Allie Terry-Fritsch
I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Italian Renaissance Art History in 2005 and am now Professor and Chair of Art History at Bowling Green State University in Ohio (USA). My research focuses on the performative experience of viewing art and architecture in the early modern period, with a particular focus on fifteenth-century Florence. My published research includes books, articles, and book chapters on Italian modes of viewership, the co-involvement of the spectator in Renaissance works, and the history of art patronage.
My co-edited book, Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, was published by Ashgate in 2012 and issued in paperback by Routledge in 2016. Interrogating how medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this collection explore the experience of individual or collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge across temporal moments. https://www.routledge.com/Beholding-Violence-in-Medieval-and-Early-Modern-Europe/Terry-Fritsch-Labbie/p/book/9781409442868I
My latest book, Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580, is published with Amsterdam University Press (2020). The book examines the immersive, multisensory contexts for viewing art in Medicean Florence as strategies for the mindful fashioning of Renaissance audiences into political communities.
My next book is on Fra Angelico's Public: Renaissance Art, Medici Patronage, and the Library of San Marco. It builds on research that I first performed for my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago and have continued through the support of research fellowships sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities, Fulbright, Pittsburgh foundation, University of Chicago, BGSU, and SACI-Florence, which considers Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco from the point of view of the humanistic community that was once active at the Observant Dominican convent during the time of Cosimo de'Medici, between the 1430s and 1460s. Opening the study of Fra Angelico at San Marco to a secular audience, the book analyzes the paintings that were made along the humanist itinerary within the cross-cultural context of the Council of Florence (1438-9) and suggests that Angelico's works provided a visual exegesis of the humanistic interests pursued within the convent and applied in the political sphere of the Renaissance city.
Articles have appeared (most recently) in the journals Art History, Renaissance Studies, Open Arts Journal, Medieval Encounters, and Journal of Theater and Religion, and book chapters in, The Senses and the Experience of God in Art in the Franciscan Tradition (2019), Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World (2018), Visualizing Sensuous Suffering: Pain in the Early Modern Visual Arts of Europe and the Americas (2018), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 (2015), Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2013), Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350 (2012), Renaissance Theories of Vision (2010), and Sex Acts and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy (2010).
I am grateful to several institutions for grants and awards to support my onsite and archival research, including the National Endowment of the Humanities, William J. Fulbright Foundation, the Italian Art Society, the Pittsburg Foundation, Universität Salzburg, Studio Art College International in Florence, Institute of the Study of Culture and Society at BGSU, School of Art BGSU, Faculty Research Council BGSU, Department of Art History University of Chicago, Hannah Holbern Gray Renaissance Studies Fellowship University of Chicago.
Supervisors: Charles E. Cohen , Robert S. Nelson, and Ingrid D. Rowland
Address: 1000 Fine Art Center
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
My co-edited book, Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, was published by Ashgate in 2012 and issued in paperback by Routledge in 2016. Interrogating how medieval and early modern communities have acted as participants, observers and interpreters of events and how they ascribed meaning to them, the essays in this collection explore the experience of individual or collective beholders of violence during the period. Addressing a range of medieval and early modern art forms, the contributors examine the complexities of viewing and the production of knowledge across temporal moments. https://www.routledge.com/Beholding-Violence-in-Medieval-and-Early-Modern-Europe/Terry-Fritsch-Labbie/p/book/9781409442868I
My latest book, Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence: Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580, is published with Amsterdam University Press (2020). The book examines the immersive, multisensory contexts for viewing art in Medicean Florence as strategies for the mindful fashioning of Renaissance audiences into political communities.
My next book is on Fra Angelico's Public: Renaissance Art, Medici Patronage, and the Library of San Marco. It builds on research that I first performed for my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Chicago and have continued through the support of research fellowships sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities, Fulbright, Pittsburgh foundation, University of Chicago, BGSU, and SACI-Florence, which considers Fra Angelico's frescoes at San Marco from the point of view of the humanistic community that was once active at the Observant Dominican convent during the time of Cosimo de'Medici, between the 1430s and 1460s. Opening the study of Fra Angelico at San Marco to a secular audience, the book analyzes the paintings that were made along the humanist itinerary within the cross-cultural context of the Council of Florence (1438-9) and suggests that Angelico's works provided a visual exegesis of the humanistic interests pursued within the convent and applied in the political sphere of the Renaissance city.
