Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power (Renaissance Art)

Product Information

There were many Italian Renaissance humanists who also praised and affirmed the beauty of the body in poetry and literature. By the early 16th-century keyboard improvisation came to be greatly valued, and numerous composers of virtuoso keyboard music appeared.

The source for these works expanded beyond works of theology and towards the pre-Christian eras of Imperial Rome and Ancient Greece.Some argue that the Timurid Renaissance in Samarkand was linked with the Ottoman Empire, whose conquests led to the migration of Greek scholars to Italy. It has also been argued that the Black Death prompted a new wave of piety, manifested in the sponsorship of religious works of art. Severing the Neck of Pride: Donatello's "Judith and Holofernes" and the Recollection of Albizzi Shame in Medicean Florence. Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, [23] play down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier innovations of the Italian city-states in the High Middle Ages, which married responsive government, Christianity and the birth of capitalism.

In much of the region, the landed nobility was poorer than the urban patriarchs in the High Medieval money economy whose inflationary rise left land-holding aristocrats impoverished.However, the ideas and ideals of the Italian Renaissance spread into the rest of Europe, setting off the Northern Renaissance from the late 15th century. In addition to the standard periodization, proponents of a "long Renaissance" may put its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.