Date: Friday, April 02, 2004

Time: 3:30-5:00

Room: GC C203

Panel Title: Dynamic Madonnas, Efficacious Objects: Divine Interventions in the Late-Medieval and Renaissance Italian City

Organizer: Joseph Connors, The Harvard University Center for Italian Studies

Organizer: Nicholas A. Eckstein, University of Sydney

Chair: Joseph Connors, The Harvard University Center for Italian

Presenter: Nicholas A. Eckstein, University of Sydney

Paper Title: The Victories Spiritual and Military of the Florentine 'People's Madonna'

Abstract: Very little is known about the monumental Marian image that Florentines called the 'Madonna del Popolo'. The image has stood in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine since at least as early as 1460, but the precise date of its arrival, and its exact whereabouts before this date, have never been established. Several chroniclers, however, allude tantalizingly to the Madonna's role in giving Florence its famous military victory over Pisa in 1406, while other evidence reveals her as a powerful miracle-worker of major importance to the Florentine laity. This paper uses a range of sources to interpret the Madonna del Popolo's significance within a religio-civic discourse that has ramifications both for the changing identity of the early Quattrocento Florentine republic, and the status of the Carmelite Order in whose church she performed her miraculous service.

Presenter: Katherine L. Jansen, Catholic University of America

Paper Title: Crucifixes and Conversion in Central Italy

Abstract: This paper will examine a little-studied theme in the lives of central Italian saints on the eve of the Renaissance: the miraculous crucifixes, which inspired or sealed their conversions. The paper will treat the theme by analyzing the hagiographical representation of these events in conjunction with some of the extant miraculous crucifixes or images of them in order to better understand the phenomenology of conversion and what it reveals about late medieval and early renaissance religion. The paper also aims to demonstrate the ways in which this theme partakes of the material, body-centered piety of the period, which both structured and actuated devotional experience and, indeed, conversion beneath the cross.

Presenter: Megan Holmes, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Paper Title: Madonna Rivalry and Conversant Frames in Renaissance Florence

Abstract: This paper will explore the relationship between the three most potent miraculous Marian images in Florence through a discussion of the tabernacles that framed them. I will focus on the tabernacle-chapels constructed for the Madonnas of the SS. Annunziata and Impruneta in the mid-fifteenth century, and their resonances with the earlier tabernacle surrounding the Madonna of Orsanmichele. I consider the tabernacle as a frame that defines the space around the miraculous image and both conveys and heightens its charismatic qualities. I also offer a corrective to a number of popular misconceptions about the art associated with religious cults. With reference to the classical novelty of the Annunziata tabernacle designed by Michelozzo, I argue against the tendency to view cults as sites of residual culture, calling for a more integrated approach that considers the complimentary nature of the representational elements.

Date: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Time: 8:45-10:15

Room: Broadhurst

Panel Title: Citation and Intertextuality in Italian Renaissance Writing

Organizer: Carol E. Quillen, Rice University

Chair: David Quint, Yale University

Presenter: Carol E. Quillen, Rice University

Paper Title: Ancient Interlocutors in the Dialogues of Leonardo Bruni and Leon Battista Alberti

Abstract: Scholars have long understood the Renaissance dialogue in relation to its classical models and have described how Bruni, Alberti, Poggio Bracciolini, and others imitated structural and thematic elements expressed in ancient (especially Cicero's) writings. Such imitation clearly made a case for the relevance of ancient culture. Citation, this paper shows, was an equally important way for humanists to argue for the relevance of the past. In their dialogues, humanist writers used citation to identify topics addressed by the ancients and of interest to their contemporaries (friendship, grief, fame) and to define a richly textured, common vocabulary among classical and Renaissance writers. Most importantly, this paper argues, the tension generated by citation between text and subtext enabled humanist writers to express simultaneously the contradictory desires that underlay their work: the desire to acknowledge temporal distance and the desire to overcome it.