Articles have appeared (most recently) in the journals Art History, Renaissance Studies, Open Arts Journal, Medieval Encounters, and Journal of Theater and Religion, and book chapters in, The Senses and the Experience of God in Art in the Franciscan Tradition (2019), Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World (2018), Visualizing Sensuous Suffering: Pain in the Early Modern Visual Arts of Europe and the Americas (2018), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 (2015), Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2013), Florence at the Dawn of the Renaissance: Painting and Illumination, 1300-1350 (2012), Renaissance Theories of Vision (2010), and Sex Acts and Visual Culture in Early Modern Italy (2010).
I am grateful to several institutions for grants and awards to support my onsite and archival research, including the National Endowment of the Humanities, William J. Fulbright Foundation, the Italian Art Society, the Pittsburg Foundation, Universität Salzburg, Studio Art College International in Florence, Institute of the Study of Culture and Society at BGSU, School of Art BGSU, Faculty Research Council BGSU, Department of Art History University of Chicago, Hannah Holbern Gray Renaissance Studies Fellowship University of Chicago.
Supervisors: Charles E. Cohen , Robert S. Nelson, and Ingrid D. Rowland
Address: 1000 Fine Art Center
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green, Ohio 43403
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Books by Allie Terry-Fritsch
Edited Books by Allie Terry-Fritsch
In considering new methods to examine the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: Can we speak of such a thing as the "period eye" or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze or does it risk universalizing perception and thus empty out the very certainty that it seeks to confirm? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?"
Articles and Book Chapters by Allie Terry-Fritsch
By considering the historical experience of the site, this essay ultimately provides an alternative explanation for artistic style at Varallo, which, as argued here, must be understood through the somaesthetics of the artistic program’s original viewers. The physical performance of viewing at Varallo accentuated awareness in all sensory receptors to activate the prosthetic body and mind of pilgrims, who were physically challenged while simultaneously mentally engaged as they made their way through the steep and winding landscape of the site. Invited to enter into the architectural environments and to touch, smell, taste and hear, in addition to view the holy simulacra, both male and female pilgrims recorded the powerful affective bonds produced through such active bodily cultivation and spiritual stimulation. Thus, in many ways, the somaesthetic strategies employed at Varallo enabled pilgrims to move beyond traditional gendered notions of the performance of the body in devotional contexts and to assume the role of both a Biblical personage (or multiples thereof) and a contemporary pilgrim to the Holy Land.
The positive reception of sacre rappresentazioni by an Eastern official at the Council of Florence (1439) counters recent claims that visual representation in the West failed to communicate across cultures in the fifteenth century. The essay analyzes the form and function of the sacred dramas to probe the relationship between pictorial and dramatic representation and the theological foundation of the Byzantine image. The sacred dramas arguably function in an aesthetic mode akin to the Baroque conception of meraviglia, which is examined as a form of visual rhetoric that allowed for cross-cultural communication in fifteenth-century Florence.
While Donatello’s bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, and may have been originally created in and for different contexts, they are firmly connected to one another through their content: both figures clearly are characterized as active agents of decapitation. As this article argues, the Medici fostered a familial association with the iconographic, symbolic and practical language of decapitation in Florence since the Albizzi coup of 1433-4, when the family came to be associated with the feast of St. John the Baptist’s martyrdom, through the placement of the Donatello sculptures in the family palace in the 1460s. Although rarely mentioned in the vast art-historical literature on the Medici, visual allusions to beheadings in paint, performance and sculpture served a rhetorical function in Florence to describe the shifting political status of Cosimo de’Medici and his family. By outlining a cultural map by which this visual rhetoric of decapitation may be charted in relation to the Medici family, this article contributes yet a further layer of meaning to the Donatello sculptures within the larger context of early Medici patronage and politics and offers a new methodological approach for the investigation of early modern Florentine visual culture.
in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
Using the Bargello as the focus of an inquiry on material culture, historical framing and aesthetic cultivation, this essay interrogates the use of violence as an aesthetic frame for tourists to Florence, and examines the architectural transformation of the prison in terms of the cultural agenda of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento and its manipulation of the material culture of the city. As scholars of the early modern period increasingly have begun to recognize, the writers, artists, governmental officials and other communities involved in the production of knowledge in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries largely fashioned the image of the renaissance in Florence and elsewhere to fit within their own cultural, social and ideological frameworks of understanding. The replacement of a historical blemish, such as the corporeal violence associated with the Bargello prison, with a new historical monument, the Bargello museum, in the nineteenth century effectively drew on the power of the place to project both backward into the past and forward into the future. By transforming the site into a cultural institution that still retained its architectural shell, the museum displayed its institutional past to expose its foreignness to the present moment and initiated the creation of a new meta-narrative of Italian judicial, and cultural, history.
