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In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Online ISBN:
9780804773379
Print ISBN:
9780804762151
Publisher:
Stanford University Press
Book

In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy

Published:
24 November 2009
Online ISBN:
9780804773379
Print ISBN:
9780804762151
Publisher:
Stanford University Press

Abstract

This book concentrates on the Renaissance concern with “self-fashioning” by examining how a group of Renaissance artists and writers encoded their own improprieties in their works of art. In the elitist court society of sixteenth-century Italy, where moderation, limitation, and discretion were generally held to be essential virtues, these men consistently sought to stand out and to underplay their conspicuousness at once. The heroes (or anti-heroes) of this book—Michelangelo Buonarroti, Benvenuto Cellini, Pietro Aretino, and Anton Francesco Doni—violated norms of decorum by promoting themselves aggressively and by using writing or artworks to memorialize their assertiveness and intractable delight in parading themselves as transgressive and insubordinate on a grand scale. Focusing on these sorts of writers and visual artists, this book constructs a version of the Italian Renaissance that is neither the elegant one of Castiglione's and Vasari's courts—so recently favored in scholarly accounts—nor the dark, conspiratorial one of Niccolò Machiavelli's and Francesco Guicciardini's princely states.

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