Academic literature on the topic 'Late-medieval Italian merchant visual culture'

Outdoor public seating is an intriguing and virtually unstudied element in the history of western architecture and urbanism. This article focuses on Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, tracing the numerous stone benches that once existed on piazzas, streets, loggias, and palace façades throughout the city. More than simply utilitarian appendages, the benches were carefully integrated into the design of iconic urban spaces and building fronts, both civic and private. The study draws on abundant and varied primary source material: contemporary chronicles, histories, letters, poetry, statutes, etiquette books, and architectural treatises, which provide a wealth of information on the use and form of the benches. Together with Renaissance images recording Florentine daily life, the documents reveal a rich culture and vocabulary of alfresco bench-sitting by people of all ranks, from government officials to vagrants. I examine the design, sociopolitical functions, and urban context of the benches. I propose that benches were part of the Tuscan urbanistic model for a civic piazza, and show how in Florence, the civic piazza was configured with tiered seats, exploring formal and semiotic resonances with the tribunal, theater, and council hall. I explore the appearance of stone façade benches on private palaces in fifteenth-century Florence. This was in part a monumentalization of a vernacular element, but I also suggest that for the Medici and other patrician builders, the bench was a direct reference to the civic center. The palaces valorized the stone façade bench for domestic architecture and codified it as a common element of Renaissance palace typology. References to contemporary seating provisions of other Italian towns and to precedents in Roman antiquity and late-medieval Italy provide context for the Florentine innovations. The bench emerges as a versatile element, both functionally and semiotically, which provides new insight into representations of power through the social control of outdoor space, and expressions of political ideology in urbanistic and architectural forms.

This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.

My dissertation is a study of how merchants in Trecento Italy used the imagery they commissioned as a form of moral self-representation and as a practical tool in their pursuit of eternal life in heaven. The study is grounded in the theoretical framework of Michael Baxandall’s concept of the “period eye,” that is, the belief that “social facts lead to the development of distinctive visual skills and habits.” (Baxandall, 1988) A primary social fact affecting medieval merchants was their long association in Christian culture with the individual and societal evils related to the pursuit of money and wealth—the sin of avarice. This linkage was expressed across the entire range of medieval cultural expression, in texts, sermons, and imagery. The challenge for merchants, therefore, was to publicly demonstrate that they earned their money ethically and legally, that they led a morally sound life, and that they used a portion of their money for the common good, especially in caring for the poor. The commissioning and public/semi-public display of imagery thus became a way of portraying a merchant’s moral identity as a worthy civic and Christian citizen, with all of the temporal and spiritual benefits that might produce. In order to better understand how such imagery served these objectives, I have developed an analytical framework I call the Merchant’s Moral Eye. This framework consists of eight primary dimensions that I believe were fundamental to the formation of merchants’ moral beliefs and behaviours during this period. These dimensions are: 1. Purgatory 2. Medieval Spaces 3. Christian Symbolism 4. Obligation & Reciprocity 5. The Virtues & Vices 6. Fama 7. Hospitality 8. Coats of Arms Collectively, these interlaced, multidisciplinary dimensions provide a systematic approach to produce the robust contextualisation needed to explore why, and how, merchants used imagery to achieve their objectives. However, while this study’s focus is solely on the moral and salvific functions of this imagery, it needs to be remembered that the same imagery also served other more worldly objectives, be they social, economic, or political. As an analytical tool this framework enables three fundamental functions with respect to the underlying motives, meanings, and uses of merchant-commissioned art in Trecento Italy: - an assessment of the feasibility of existing interpretations - the enhancement or nuancing of existing interpretations - the identification and explication of wholly new interpretations To demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework in achieving the above, I have selected, as case studies, three merchants in three different locations, whose artistic commissions spanned the entire Trecento. These individuals and their imaged artifacts are: 1. Enrico Scrovegni of Padua and the Arena Chapel, decorated by Giotto 1303-5. 2. Domenico Lenzi of Florence and his illuminated manuscript, Lo Specchio umano (The Mirror of Humanity), produced c. 1340; 3. Francesco Datini of Prato and the Palazzo Datini, decorated in the 1390s. These individuals represent a cross-section of Trecento Italian merchants in terms of status, wealth, and public profile. These merchants and their commissioned artworks are discussed in detail using the framework dimensions as modes of enquiry to show how this imagery supported their self-representation as honest merchants and dutiful Christians, and generated the prayers and other suffrages they assumed they needed to eventually get to Heaven. In all three case studies there were significant findings that fulfilled each of the analytical functions noted above, thereby confirming the utility of the Merchant’s Moral Eye Analytical Framework as an effective methodological approach.<br>Graduate<br>2022-05-27

This chapter focuses on a twelfth-century Italian urban lay saint: the merchant turned penitent Ranieri of Pisa (d. 1160). It is within the first written and visual sources created to celebrate Ranieri that one finds the most extensive evidence of a twelfth-century layman being celebrated more for his work as a living holy man than for his pious activities. In short, in the earliest cults of laymen in the Italian communes, it is spiritual gifts or charisma—specifically the performance of miracles—and not pious actions like a dedication to penance, a rigorous prayer schedule, or charity work that stand as the most compelling proof for sanctity. The first sources created for Ranieri's cult gives one an opportunity to see not only a detailed portrait of this kind of lay charisma but also how threatening such claims must have been to the institutional church in the late twelfth century. Although asceticism, pilgrimage, and charity would become defining characteristics of late medieval lay religion and would eventually come to dominate the cults of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century lay saints, Ranieri's early cult demonstrates how such a threefold identity was not emphasized in early lay saints' cults but rather emerged out of Pope Innocent III's efforts to redirect and reconceive of an ideal lay life.