlight references to contemporary perceptions of and debates about the Turks and other Muslim peoples. It will be demonstrated that different city states had different degrees of contact with Islamic countries and that the peculiarities of local historical contexts influenced literary representations of Islamic culture. At first glance, the portrayal of the non-Christian Other seems to be more positive in poems composed in the second half of the fifteenth century than in early sixteenth-century poems. Does this mean that, as the Renaissance progressed, the tendency to view Muslims as barbarians increased?

2)      Timothy Demetris, University College London

‘Cardinal Olivero Carafa’s 1472 Naval Expedition against the Turks. Two accounts for the Quattrocento.’

Cardinal Oliviero Carafa’s 1472-73 naval expedition against the Turks has often been acknowledged by scholars but rarely explored and analysed in depth. Indeed, Pietro Ursuleo’s firsthand account of the expedition, dedicated to Pope Sixtus IV and found in BAV manuscript Ottob. lat. 1938, remains to this day unedited and unpublished. I shall, with my paper, present the most significant features of Pietro Ursuleo’s invaluable text and then compare his account of Cardinal Carafa’s naval expedition with that of Bartolomeo Platina, found in his biography of Sixtus IV in his Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum.

3)      Charlene Vella, The University of Warwick

The Renaissance in the South

By the turn of the sixteenth century, the spill of the Renaissance in the island of Sicily was complete. This was largely due to the presence of two important figures – the artist Antonello da Messina (c. 1430-1479) and sculptor Domenico Gagini (1425/30-1492) – and their respective bottege. This paper will explore the work of their followers, who were arguably responsible for the over-spill of the Renaissance style into the Central Mediterranean. The Mediterranean island of Malta had established good contacts with both these Sicilian workshops, and moreover had close links with the Messina School of Antonello da Messina, with whom it had a family tie. Hence the Renaissance reached Malta too.

Panel II – Print and Culture

1)      Bryony  Bartlett-Rawlings, Victoria and Albert Museum

‘Da le cui grotte ove mai non soggiorna

Hor tanta luce a si bella arte torna.’

(Whence now from grottoes where no people live

So much new light on this fine art is spreading)

Sixteenth-century ornament prints and the dissemination of the grotesque

The emergence of the grotesque in Italy following the rediscovery of the Domus Aurea, and its spread throughout Europe through the dispersal of artists after the Sack of Rome has previously been investigated. However the role ornament prints in the dissemination of the grotesque has yet to be considered. This paper will investigate ornament engravings by printmakers including Giovanni Birago, Nicoletto da Modena and Agostino Veneziano to consider the role of prints in disseminating the grotesque.

While used to create and record decorative schemes to be employed by artists, the technical quality and beauty of ornament engravings also appealed to early collectors. The presence of these prints in sixteenth-century collections testifies their movement and influence on taste. Visual comparisons between these prints and the decorative arts will assess the role of prints in disseminating grotesque ornament within the arts in Italy and beyond during the sixteenth century.

2)      Marianne Gillion, University of Manchester

‘Re-birth: The Council of Trent, Printed Graduals, and the Feast of the Nativity’

The Council of Trent is usually seen as a turning point in Early Modern European cultural life. Its pronouncements and the interpretations thereof provided an impetus for re-evaluation and change in areas including theology, liturgy, and the arts. Yet while its perceived effect on polyphonic liturgical music has been much debated, relatively little attention has been given to the resulting changes in monophonic liturgical music, or plainchant. The Vatican commissioned gradual finally published in 1614-15, known as the “Medicean Edition”, contains chants for the celebration of the Mass that are curtailed and sometimes newly composed according to late-sixteenth-century aesthetic and theoretical standards. This print has generally been assumed to be the culmination point of post-Tridentine chant reform and a key influence for all developments which followed it. However, when the evidence of sixteenth century Italian printed graduals is examined alongside that of contemporary manuscripts, it becomes clear that underlying tendencies of chant reform go back to at least the 1540s, if not before, and were well-established at least 25 years before the publication of the Medicean Edition. Italian printers, including Giunta, Liechtenstein and Gardano, issued prints wherein chants were abridged and conflated; this can be seen, for example in the chants surrounding a celebration of new birth: Advent and the Nativity. Thus, the exploration of these Italian printed sources provides a new direction in the reassessment of the impact of the Council of  Trent on liturgical music.

