Italy Books

A find of gold! Not mentioned the well-researched writings, the illustrations, presented in big size, printed with high quality, definitely are the merits for this coffee-table sized book to serve as a pictorial reference for art of the Renaissance, especially, for the sculpture part. This high-quality volume is a bargain. It should be one of the collection on your book shelf if you find interest in classic works of art.

Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Early Baroque painter, today considered one of the most accomplished painters in the generation influenced by Caravaggio. In an era when women painters were not easily accepted by the artistic community, she was the first female painter. This book is a research in Artemisia's life and though it is a little bit fictioned it does leave a footprint in your heart that few other books do. It describes the life in Italy of a woman in those ages, the struggle of an artist and a genius, the difficult relationship that often men have with their daughters from the dawn of time. Artemisia and her story will touch you deeply in your creativity and in your admiration for the women that did make the difference for many of us in History.

This book is, by far, one of the best I've personally seen or read, on the subject.

The author is quite versed in the Renaissance and its masters.

Printed in Italy, this is a lavish coffee table book, weighty and with thick glossy pages.
Written and extremely well researched by Doretta Davanzo Poli, it is in large, double-spaced type, making this history of Venice and its artisans a quick and easy read. It describes how the palaces and churches were built, the materials used, and how its famous glass making was developed.

It has classified the arts of Venice into four categories:
"Solid" (stone, tiles, wellheads and chimneys).
"Ductile" or "Malleable" (wood and metals).
"Fragile" (glass, ceramics, stucco).
"Soft" (silk, tapestries, lace, embroidery, leather).

This is a wonderful book to read and learn from, but it is the work of Mark E. Smith, who with few exceptions did most of the photography, that makes it so spectacular. His close-up views of marble and wood inlays, ornate jewelry, brocades and laces, often in 2 page spreads, are breathtaking.
An all-color, profusely illustrated book, it will educate as well as delight the eye with its luxurious beauty.

Compiled and deftly edited by Catherine Hess (Associate Curator of Sculpture, Getty Museum), The Arts Of Fire: Islamic Influences On Glass And Ceramics Of The Italian Renaissance is informationally enhanced by the contributions of George Saliba (Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science, Columbia University) and Linda Komaroff (curator of Islamic Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art). Graced with a map, 61 color images and 17 b/w illustrations, The Arts Of Fire showcases luxury glass and ceramic objects made by Italian artists and craftsmen during the 15th and 16th centuries -- an era considered to be a high point in Renaissance art. What's less well known is that none of these wonderful creations would have been possible without the introduction of the technological and formal advances in the art and production of glass and ceramic ware imported into Italy from contacts within the Islamic East where they were originally developed and practiced. Also available in a hardcover edition (0892367571, $65.00), The Arts Of Fire is a superb and enthusiastically recommended addition to personal, professional, and academic Art History reference collections, The Arts Of Fire is a joy to simply page through and will leave the reader wondering what other treasures the Getty Museum has within its collections.

Much of what we know about the A.D. 79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius - the eruption that sealed Pompeii and Herculaneum in time and volcanic ash - comes from the letters written by Pliny the Younger to his friend Tacitus. Pliny was an eyewitness, and his uncle died in the eruption.<
These texts have been available for a long time. What is new and impressive about this book are its illustrations, relief engravings by artist Berry Moser, Professor in Residence in the Art Department of Smith College in Massachusetts.<
The letters are freshly translated by Benedicte Gilman, who has also provided biographies of Tacitus and Pliny the Younger, as well as an essay describing how it was that the letters themselves came to be preserved into modern times. This is solid, readable, exciting work in and of itself.<
But the real force in this book is the illustrations. Using a technique generally confined to wood engraving, Moser has given us a series of 16 vital illustrations that bring a terrible life to the horrible events of the eruption. As slim as it is, this volume is a literal "must have" for all lovers of art and history.

Aspiring Saints by Anne Jacobson Schutte, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, presents an interesting look at the peculiar phenomenon of pretense of holiness. Anne Schutte is an established historian, her other works include The Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint; Time, Space and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe; and Heavenly Supper: The Story of Maria Janis. Aspiring Saints is an expansion of her previous work about Maria Janis, one of the women accused of pretense of holiness. In this work, Schutte focuses on twelve cases, which she discovered while working in the Inquisitorial archives of Venice. A total of nine women and seven men, sometimes working in collusion, were accused of either being "false saint" or aiding them in their cause. The cases that Schutte examines are from the period of 1618-1750 and take place in the Republic of Venice. A majority of the cases she cites are those of beatas, women that are virgins or widows who have dedicated their lives to being holy. Surprisingly, nearly all of these women also had an accomplice, usually a priest that was their confessor, who would also propagate the belief that this person was holy. Piecing together the facts of each case from denunciations and trial dossiers, Schutte attempts to understand the similarities and differences that exist with each of these "living saints".

