In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780804762168)

In Your Face concentrates on the Renaissance concern with "self-fashioning" by examining how a group of Renaissance artists and writers encoded their own improprieties in their works of art. In the elitist court society of sixteenth-century Italy, where moderation, limitation, and discretion were generally held to be essential virtues, these men consistently sought to stand out and to underplay their conspicuousness at once. The heroes (or anti-heroes) of this book--Michelangelo Buonarroti, Benvenuto Cellini, Pietro Aretino, and Anton Francesco Doni--violated norms of decorum by promoting themselves aggressively and by using writing or artworks to memorialize their assertiveness and intractable delight in parading themselves as transgressive and insubordinate on a grand scale. Focusing on these sorts of writers and visual artists, Biow constructs a version of the Italian Renaissance that is neither the elegant one of Castiglione's and Vasari's courts--so recently favored in scholarly accounts--nor the dark, conspiratorial one of Niccolò Machiavelli's and Francesco Guicciardini's princely states.

Author: Douglas Biow
ISBN-10: 0804762163
ISBN-13: 9780804762168
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/24/2009
Pages: 272
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 01/15/2010 pg. 20
Choice 07/01/2010
Reference and Research Bk News 05/01/2010 pg. 44