Taking the bronze satyr in San Gimignano as a point of departure, this paper will focus on the form and function of these little-studied, but highly decorative, torture instruments in Italy and will question the conflation of art and punishment in the fifteenth century. While punishment of criminals during this period often included the public display of the criminal's body and torture was often publicly administered, the actual instruments of torture were of such a size that they would have been seen only by the ministers of justice and the criminal, viewers that do not readily explain the high quality of craftsmanship of the objects. In this essay I argue that the close-viewing experience of the decorated torture instrument by the criminal was inversely related to the function of the well-known painted panels (tavole) held before the criminal during his or her procession to the gallows; while the latter presented an image of the suffering Christ to the criminal as a personal vehicle for repentance, the torture instruments took diabolical shapes that I argue served both as a reminder of the criminal act performed against the community and the physical cleansing that was necessary to rid the city of the criminal's transgression. Though the populace would not have had the viewing access to the remarkable detail of the torture instrument, the handling of these highly crafted instruments by the anonymous torturer may be considered the enactment of the communal will upon the body of the criminal. "
This essay considers the strategies and tactics of the denunciation system in fifteenth-century Florence to examine how the placement and use of tamburi within key ritual sites impacted communal interaction in the Renaissance city. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s use of the terms “strategies” and “tactics,” the essay designates strategies as the various methods used by those in control of spaces to police and manipulate behaviors within them and tactics as the methods used by the actual users of those spaces; these users are not in possession of the space, but, nonetheless, they occupy it and maneuver through it according to either pre-established rules or by alternative routes. As I argue here, the tamburi may be approached as strategies that fostered heightened awareness of visibility within the renaissance city, both the visibility of individuals to others and of others to the individual. Their physical placement within select architectural spaces impacted the perceived layers of control already implied in these buildings’ function and use, and the moral agencies in charge of their erection and upkeep anticipated how the symbolic meaning and social value of these spaces would underscore the moral imperative to use them both to reveal information about others and avoid the behaviors that would lead to denunciation. Nonetheless, the tactics employed by individuals and groups within the city—those time-based interactions within the spaces themselves—were unpredictable, and therefore never fully visible. Ultimately, these tactics counteracted the power of the tamburi, and in certain cases, caused their failure."
In considering new methods to examine the beholder's perspective, this volume addresses such questions as: Can we speak of such a thing as the "period eye" or an acculturated gaze of the viewer? If so, does this particularize the gaze or does it risk universalizing perception and thus empty out the very certainty that it seeks to confirm? How do violence and pleasure intersect within the visual and literary arts? How can an understanding of violence in cultural representation serve as means of knowing the past and as means of understanding and potentially altering the present?"
By considering the historical experience of the site, this essay ultimately provides an alternative explanation for artistic style at Varallo, which, as argued here, must be understood through the somaesthetics of the artistic program’s original viewers. The physical performance of viewing at Varallo accentuated awareness in all sensory receptors to activate the prosthetic body and mind of pilgrims, who were physically challenged while simultaneously mentally engaged as they made their way through the steep and winding landscape of the site. Invited to enter into the architectural environments and to touch, smell, taste and hear, in addition to view the holy simulacra, both male and female pilgrims recorded the powerful affective bonds produced through such active bodily cultivation and spiritual stimulation. Thus, in many ways, the somaesthetic strategies employed at Varallo enabled pilgrims to move beyond traditional gendered notions of the performance of the body in devotional contexts and to assume the role of both a Biblical personage (or multiples thereof) and a contemporary pilgrim to the Holy Land.
The positive reception of sacre rappresentazioni by an Eastern official at the Council of Florence (1439) counters recent claims that visual representation in the West failed to communicate across cultures in the fifteenth century. The essay analyzes the form and function of the sacred dramas to probe the relationship between pictorial and dramatic representation and the theological foundation of the Byzantine image. The sacred dramas arguably function in an aesthetic mode akin to the Baroque conception of meraviglia, which is examined as a form of visual rhetoric that allowed for cross-cultural communication in fifteenth-century Florence.