Schutte starts by explaining, in brief narrative, each of the cases that she will examine. She then goes on to describe the role and function of The Roman Inquisition, the institution given the responsibility to judge the crime of pretense of holiness and then administer an appropriate sentence. With a firm background established, Schutte begins her comparative analysis.

Features common to must of these false saints were vows of celibacy, holy wounds such as the stigmata, the ability to live solely on communion for extended periods of time, the ability to go into ecstasy and receive visions, the creation and use of relics, and the power to perform miracles. These people were not saints by Catholic definition because, at the time of investigation, they were still living and had not been canonized by the church. Schutte identifies the possible causes of the pretense of holiness: possession, illness, or willful fraud. She shows many similarities between people charged as false saints and those charged with witchcraft or sorcery. She also explores the roles of exorcists and physicians as used by the Roman Inquisition to investigate this phenomenon. Schutte then examines how gender played a significant role in the occurrence of pretense of holiness.

Displaying great command over her sources, Schutte effortlessly switches between the different aspects of each case. Her methods are excellent for comparing the minute details of the cases, but sometimes this approach overly fragments the flow of information. Although Schutte supplies short narratives of each case, expansion on each narrative would have reduced the confusion caused by an overwhelming cast of characters. Trying to keep the facts straight between twelve cases proved very challenging. To add to confusion, the paths of multiple stories cross on occasion as a person takes on a role that affects one of the other cases.

Schutte accurately portrays the situations in the context of their times. Not once does she project onto any circumstance a viewpoint or conclusion that would be an anachronism. She judges each of the cases using the cultural views and methodology appropriate for the time. Schutte also brilliantly uses spiritual manuals and medical texts of the period. While in today's secular world filled with medical science it would be easy to say that no one could live for years on communion alone, but Schutte cites experiments of the 17th and 18th century that demonstrate that this type of fasting could be possible. This perspective allows the reader to see the situations as people of that time would have viewed it.

The book is well organized and contains many extra features. A map of the Republic of Venice at the front of the text identifies many of the locations discussed within. Illustrations placed throughout the text break up the monotony and add an extra visual component to the work. The book also contains an extensive index, which proved to be extraordinarily helpful when having to identify specific people and event mentioned previously in the text. Her citations are accurate and well organized, and there is even a section of the book with the explanations for the abbreviations used in her footnotes. The footnotes themselves were helpful and often went into further detail on events mentioned in the text.

In all, Aspiring Saints is a wonderful analysis of pretense of holiness. Schutte presents her research in a scholarly, yet interesting manner. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in religious phenomena or the Roman Inquisition in Venice.

Olivia Holmes's book, originally a variation on her Doctoral thesis, traces the evolution of the phenomenon of the single-authored collection of poetry, in the light of the transition from oral tradition to vernacular writing in the Middle Ages. It starts from a consideration of the ramifications of the shift from the case of multi-authored anthologies of poetry to that of the single-authored collection, which expresses the writer's individual ideas and beliefs in poetry and writing.

The prose is lucid, and hard to fault for its immense clarity. In the book itself, Holmes shows a consideration of the text(s) she studies as products not only of an intimate engagement with historical-literary phenomena, but also as expressions of the authors' capabilities in writing and their self-reflexive dimensions of thought as poets writing either against or in line with inherited literary models of the Middle Ages(or both).

The book was indispensable to my work as a Honours student, because of the groundbreaking work it offered in relation to Dante's Vita Nuova, and the the study of Italian poetry's development as a whole during the Middle Ages. Culminating as part of a recent latent insurgence against the traditional opposition between medieval conformity and renaissance individualism within literary circles, Olivia Holmes's scholarly will prove rewarding, for its ability to prove medieval Italian poetry as a ground for laying down the foundations to both the expression and the psychological phenomenon of individualism itself.

It is unfortunate that this book is out of print, because it is an outstanding modern-day tale about being our brother's keeper. Set in the Italian town of Assisi during World War II, "The Assisi Underground" tells the true story of a network of Catholic clergy, nuns, and lay persons who secretly provided shelter and aid to Jewish refugees escaping from the ravages of the war, German pursuers, and Fascist loyalists. Narrating the story in the first person is Padre Rufino, an earthy Franciscan priest who lead the network on orders from his bishop. Through Rufino, author Alexander Ramati relates in fine detail the difficult logistics of the operation from the arrival of the refugees at their monastery shelters to their safe passage to Allied-occupied zones. The book is exciting as it is moving; the reader is treated to the cloak-and-dagger aspects of the operation as well as its desperate but ultimately triumphant moments. (A motion-picture adaptation written and directed by Mr. Ramati was released in 1985, yet it does no justice to the book). To those searching a copy through a library or second-hand bookstore, I will say it is worth the effort.

Value for money! I highly recommend it to any one interested in C16 italian life styles. Loads of photos of extant pieces. There is one photo of an islamic incesence ball. I had read/heard/seen one of these some time ago but didn't have any more than a memory of it. Fan-tas-tic!

Cross cultural influnces are also discussed in this book to give a broarder view of Italian society.