Presenter: Stefano Jossa, Universita degli Studi di Napoli

Paper Title: Classical Memory and Modern Poetics in Ariosto's Orlando furioso

Abstract: Scholars who study the romance sources of Ariosto's Orlando furioso usually link his poem with the French chivalric tradition of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The common opinion distinguishes between Ariosto's chivalric sources, understood to be thematic, narrative, and imaginative, and his classical sources, understood to be mainly linguistic and stylistic. It suggests a different perception and reception for these two kinds of sources. Recent studies -- by Daniel Javitch, David Quint, and Jane Everson -- have focused increasingly on the classical dimensions of Ariosto's culture. This paper demonstrates that Ariosto's writing uses citation to appropriate aspects of the classical tradition, not only to achieve a higher poetic standard but also to develop a historical perspective following the humanistic concepts of varietas and concoctio. His citation is not an exhibition or collection of quotations but a way producing modern poetry from classical memory.

Presenter: Alessandro Daneloni, Universita degli Studi di Messina

Paper Title: Il concetto di auctoritas in Angelo Poliziano

Abstract: Molti sono i contributi che illustri studiosi hanno dedicato al Poliziano come erudito e studioso dei classici greci e latini. Sotto vari aspetti la sua esperienza, lo sviluppo, la maturazione della sua metodologia di indagine e di interpretazione della letteratura antica rappresentano una svolta decisiva, segnano un avanzamento nel processo di sviluppo della filologia umanistica. Il secondo Quattrocento è un periodo nel quale si rifonda il canone degli autori classici e si ridefinisce lo statuto, il fondamento del concetto di auctoritas. In questo contesto Poliziano gioca un ruolo molto importante; lo scopo della mia relazione è di indagare la funzione che gli auctores vengono ad assumere nell'elaborazione teorica e nella produzione filologica e letteraria del Poliziano. Partendo dall'esame di specifici esempi, intendo chiarire la sintassi del concetto di auctoritas, il contesto storico in cui la funzione dell'auctor si chiarisce nel Poliziano.

Date: Saturday, April 03, 2004 Time: 8:45-10:15

Room: Music Box

Panel Title: Musical Life in Florence and Prato: A New Look at Documentary Evidence

Organizer: Patrick Macey, Eastman School of Music

Chair: Jessie Ann Owens, Brandeis University

Presenter: Patrick Macey, Eastman School of Music

Paper Title: From Madrigal to Lauda: An Unusual Repertory from a Dominican Convent in Prato

Abstract: The lauda is a sacred genre that often relies on secular songs, including strophic carnival songs, for its music. One anthology of lauda texts, Magl. VII.365, apparently copied after the mid-sixteenth century at the convent of San Vincenzo in Prato, turns to an unusual repertory: some thirty laude have incipits instructing the singers to use the music of Florentine madrigals from the 1520s and 1530s, including works by Verdelot and Arcadelt. The nuns clearly had access to elite music from Florence, and some of the madrigal incipits are even concordant with unica from an important Florentine madrigal anthology, Brussels 27731. The madrigal is generally epigrammatic and non-strophic, and thus seems ill-suited for singing laude with multiple stanzas. I will present a few of the more-or-less-successful ways that poets in this collection adapted the music of madrigals for strophic performance.

Presenter: Blake Wilson, Dickinson College

Paper Title: A New Witness to Musical Events in Laurentian Florence: the Correspondence of Ambrogio Angeni, ca. 1487-92

Abstract: New evidence has recently surfaced concerning Florentine musical life in the late 1480s. The archives of the da Filicaia family preserve a group of letters from Ambrogio Angeni to Antonio da Filicaia, a member of a patrician family who was away on business in Northern Europe for extended periods during the 1480s and 1490s. The letters make frequent reference to Heinrich Isaac, the great Franco-Flemish musician brought to Florence by Lorenzo de' Medici, and they reveal a surprising involvement with Lorenzo's private musical circles, including commissioning and obtaining copies of works from Isaac that Ambrogio then sent to Antonio. The letters are full of musical references to new compositions, works by Isaac, preparations for Carnival, aesthetic judgments and technical discussions of music, Lorenzo's patronage, and the activities of a local composer previously unknown to musicologists. This paper will present a summary of the new information contained in these letters, and preliminary observations on their significance to music history and historians.

