Renaissance Culture (History)

Analysis of some sections of Remigio Nannini's anthologies of historiographical speeches (Venice, Giolito 1557; 1560; 1561), with special reference to the orations taken from Cassius Dio’s ‘Roman History’, in order to show the tendency of the Dominican Compiler to revitalize their meaning and to interpret their content in the light of the political context of late Cinquecento Florence.

Al caminar por el centro de Londres y Trafalgar Square, se llega a uno de los principales museos de Inglaterra, la National Gallery (NG). Este museo inaugurado en 1824, cuenta con una gran colección de obras pictóricas desde el siglo XIII hasta el XX.

The volume gathers 15 among the most relevant papers about medieval grammar and rhetoric written by Gian Carlo Alessio,
formerly full Professor at Ca’ Foscari (chair: Medieval Latin Literature and Philology). In the field of grammatical and rhetorical studies he reached the most important goals of his
research and teaching career; and precisely the latter is summarized here by a wide choice of papers which were published between 1979 and 2006 and seem now especially exemplary of Prof. Alessio’s working methods and research outcomes. In the studies which are reprinted here the following subjects stand out: classical rhetoric in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (especially Cicero, De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium), medieval rhetoric, ars dictaminis and speculative grammar; in every paper a key role is always played by the attention to masters and/or specific cultural contexts (e.g. above all Bologna). The book is completed by 2 indexes (names; manuscripts).

In occasione del sesto centenario della nascita di Leon Battista Alberti, molta luce è stata gettata sul rapporto tra l'umanista architetto e la capitale estense, con la quale, come ben noto, egli ebbe non pochi rapporti storicamente documentati (1). La questione della paternità albertiana per alcune architetture ferraresi d'avanguardia è stata affrontata con una serrata analisi delle fonti e dei modi linguistici dispiegati in esse. Se è stato proposto di togliergli l'arco del Cavallo, riconosciuto lontano dai canoni progettuali di Leon Battista, è stata portata invece una nutrita serie di importanti prove indiziarie a favore Fig. 1 -Ferrara, campanile del duomo.

Nadia Zeldes
Despite the increasing number of studies on Sicilian Jews, few offer a convincing picture of their cultural characteristics, especially in the last generations of their presence in Sicily. The continuing use of the Sicilian variety of Judeo-Arabic as a spoken dialect, and the knowledge of Arabic, do not preclude the incorporation of other elements from the surrounding society, and even the assimilation of certain aspects of Renaissance culture as it reached Sicily. Even those who continued to speak Judeo-Arabic could not help but be affected by current fashions that permeated the surrounding society. In fact, the various components of Jewish culture in Sicily, taken together, present a rather complex picture that cannot be summed up as “Arabic”. This paper would like to focus on a cultural aspect usually neglected: the penetration of Renaissance fashions, dance and music among Sicilian Jews.

Gli usi del manoscritto, della stampa e dell'oralità interagivano nell'Italia tra Quattro e Cinquecento, come si può dimostrare a partire da raccolte di profezie manoscritte o stampate in brevi opuscoli di prezzo modesto; questi materiali, in particolare se in versi, rappresentavano spesso un sussidio per i cantastorie. Tutti questi mezzi contribuivano a creare nei diversi strati sociali una comunità di intenti e convinzioni. Ciò appare tanto più rilevante in quanto l'elemento che fungeva da stimolo era l'attualità, o meglio la percezione dell'attualità di quanto era profetizzato dai materiali che venivano raccolti, e che ai nostri occhi appaiono invece oscuri e confusi. All'interno della cultura religiosa e soprattutto civile dell'Italia del Rinascimento, la strumentazione profetica forniva infatti una modalità di analisi politica del presente, e la molteplicità dei tramiti con cui veniva trasmessa ne consentiva la trasmissione ad una grande varietà di pubblici, alfabetizzati e non, contribuendo a definire nel mondo urbano un linguaggio comune e una comune strumentazione politica. keywords manuscripts, orality, printing, prophecy, Renaissance 1. Nell'Italia e nell'Europa della primissima età moderna i canali della comunicazione appaiono intrecciati e sovrapposti. Vi è una intersezione fra usi del manoscritto, della stampa e dell'oralità, che spesso non costruiscono processi comunicativi separati, ma denunciano solo l'uso di media diversi all'interno di uno stesso processo. 'Manuscript culture [.. .] needs to be studied in relation to the two other modes of circulation that were available in the sixteenth century: to the oldest of all, oral performance, and to the newcomer, the printed word'. 1 Di fatto, come ha rilevato D. F. McKenzie per l'Inghilterra del Seicento basandosi a sua volta su osservazioni di