3)      Eugenio Refini, University of Warwick

‘Reshaping Knowledge: New Perspectives on Vernacular Translation in Renaissance Italy’

Throughout the Renaissance Italy experienced a revolution in the transmission of knowledge, which contributed to the shaping of a wider, non-Latinate public, able to share in (and help transform) the assumptions of the cultural elites. This transformation took place mainly through the medium of translations from Latin (and sometimes Greek) into the Italian vernacular. Making the most of my current research within the AHRC-funded project ‘Vernacular Aristotelianism in Renaissance Italy, c. 1400-c.1650’, the paper – through the analysis of new findings and previously unstudied materials – will focus on the broad meaning of translation as a fundamental tool for the early modern appropriation (and reshaping) of classical philosophy and science. I will first deal with the issues approached in setting up a database of Aristotelian works written in Italian between 1400 and 1650 (rationale of the project, gaps in previous bibliography, matters arisen, objectives, etc.). Through the study of select materials from the database, I will then focus on three main themes relevant to a critical reassessment of the topic: (1) early modern theories of translation; (2) readership and contexts, which favoured the practice of translation; (3) forms and genres of translation. Paying special attention to paratextual elements usually neglected by scholars, I will outline the main trends of vernacular translation within the period concerned: prefaces, epistles to dedicatees and notes to the readers often reveal, in fact, the cultural and political agendas underneath the practice of translating (and commenting on) the classics. Moving around the main case study of vernacular Aristotelianism, my paper will aim to trace those strands, which, in my opinion, deserve further investigations in order to shed light on the complex and multi-sided phenomenon of Renaissance translation.

Panel III – Materials and Materiality

1)      Maria Alessandra Chessa, Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum

‘The Materiality of Paper’

The aim of my research is to investigate the materiality of paper, along with its perception and relative impact in the early modern Italy, by exploring the manifold applications of this material in regard to practices, functions, and creativity. Contrarily to the direction undertaken by the current historiography on paper, which mainly addresses the consequences of its use as a mere support to textual contents, my investigation looks at the manifold uses of paper in everyday context, and as a resourceful tool in the hands of craftsmen and artists, in order to consider how the circulation of this material deeply affected culture as an innovative paradigm of materiality.

My research reveals that the rapid increase of paper production, following the introduction of the printing press in Italy, led to a wide diffusion that can be defined as a collective phenomenon, affecting economy, customs, taste and even thought. Being produced from the processing of rags and being consequently perceived as an artificial substance, paper emerged as an extraordinary medium, right by virtue of its anomalous disconnection from nature. The application of paper as a surrogate of nature, which emerges in some case studies, reveals the intrinsic potentialities of this material as both an inspiring medium for the visual expression, and a resourceful support to imagination. The innate properties of paper, thus, disclosed surprising potentialities in the creative sphere and in the intellectual process of the abstract thinking. The experimental applications analysed in my study, in the form of papier-mâché artifacts, Leonardo’s disegno on paper, and the rapid introduction of the pouncing cartoons technique, offer a novel insight into the ground-breaking influence of this material. Paper was an extremely influential material that, lying in- between the intellectual process and the creative act, must be considered the root itself of the Italian Renaissance creativeness.

2)      Emanuela Vai, Polytechnic-University of Turin

‘Stettero molti Cantori sopra l’Organo et in Choro’. Performance practices and architectural setting in the Palatine Basilica of Santa Barbara

The contribution investigates the sixteenth century architecture within the context of the events and situations that take place in it. The research combines a critical approach to the existent literature with the analysis of accounts from a varied range of primary sources such as ceremonial, ledgers, correspondence and musical scores as well as diaries, inventories and financial and legal records. The analysis of the archival documents – containing information about the shape, dimensions and materials of the church – allow to carry out a 3d virtual reconstruction of the building phases of the church and, moreover, an acoustic investigation of the performing in situ of the compositions expressly written for the basilica. The interdisciplinary methodology demonstrates how the new media provide an added-value for the study of Renaissance allowing us to evaluate the subject matter as a product of different factors that interact and contribute in creating and shaping space. By this way, it is possible to comprehend the inherent relationship between art, liturgy and function in the “theatre” of the Renaissance culture.

3)      Hannah Higham, University of Birmingham

‘One design, many makers, many meanings: the case of the Master of the Unruly Children’

The Master of the Unruly Children was a name coined by Wilhelm Bode in 1900 to describe the anonymous sculptor he believed responsible for a group of works in Berlin featuring animated infants. Largely due to this singularity of subject-matter this name has stuck and the focus of scholarship has been on the identification of the artist.

In this paper I will examine the group of works “responsible” for the Master’s fame with particular attention paid to their repetition and adaptation. The reproduction of similar designs is central both to a reappraisal of the Master of the Unruly Children, as it is this which essentially led to his invention, and to a reconsideration of workshop production in Renaissance Florence. The manufacture of works will be examined with specific attention given to how single models were adapted to different ends. This in turn allows exploration of the varying and multiple uses to which these small-scale sculptures were put.

Through a combination of scientific analysis, historiography and a fresh examination of the iconography this paper will shed new light on the production of such works in sixteenth century Florence, and in particular what drove the demand, their function and significance and how previous scholarship has dealt with such commercialisation. It will also question issues of authenticity and innovation that are bound up with the