Presenter: Marica S. Tacconi, Pennsylvania State University

Paper Title: Reaching the Public Eye: The Florence Cathedral Choirbooks and their Audience

Abstract: The fifteenth- and sixteenth-century choirbooks of the Florentine cathedral were designed to awe the viewer. The vibrant colors of the painted pages, the extensive use of gold leaf and lapis-lazuli blue, the heavy and precious bindings (not to mention the enormous size of the manuscripts) were all intended to dazzle anyone whose gaze fell upon them. At the same time, on a somewhat more subtle level, the iconographic details of their illuminations conveyed powerful messages, oftentimes both political and propagandistic. In light not only of these messages, but also of such splendor and of the unabashed display of wealth it is hard to imagine that the viewing of these lavish codices was limited to the cathedral choirboys and clergymen entrusted with the singing of the chants therein. The particular design of the cathedral's liturgical space as well as some new documentary evidence will show that the choirbooks were indeed intended to be admired by a vast audience.

Date: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Time: 10:30-12:00

Room: Music Box

Panel Title: Intertextuality and Memory

Organizer: Yolanda Meritxell Plumley, University College

Chair: Nicholas A. Eckstein, University of Sydney

Presenter: Jan O. Stejskal, University in Olomouc, F. of Arts

Paper Title: Memory and Heresy

Abstract: Almost all manuscripts written by Czech emigrants during first half of the fifteenth century contain the short sentence 'Bohemus sum sed errore non' to prevent their authors from being accused of heresy. Hundreds of Czech Catholics were forced to leave the country by radical Hussite reformers, and many of them traveled to Italy seeking support there for their views on moderate Church reform. They also believed that experiences from the Czech lands, where social and religious tensions exploded into a radical reformation, would be useful for the Church in general. They memorized words of Czech heretics as mementos, last-minute warnings to the Church. Italian humanists, on the other hand, often used the sentences of condemned heretics in order to criticize the present frailties of the Church and, especially, of the Roman Curia.

Presenter: Karel Thein, Institute for Philosophy & Religious Studies

Paper Title: Time, Image, and Memory in the Early Renaissance

Abstract: The alliance of memory and image is attested for the period ranging from the Greco-Roman rhetoric to the Late Renaissance. Both the classical ars memoriae and its heirs rely on the spatial organization of the memory-image. Compared to this pattern, incarnated already in the architecture of some Roman houses, the early-Renaissance ars memoriae moves to the temporal and emotional pattern of the imago agens based upon the biblical narrative. The painted image expresses an inner visualization of a given scenery (hence the apparent 'naturalism,' a true heir of ancient enargeia). From this perspective, using as the background the Rhetorica ad Herennium in its volgarizzamento by Bono Giamboni, I shall discuss Lorenzetti's Allegory of Redemption, an anticipation of the Trionfi della Morte and an example of imago agens, moving within one frame from the creation of man to history's double culmination in the Crucifixion and the Last Judgment.

Presenter: Yolanda Meritxell Plumley, University College

Paper Title: The Collective Memory: Citation and Compositional Process in Machaut's Lyrics

Abstract: The practice of citation and allusion, already a strong tradition in the thirteenth century, continued to thrive in fourteenth-century French lyric. Guillaume de Machaut wrote several hundred lyrics, a significant number of which he set to music, and these texts are riddled with borrowings, including quotations of works by other poets as well as more collectively 'owned' material like refrains and proverbs. Most prevalent of all, however, are self-citations. The prevalence of this phenomenon in Machaut's lyrics raises questions concerning the collective memory: to what extent was he relying on his audience's memory to conjure up other works or materials to unlock the sense of his newly created work? In the cases of his self-citations, the borrowings seem rather to reflect a systematic reworking of elements that can be traced through his career; his handling of musical elements in his songs parallels this aspect of his compositional process.