Wurstisen Lute Book contains intabulations of four Latin motets among its enormous number of pieces. The first three bear the authorship of Orlando di Lasso, while the last one is a barely known piece of music. Before focusing on the musical content and the process of arranging the vocal models to lute pieces, I find it necessary to focus my attention on the outstanding musical figure of Orlando di Lasso and the influence of his music on the lute repertory in the second half of the 16th century.
Another crucial topic that needs to be discussed is the problem of musica ficta, its guidelines and positions among some prominent modern musicologists. This preliminary data leads to the core part of the study – the motets of Lasso, intabulated for lute and written down by Wurstisen. It has become clear that these particular arrangements were first published by Melchior Neusidler in his Italian print of 1566, only four years after their original appearance, and were reprinted later in 1571 by Pierre Phalese. The analysis sheds light on the questions of how the intabulations were compiled, which rules were preferable, how the ornamentation and passages were used, and whether any word-painting was involved. The examination supports the notion of the special influence which the two Bavarian-based masters Lasso and Neusidler had on Wurstisen. A further examination of this manuscript has the potential of revealing more about it.

Il lavoro presenta uno studio sulla prima diffusione della stampa a Firenze, sede privilegiata di produzione del libro manoscritto, condotto sulla base dello spoglio e dell’analisi di antichi inventari, cataloghi e liste di libri che descrivono il posseduto di numerose biblioteche presenti in città negli anni compresi tra il 1470 e il 1520. Un’indagine che ha trovato la sua giustificazione nel fatto che Firenze può essere considerata, a tutti gli effetti, una capitale per la storia del libro come ben testimoniano la varietà e il numero di volumi a stampa confezionati entro il primo ventennio del XVI secolo. Dopo una premessa sugli obiettivi e i criteri scelti, la ricerca si è estesa a diversi campi d’indagine: ad un’analisi prettamente quantitativa e statistica fa riscontro uno studio qualitativo del formulario e del lessico utilizzato dai compilatori delle fonti per la descrizione dei libri a stampa, nonché una riflessione sulle informazioni desunte dai documenti, comparate anche ad altre realtà esemplari del territorio italiano. Segue il Repertorio di schede che descrivono in dettaglio le fonti censite, con un criterio di analisi che scandaglia il documento librario in ogni sua specifica sezione. La seconda parte è costituita dal Catalogo degli autori e delle edizioni, testimoniati dagli esemplari a stampa descritti dalle fonti. In Appendice sono pubblicate fonti librarie inedite. Chiudono il lavoro una ricca bibliografia e gli indici.

