Seminars

In the porch of the church of Santa Felicita in Florence sits the imposing funerary monument of one Arcangela Paladini (1596-1622). It bears the intriguing inscription, "Scatter this stone with roses, for here, innocent and of celestial song, lies the siren of Tuscany and the muse of Italy.” Who was this “siren of Tuscany” and why did she, having died at the tender age of 26, merit such a monument? My paper explores the brief life and career of this “siren,” who was not only an angelic singer at the Medici court but also an accomplished painter whose self portrait hangs in the Uffizi galleries. I will also discuss her relationship with contemporary artists and composers, among them Artemisia Gentileschi and Francesca Caccini; her marriage to a wealthy Dutch tapestry- maker; and her musical self-fashioning as Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. In a description of one of the singer’s captivating performances at court the writer states that he “must not fail to mention the wonderful amazement that Signora Arcangela left in the hearts of everyone there as she represented Saint Cecilia in such a beautiful and devout manner, both with her presence and her song . . . .” I suggest that Arcangela’s representation of Saint Cecilia on that occasion was informed by a tradition of Cecilian imagery that goes back to the early 16th century, with Raphael’s Ecstasy of Saint Cecilia being the prime example. I also discuss the special place of solo singing in the court culture of Medicean Florence, which in fact culminated in the birth of opera.

In 1519, the publication of Utopia by the Florentine press Giunti sparked immediate interest in More’s text among Italian intellectuals. Over the next 35 years, Utopia was imitated, included in elaborate literary games, translated into Italian (1548), and inserted into larger works. However, the fascination with More’s work abruptly ceased midway through the century. In the Seicento, Utopia recaptured the attention of Italian authors. A crucial factor in the revival of More’s text was Giambattista Bidelli’s 1620 edition. Unlike the earlier Italian version, “Bidelli’s Utopia” contained the paratext that had accompanied the original edition, thus providing Italian readers with a more accurate picture of how More had conceived Utopia. Scholars (Manual and Manuel, Firpo) argue that the resurgence of interest in More’s text during the Seicento lacked the inventiveness of the previous century’s utopian endeavors. However, a careful analysis of the literary and conceptual features of 17th-century Italian works that engaged with Utopia tells a different story. The renewed focus on More’s text in the Italian Seicento led to compelling ways of reimagining Utopia. Some authors expanded upon the limited utopian attempts of the 16 th century by developing more complex and theoretically sophisticated utopias. Others creatively transformed Utopia by employing unusual literary genres. However, the most innovative development was that Utopia was not just used or imitated—it was also examined critically. Some thinkers investigated its place in the history of utopian thought by considering its relation to ancient utopias, while others tried to integrate More’s utopianism into political philosophy.

The ducal palace of Vila Viçosa, in the Alentejo region of Portugal, housed one of the most significant libraries of sixteenth-century Iberia. At the death of Dom Teodósio I, Duke of Bragança, in 1563, a post-mortem inventory recorded not only over a thousand books in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and various vernaculars, but also a remarkable array of artefacts. In the first section of the inventory — titled 'Panos que estão nesta casa da liuraria & outras cousas & pintados' — one finds large illuminated maps on parchment, atlases, astronomical instruments, celestial and terrestrial globes and paintings with biblical and classical subjects. These items, alongside the books, in particular those listed under the heading 'Astrologia e Matematica', reveal a materially and intellectually curated space. This talk examines how globes, quadrants, maps, and books functioned together in D. Teodósio's library and asks what it meant to bring together such tools of erudition in a single, architecturally bounded setting. The court of the Braganças actively competed with the Portuguese royal court and other European courts, promoting literary gatherings — sometimes described as an 'Academia' — and even envisaging the foundation of a 'Studium Generale'. Drawing on the findings of the research project 'De todas as partes do mundo' (PI: Jessica Hallett), including Ana Isabel Buescu’s analysis of the library inventory and Hugo Miguel Crespo’s detailed work on domestic and scholarly objects, this presentation explores the spatial and material culture of mathematics in a courtly context, and how science, art, and authority were made to cohabit the same room.

In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (c. 1549), Etienne de la Boétie asks, of the condition of servitude: ‘Is this life? Can we call this living?’ He despairs over those who seem more alive in body than in spirit, and those whose desire to live on is more powerful than their desire to be free. Desire is a critical theme for La Boétie, who was also a love poet and whose Discourse was influenced by Petrarchan themes. In his Sonets pour Helene (1578) Ronsard writes ‘I must hide myself / So as to not die and be reborn so many times’. Scholars have discussed the tension in Petrarchan lyric between life and death, with each sonnet a re-animation both of generic tropes and of the lyric voice that repeatedly expresses its conflicted desire for continued life. Why live on, why want to survive? This paper examines literary concern with this question in mid- sixteenth century France, taking La Boétie’s text and its poetic contexts as a case study. I argue that desire conditions the representation of life in these works with complex political implications, ask whether a survival motif inflects ‘renaissance’ writing within and beyond lyric, and consider the theoretical and historical stakes of approaching early modern texts from this perspective. This work is drawn from the first chapter of my current book project, titled Surviving the Renaissance.

In several works Bruno combines themes and ideas from the Kabbalah and the Apocalypse. Francesco Giorgi and Heinrich Agrippa von Nettesheim, among other Renaissance Kabbalists, had done so too but, unconventional though their views might be, they had aspired to remain within the bounds of orthodoxy. Bruno, by contrast, had no such scruples. The Kabbalah and the Apocalypse were two aspects of the same Jewish religion, one that, at best, preserved traces of the ancient wisdom of Egypt, at worst, knowingly peddled lies and false promises.

My paper presents the personal story of and analyzes the books of histories by a forgotten historian of the early modern Mediterranean: Luigi Parma, who was active in Venice in the middle of the 1540s and died before 1552. A pro-Spaniard historian, involved in trans-imperial espionage in Venice, Luigi Parma was the author, among other texts, of a forgotten, and essentially unexplored, Mediterranean and Eurasian history of the wars between the Spanish and the Ottoman Empires (1535-1545), entitled History of Charles V’s Wars Against the Turks. This historical work was seized by the Counsel of Ten in 1544 and has remained unread, and unstudied, at the Biblioteca Marciana since then. A microhistorical exploration of Luigi Parma’s personal story and the analysis of Parma’s History allows us to enter the political, diplomatic, and intellectual laboratory of a historian of the early modern globalizing world, whose life, aspirations, and works have been crushed in the great trans-imperial rivalry of the sixteenth century.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) constantly studied light and shadows. His thinking on the matter turned to questions of Platonic metaphysics, geometric optics, and cosmology, as well as practical experiments. One long-neglected aspect of his reflections on light and shadows is how he repeatedly discussed the nature of pinhole images and camerae obscurae. According to Ficinian reasonings, the camera obscura is not just a dark box that serves as an analogue to Plato’s allegorical cave, it is also an experimental tool that demonstrates the nature of light and shadows. One particularly interesting instance of Ficino's experimental thinking is how he explains that the eye functions like a camera obscura. However important this explanation of the eye might be for understanding Ficino's place in the history of vision, Ficino never detached his thinking about camera obscurae (as well as geometric optics and cosmology more broadly) from metaphysical considerations.