Date: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Time: 3:30-5:00

Room: Julliard

Panel Title: Controlling the Visual Arts in Early Modern Italy

Organizers: Joseph Connors, The Harvard University Center for Italian, Bette Talvacchia, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Anthony D. Colantuono, University of Maryland, College Park

Chair: Bette Talvacchia, University of Connecticut, Storrs

Respondent: Pamela M. Jones, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Presenter: Anthony D. Colantuono, University of Maryland, College Park

Paper Title: Get with the Programme: Creative Freedom and the Mechanics of Iconographic Control in Renaissance Art

Abstract: Renaissance patrons frequently engaged the services of humanistic rhetoricians and poets, or of theologians and other learned individuals, to compose iconographical instructions for painters and sculptors. Indeed, several hundred individual cases of such iconographic control have been documented by scholars, and the evidence suggests that most artists C even those nowadays famed for their originality of invention C fully expected and typically accepted such advice, though it was also standard for the artists to discuss or negotiate creative options with their advisors. This paper presents the results of a broader study covering the Aadvising@ phenomenon ca.1350-1750 as a cultural 'behavior pattern,' showing that anachronistic assumptions about Renaissance artistic 'freedom' risk distorting our view of this distinctly premodern culture of prudential control and collaborative creativity. Also to be discussed are the parallel phenomena of censorship, coercion, and the role of art-pedagogical institutions as mechanisms of cultural control.

Presenter: Brian A. Curran, Pennsylvania State University

Paper Title: Prince, Patron, Pharaoh: Egyptology as Argument in Renaissance Rome

Abstract: This paper explores the relationship between patronal intention and artistic result in the conception of three Egyptianizing works of the Roman Renaissance, including Pinturicchio's Isis and Osiris cycle in the Vatican's Sala dei Santi, a never-completed project of 1519 for an obelisk and Egyptianizing fountain to be placed in the Piazza del Popolo, and the Egyptianizing illuminations of the Colonna Missal, executed ca. 1526- 32 for Cardinal Pompeo Colonna. It will be demonstrated that in all three cases that the patron defined and controlled virtually every aspect of the work, including not only its conception, content, and form, but also its display context and audience, in order to exploit its potential as a vector for his personal discourse. As I shall argue, the patrons' almost obsessive control of the work of art and its reception in these cases consciously and intentionally mirrors the propagandistic rhetoric of the ancient Egyptian and Roman political orders to which their projects refer.

Date: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Time: 3:30-5:00

Room: Carnegie

Panel Title: Cooks in Renaissance Italy: the Emergence of a Profession

Organizer: Allen J. Grieco, Villa I Tatti

Chair: Marcello Fantoni, Georgetown University, Florence

Presenter: Allen J. Grieco, Villa I Tatti

Paper Title: The Professional Cook in Italian Renaissance Courts: From Artisan to Artist?

Abstract: The first cooks whose names have survived can be dated back to the end of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Distinguished by working for important courts and remembered for the cookbooks they wrote, this professional category was to develop along a trajectory similar to that of the Renaissance artist, evolving from artisan status to that of a sought-after expert in an increasingly important field. Platina, in his De Honesta Voluptate confirms the honorable status that elite cooks had attained when he defines the art of the table as a serious matter. By the end of the sixteenth century, cooking had become recognized as a science, and the professional cook had developed techniques of self-promotion similar to those used by artists.

Presenter: Guido Antonio Guerzoni, Università Luigi Bocconi, Milano

Paper Title: The Cooks of the Este Courts (1450-1650): Contracts, Careers and Professional Expectations

Abstract: The extremely detailed account books regarding the staff of the Este courts over more than two centuries allow for an in-depth analysis of the careers of several hundred cooks. These esteemed professionals worked not only at the Ferrarese court, but also in a variety of minor provincial courts maintained by various members of this family. The provisions and privileges included in their contracts, and the professional trajectories achieved during their service in these courts, define the evolving status of an increasingly acknowledged profession.