This book tells the history of Cambridge from the earliest Roman and Anglo Saxon inhabitants through to the notorious Cambridge Spies, who actively spied for the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Told in an accessible manner, and illustrated throughout, the contents are:
1. Etheldreda: Born a Princess, Died a Saint
2. Vanquished by the Vikings: the sacking of Cambridge
3. Fire, Death and Murder at the Fairs: Stourbridge and Midsummer Fairs
4. Jousting Tournaments: history of jousts at Cambridge
5. The Black Death: death in Cambridge
6. Peasants' Revolt: attacks on Cambridge colleges during the revolt
7. Bloody Mary's Revenge on Cambridge
8. Burnt at the Stake: John Hullier, the Protestant Martyr
9. Bear-Baiting: cruel sport in Cambridge
10. Witches and Witchcraft: women killed for being witches
11. Bull-Baiting: more cruel Cambridge sports
12. The English Civil War: the fortification of Cambridge
13. Oliver Cromwell's Missing Head
14. Pressed for an Answer: Peine Forte et Dure
15. One in the Eye for Sir Isaac Newton
16. Highway Robbery: highway men in Cambridge
17. Branding: punishment for crimes
18. Bloody Burwell Fire: the death of 70 innocent people
19. Dick Turpin: his time hiding in Cambridge
20. Cockfighting: history of cockfighting at Cambridge
21. The Resurrection of Tristram Shandy - death of Laurence Stearne: grave robbers steal his body for dissection in the university
22. Cambridge Gallows: the tragedy of those hung at Cambridge
23. The Tragical Death of the Revd Samuel Reeve
24. The Chimneysweep Burglars: thefts from colleges
25. Elizabeth Woodcock and the Curse of the Three Tuns Inn
26. General Tom Thumb Causes a Riot
27. Sister Act: The Cambridge Arsenic Poisoners
28. The Three Tuns Inn: Den of Thieves
29. Burned Alive
30. Bloody Students: The Battle of Town and Gown
31. Fatal Bumps: death on the river Cam
32. Suffragette's Protest
33. The Great War: the role the university played in WWI
34. The Judases Who Betrayed from Within: the story of the Cambridge spies: Blunt, Burgess, Philby, MacLean, and others
35. The Enigma of the Second World War: the role Cambridge played in cracking the German enigma codes at Bletchley Park

Also attached are reviews of the book in the Cambridge News by Emma Higginbotham and a piece about Oliver Cromwell's Head, taken from the book.

This book represents the fi rst comprehensive eff ort dedicated to the interdisciplin-ary study of Renaissance music in Croatia. In spite of the grave political problems it faced during the fi ft eenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Ottoman Empire established its power in the northern and eastern regions, Croatia provided fertile soil for the establishment and fl ourishing of a vivid musical tradition. A closer look at key aspects of Croatian cultural and musical life reveal the extent to which those were infl uenced by foreign practices, primarily those coming from Italy. The performance of the Catholic liturgy in the native language, the popularity of Petrarchan poetry in Italian, with which some Dalmatian poets managed to attract the attention of contemporary Italian composers, and fi nally, the fact that the Croatian coastland was the extreme southeastern point reached by the widely spreading Netherlandish Renaissance polyphony, all attest to the existence of an important pattern of cross-cultural exchange. Throughout the pages of this book, the dramatis personae comprise priests and heretics, noblemen and tradesmen, men of learning and illiterate fi shermen, ladies from high society and courtesans, printers and scribes, patrons of the arts and their protégés – in other words, the variety of individuals taking part in, and shaping in diff erent ways, local cultural and artistic events. This volume aims to identify, contextualize and present the uniqueness and depth of the Croatian musical heritage of the Renaissance to the wider international public.
Table of Contents
The book consists of eleven chapters, followed by the rather exhaustive bibliography.
First chapter Ante murale christianitatis offers some basic information on political and cultural context. During the 15th and 16th centuries the Croatian lands, spreading from the Pannonian Plain to the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, were shaken by grave political problems. Cornered by the interes of Venice, Hungary and the Ottomans, the Croats found themselves on the borders of confliting worlds.
Second chapter Sources: from manuscript to print gives an overview of music sources mentioned in this book.
In third chapter Education and music reader can learn how was both public and church education organised in some Croatian cities and what was the importance of music in education.
In fourth chapter The church: catholics, reformists, catholic reformation one could find a more important data on a very specific liturgy practise, i.e. the church singing in native language, the so-called „Glagolitic chant“.
Fifth chapter Folk culture and popular culture offfers a close reading of mostly literary sources.
Sixth chapter Ceremonies and devotions gives an anthripological approach to the finds of music performances in the city streets, both caarnival and other secular and church celebrations.
Seventh chapter Music and theatre gives a rich and very interesting documentation, which deserves full attention of international reader.
In eight chapter Music and literature one could read about „multilinguality“ in Croatian written culture. It is shown, for instance, how the Petrarchan poetry in Italian language and written by Dalmatian poets attracted the attention of some contemporary composers.
Ninth chapter Celebri autori deals with the most important composers of the Renaissance music in Croatia, such as Andrea Patrizio „da Cherso“, Giulio Schiavetto from Šibenik and Lambert Courtoys, a Frenchmen active in Dubrovnik.
Chapter tenth, entitled The end of the Renaissance, is devoted entirely to the Istrian composer Francesco Sponga-Usper.
The very last eleventh chapter is written in a literary form of dialogue, summaryzing what was previously said.

