Leonardo, Bramante, and the Academia
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Book Series
Renovatio Artium, vol. 16
- Pages: approx. 336 p.
- Size:220 x 280 mm
- Illustrations:1 b/w, 85 col.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2026
- € 160,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-1-915487-50-6
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Jun/26)
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This book reveals an original investigation of Renaissance literature and portraiture.
BIO
Lina Bolzoni is Professor Emerita of Italian literature at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, New York. She is a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, the British Academy, and the American Philosophical Society. Among her books, translated into many languages, there are La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’età della stampa (Turin, 1995); La rete delle immagini: Predicazione in volgare dalle origini a Bernardino da Siena (Turin, 2002); and Una meravigliosa solitudine: L’arte di leggere nell’Europa moderna (Turin, 2019).
Summary
In his Canzoniere, Petrarch evokes the image of the “crystal heart” as a metaphor for a correspondence between the inner self and external appearance. Expanding on the classical theme of the soul’s open window, the metaphor of the crystal heart embodies the utopia of amorous transparency, conveying the desire to cast aside the barriers between interior and exterior, between emotion and expression, rendering love perfectly visible from the outside. Using this image as a heuristic tool, Lina Bolzoni takes us into an original investigation of Renaissance literature and portraiture. Focusing on and taking as a departure point Pietro Bembo’s famous dialogue on love, the Asolani (first published in 1505), Bolzoni guides us into a meaningful exploration of love poetry and prose, letters, paintings, mirrors, and medals. Barriers fixed by the critical tradition fall along the way, for words, images, and objects, far from being relegated to their own spheres, refer constantly back and forth to one another, their interconnections woven together into refined and secret rituals that disclose the centrality of love in Italian Renaissance culture and society. Bolzoni’s magistral book reveals not only the pivotal role played by a reflection on love in the creation of a new court society, and of the early-modern courtier, but also love’s inextricable bond with friendship and the pleasures of interpretation.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Part One: The Asolani: Themes, Games of Perspective, Life Choices
The Three Maidens: The Opening Scene and its Diffraction
The Court and its Portraits
Literature and its Audience
Pictures Framed by Literature
Places
Between the Hermitage and the Realm of Venus
Part Two: The Portrait between Words and Images
The Text before the “Eye of the Beholder”
The Self-Portrait
Poetry and Portrait: The Negotiation of Borders
Part Three: The Double Portrait
Double Portraits in Poetry: Ariosto and Castiglione
Portraits with Cover or with Reverse, or A Portrait in Two Installments
The Space of the Heart
Part Four: The Community of Friends
Bernardo Bembo from the Court of Charles the Bold to the Florence of Lorenzo de’ Medici
Bernardo, Ginevra de’ Benci, and the Circle of Friends: The Construction of a Myth, the Pleasure of Interpretation
Virtus et Honor: The Metamorphoses of the Impresa between Celebration and Memory
The Sensual Pleasure of Medals, or a Medal in Dispute
Double Portraits for the Asolani
Bibliography
Index
Media