Presenter: Lorenz Boeninger, Independent Scholar

Paper Title: German cooks in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Abstract: The German minority in late-medieval Italy has been studied predominantly with respect to the various professions exercised by the northern immigrants. Little attention has yet been paid to the fact that many of them, especially in Florence, found jobs as inn- or tavern-keepers and cooks. German cooks were employed in communal and religious institutions and sometimes also in private households; some of their professional careers can be reconstructed in more detail.

Date: Saturday, April 03, 2004

Time: 3:30-5:00

Room: Park Avenue

Panel Title: Salvatore Camporeale, Lorenzo Valla, Humanism and Theology

Organizer & Chair: Melissa Meriam Bullard, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Respondent: John W. O'Malley, Weston Jesuit School of Theology

Presenter: Christopher S. Celenza, Michigan State University

Paper Title: Rhetoric, Philosophy, and Lorenzo Valla: The Work of Salvatore Camporeale

Abstract: This paper examines certain themes undergirding Salvatore Camporeale's work. Camporeale, in the tradition of Eugenio Garin, saw Renaissance humanism (with Valla as its ablest exponent) as a movement of the utmost intellectual seriousness that not only challenged philosophy and philosophical theology (both conceived in a metaphysically hierarchized manner) on their own ground, but, in fact, changed the nature of what doing philosophy and theology meant. Arguments about the relationship of rhetoric vis-a-vis philosophy often rest on unexamined assumptions about the meanings of those words; most do not recognize how foundational late-nineteenth-century assumptions were in framing the modern histories of rhetoric and philosophy. This paper aims to recognize and then peel back those layers of assumptions; this will help us understand the seriousness that Camporeale and others in the postwar Italian historicist tradition were driving at, and comprehend their meaning when they stressed the philosophical importance of certain Renaissance humanists.

Presenter: Brian P. Copenhaver, University of California, Los Angeles

Paper Title: Camporeale's Valla and the Philosophy of Language

Abstract: Lorenzo Valla had more influence on post-Cartesian philosophy than most Italian philosophers of the Renaissance; nonetheless, understanding, or even awareness, of Valla's ideas, particularly his provocative views about language and logic, remains rare among contemporary philosophers whose ideas derive from the post-Cartesian canon. Salvatore Camporeale wrote the most complete and the most acute studies of Valla in modern times. Nonetheless, because he wrote in Italian, Camporeale's views on Valla have been far less influential than they deserve to be, and, as a consequence, Valla still has no standing as an original philosopher of language in the eyes of contemporary philosophers. I will explain how a better appreciation of Camporeale might change that picture, referring as well to other work on Valla's philosophy of language written during Camporeale's lifetime.

Presenter: Mariangela Regoliosi, Università di Firenze

Paper Title: Il contributo di Salvatore Camporeale alla teologia e alla storia della Chiesa

Abstract: Si parla di due questioni: lo statuto della teologia e del linguaggio teologico. Ripercorrendo la concezione della lingua del Valla e il valore attribuito alla consuetudo, e analizzando la Dialectica e l'Encomion Sancti Thomae dove Valla dimostra che, sulla base della consuetudine grammaticale latina, i significati attribuiti alle parole chiamate a definire gli universali risultano pseudosignificati, o addirittura suoni vuoti di senso Camporeale evidenzia come per Valla il linguaggio umano sia incapace di 'dire' gli universali ontologici. Deduce un nuovo modo di 'parlare di Dio', mettendo in crisi il metafisico medievale e rivaluta invece, l'immagine, il simbolo, la lode, la contemplazione, e la preghiera. La seconda questione riguarda l'immagine e storia della Chiesa. Con una analisi del De falso...Constantini donatione Camporeale dimostra la volontà del Valla, attraverso la denuncia del temporalismo ecclesiastico, di recuperare il volto originario e cristologico della Chiesa, e di individuare l'origine della secolarizzazione nella commistione di potere politico e potere spirituale instaurata da Costantino con l'assunzione della religione cristiana a religione di stato.