While Donatello’s bronze sculptures of Judith and David are stylistically discrete, and may have been originally created in and for different contexts, they are firmly connected to one another through their content: both figures clearly are characterized as active agents of decapitation. As this article argues, the Medici fostered a familial association with the iconographic, symbolic and practical language of decapitation in Florence since the Albizzi coup of 1433-4, when the family came to be associated with the feast of St. John the Baptist’s martyrdom, through the placement of the Donatello sculptures in the family palace in the 1460s. Although rarely mentioned in the vast art-historical literature on the Medici, visual allusions to beheadings in paint, performance and sculpture served a rhetorical function in Florence to describe the shifting political status of Cosimo de’Medici and his family. By outlining a cultural map by which this visual rhetoric of decapitation may be charted in relation to the Medici family, this article contributes yet a further layer of meaning to the Donatello sculptures within the larger context of early Medici patronage and politics and offers a new methodological approach for the investigation of early modern Florentine visual culture.
in Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Ed. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
Using the Bargello as the focus of an inquiry on material culture, historical framing and aesthetic cultivation, this essay interrogates the use of violence as an aesthetic frame for tourists to Florence, and examines the architectural transformation of the prison in terms of the cultural agenda of the nineteenth-century Risorgimento and its manipulation of the material culture of the city. As scholars of the early modern period increasingly have begun to recognize, the writers, artists, governmental officials and other communities involved in the production of knowledge in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries largely fashioned the image of the renaissance in Florence and elsewhere to fit within their own cultural, social and ideological frameworks of understanding. The replacement of a historical blemish, such as the corporeal violence associated with the Bargello prison, with a new historical monument, the Bargello museum, in the nineteenth century effectively drew on the power of the place to project both backward into the past and forward into the future. By transforming the site into a cultural institution that still retained its architectural shell, the museum displayed its institutional past to expose its foreignness to the present moment and initiated the creation of a new meta-narrative of Italian judicial, and cultural, history.
Taking the bronze satyr in San Gimignano as a point of departure, this paper will focus on the form and function of these little-studied, but highly decorative, torture instruments in Italy and will question the conflation of art and punishment in the fifteenth century. While punishment of criminals during this period often included the public display of the criminal's body and torture was often publicly administered, the actual instruments of torture were of such a size that they would have been seen only by the ministers of justice and the criminal, viewers that do not readily explain the high quality of craftsmanship of the objects. In this essay I argue that the close-viewing experience of the decorated torture instrument by the criminal was inversely related to the function of the well-known painted panels (tavole) held before the criminal during his or her procession to the gallows; while the latter presented an image of the suffering Christ to the criminal as a personal vehicle for repentance, the torture instruments took diabolical shapes that I argue served both as a reminder of the criminal act performed against the community and the physical cleansing that was necessary to rid the city of the criminal's transgression. Though the populace would not have had the viewing access to the remarkable detail of the torture instrument, the handling of these highly crafted instruments by the anonymous torturer may be considered the enactment of the communal will upon the body of the criminal. "
This essay considers the strategies and tactics of the denunciation system in fifteenth-century Florence to examine how the placement and use of tamburi within key ritual sites impacted communal interaction in the Renaissance city. Drawing on Michel de Certeau’s use of the terms “strategies” and “tactics,” the essay designates strategies as the various methods used by those in control of spaces to police and manipulate behaviors within them and tactics as the methods used by the actual users of those spaces; these users are not in possession of the space, but, nonetheless, they occupy it and maneuver through it according to either pre-established rules or by alternative routes. As I argue here, the tamburi may be approached as strategies that fostered heightened awareness of visibility within the renaissance city, both the visibility of individuals to others and of others to the individual. Their physical placement within select architectural spaces impacted the perceived layers of control already implied in these buildings’ function and use, and the moral agencies in charge of their erection and upkeep anticipated how the symbolic meaning and social value of these spaces would underscore the moral imperative to use them both to reveal information about others and avoid the behaviors that would lead to denunciation. Nonetheless, the tactics employed by individuals and groups within the city—those time-based interactions within the spaces themselves—were unpredictable, and therefore never fully visible. Ultimately, these tactics counteracted the power of the tamburi, and in certain cases, caused their failure."
Hosted by the School of Art at Bowling Green State University, this event celebrates the publication of Professor Terry-Fritsch's latest book with an author reading and a dialogue between Dr. Terry-Fritsch and Charlie Kanwischer, Director of the School of Art, about the ideas in the book, where they came from, and what future applications the methods and theories of the book may be envisioned
Author: Allie Terry-Fritsch
Series: Visual & Material Culture, 1300-1700
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenthcentury Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.
Download the table of contents and Intro at: https://assets.ctfassets.net/4wrp2um278k7/62BJ1eDaDnyBlinBbnOua9/c143bb79b451696dc07f95b8f85b8a6a/9789048544240_Preview.pdf
For more information, visit: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463722216/somaesthetic-experience-and-the-viewer-in-medicean-florence