La ricezione dell'opera di Jakob Burckhardt in Inghilterra si articola in varie fasi. Il critico svizzero effettua due visite a Londra, documentate nelle lettere dalle impressioni e idee che scaturiscono da quell'esperienza. Le sue opere vengono quindi tradotte, e trovano ampia risonanza in un circolo di intellettuali interessati al concetto di Rinascimento. Nel panorama dell'Inghilterra alla seconda metà dell'Ottocento, è da sottolineare la vivace risposta di storici e critici d'arte a Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien: e non è solo il tema del Rinascimento per sē ad attivarne la ricezione con le sue alchimie visive, ma anche il taglio culturale impresso da Burckhardt alla sua indagine sulle forme dell'arte, che appare come elemento liberatorio, via di fuga dalle assiologie morali e cronologiche della critica vittoriana, dall'egemonia critica di John Ruskin e dalla supremazia artistica e morale attribuita al Gotico.

FACES (Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems) is a project that, after two years of research support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), has established proof of concept for the application of face recognition technology to works of portrait art. In the application of face recognition technology to photographed human faces, a number of difficulties are inherent in a real or perceived alteration of appearance of the face through variations in facial expression, age, angle of pose, and so on. With works of portrait art, not only do all these problems pertain, but these works also have their own additional challenges. Most notably, portrait art does not provide what might be called a photographic likeness but rather one that goes through a process of visual interpretation on the part of the artist. After establishing the initial parameters of the application of this technology, the main goal of FACES has been to test the ability of the FACES algorithm to restore lost identities to works of portrait art, something our research has shown is clearly feasible. Our work has also suggested a number of other potential applications, both using the FACES algorithm and employing basic concept of FACES in an altered form.
The use of the FACES algorithm should not be thought of as limited to facial recognition in the sense of identification alone. An altered form of the technology used in FACES might also be used to study a wide range of other applications such as adherence or non-adherence to widely recognized artistic canons, formal or informal; the identification of variations in the practice of an individual artist (over time, with different subjects, with different genres, after exposure to external influences, and so on); probable bodies of work of anonymous artists; difference in larger bodies of works (art historical ‘big data’); even to detect the change of masons in medieval building.

Along with his vast production of figure drawings, Jacopo Tintoretto arises among other venetian artists for his atypical investigation on sculpture. This research aims to offer an analysis of such profound interest by drawing a parallel between Tintoretto’s study drawings and the Florentine theory of "disegno", which appeared to be fervently discussed in sixteenth-century Venice by Pietro Aretino and his entourage. Through the analysis of Tintoretto’s early graphic production, where the sculptures of Jacopo Sansovino and Michelangelo stand as visual references, it is possible to reflect on the influential role played by the Tuscan approach in the artist’s training, which will be later on looked up as a model to train his workshop.
Nevertheless, Tintoretto’s final outcomes in drawings appear inevitably bound to a strong Venetian tradition: a critical inspection of both his drawing style on paper, and its formal correspondence in the underdrawings on canvas, explains the artist’s custom between a theorical approach to sculpture and his characteristic outcome towards drawing and painting. Eventually, Tintoretto develops a conscious translation of sculptural presence of the human body into a painterly rendering of forms, to which his contemporaries will address as "prestezza".

SADRŽAJ


RIJEČ NA POČETKU

1) ANTEMURALE CHRISTIANITATIS
Na granicama svjetova
Između Venecije, Ugarskoga dvora i Turaka
Povijest i historiografija        
Dva humanista o Turcima i turskoj glazbi

2) IZVORI: OD RUKOPISA DO TISKA
Samostanski skriptoriji, crkvene zbirke glazbenih kodeksa
Zagubljene muzikalije, zaboravljeni glazbenici
Tiskane muzikalije
Glazbeno tiskarstvo
Jacques Moderne "da Pinguente" i Andrea Antico "da Montona"
Ekskurs: Iz kataloga i oglasa knjižara i nakladnika

3) ODGOJ I GLAZBA
Glazba u školi
O glazbenoj teoriji (iz privatnih i javnih knjižnih fondova)
Školovanje izvan domovine
Učena društva, akademije
Ekskurs: P. P. Vergerije i F. Niger o glazbi u školi

4) CRKVA IZMEĐU REFORME I OBNOVE
Glagoljaško pjevanje: između koralnih zapisa i usmene predaje
Glazba u reformaciji

5) NARODNA I POPULARNA KULTURA
Juraj Šižgorić: poeta doctus u Arkadiji
Petar Zoranić: narodna kultura i književna fikcija
Petar Hektorović i kritičko čitanje narodne kulture
Glazba i književnost "Schiavona"
Scuola Dalmata
Ekskurs: Franjo Ksaver Kuhač suočen s paleografskom zagonetkom

6) SVJETOVNE SVEČANOSTI I PUČKE POBOŽNOSTI
Glazba i ples na gradskim ulicama, karnevalske i druge svjetovne svečanosti
Pučke pobožnosti: aklamacije i laude
Svetkovanje sv. Vlaha

7) GLAZBA I KAZALIŠTE
Crkvena prikazanja
Svjetovno kazalište: tragedije, pastorale, komedije
Falstaf u Zadru, intermediji u Osoru
Ekskurs: Uz najraniji prijevod Tassove Aminte


8) KNJIŽEVNOST I GLAZBA
Uz početke hrvatske glazbene terminologije
Marko Marulić i glazba
Hrvatski petrarkisti na talijanskom jeziku
Ekskurs: o ženama

9) CELEBRI AUTORI
Jedan glazbeni amater: Šime Budinić
Polifonija u Dalmaciji: madrigali, moteti...
Francuz u Dubrovniku: Lambert Courtoys

10) KRAJ RENESANSE
Istranin u Veneciji: Francesco Sponga Usper

EPILOG (Dialogo)


BIBLIOGRAFIJA

This text forms an abridged introductory section from a dissertation I am undertaking on the Space Renaissance Initiative (SRI). The research dissertation is titled,

'The Astrosociological Imagination and the Space Renaissance Initiative- A Discourse Analytical Perspective'.

The work shares some of the essentially humanist themes of C. Wright Mills’1959 classic text ‘The Sociological Imagination’ and seeks to integrate social, personal and historical elements into a discourse analysis of the SRI, as I am on the organisation’s current Board of Directors, (2010). The work is portioned into chapters addressing key elements of the SRI manifesto and discourse in relation to modern environmental political theory.

This introductory chapter comprises a précis of my literature review and explores traditional debates inherent within sociological critique regarding the environmental crisis, in context of the conceptual precepts offered by Max Weber on rationalisation in contemporary industrial society. The SRI’s philosophies clearly present a radical departure from the polarities and inherent limitations of existing schools of thought on both environmental and socio- cultural developmental issues. The Space Renaissance Initiative is an organisation that challenges the parameters of our thinking in regard to human scientific, technological evolution.

Key concepts: -

Renaissance culture, Astronautic Humanism, rationalisation, scientific naturalism, paradigmatic evolution, sustainable development, technocentrism, ecocentrism, ecofeminism.


Key Theorists: Prof. Gerard O´Neill, Max Weber, Raymond Murphy, Thomas Malthus, the Frankfurt School.