Jerome as a penitent and his importance for lay piety, and particularly female piety, in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Florence. In Catholic theology, the Jewish Apocryphal heroine Judith has primarily been defined as an antetype of the Virgin Mary. Forged in the patristic era, this concept is particularly associated with Jerome, who inscribed it unequivocally within his famous epistolary encomia to chastity addressed to women and, less overtly, within the idiosyncratic text of the Book of Judith in the Vulgate.
This paper argues that the revival of the explicitly Marian Judith of Jerome by the Counter-Reformation Church accounts for the flavor of many visual representations of Judith in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy. Imagery by such painters as Artemisia Gentileschi, Guerra, Domenichino, and Sirani will be considered, together with contemporary sermons and polemics inspired by Jerome.
Renaissance and the Ancient World II: Curran, Pennsylvania State University Presenter: This paper investigates the shifting conceptions of Etruscan temples in sixteenth- century Italy. A drawing of an Etruscan tumulus Louvre, ca. Although based on an Etruscan tomb discovered in , the artist deviated from his model by depicting a regular, centralized monument, surmounted by a circular tempietto.
This imaginative reconstruction is inconsistent with Etruscan architecture, and with descriptions of Etruscan buildings in architectural treatises. Consideration of Etruria and Etruscan culture in Renaissance lore, histories, art, and architectural theory reveals how the Etruscan temple resisted codification, responding to wider iconographic and cultural tendencies. Byzantine Manuscripts as Models for Renaissance Painting: Some Methodological Problems Abstract: Ancient fragments, sarcophagi, and statues were abundantly present in Rome and northern Italy in the Renaissance, but no major paintings survived from antiquity.
This paper will consider how and why Hellenistic manuscripts were logical substitutes for the lost paintings of classical antiquity. The Artist as Antiquarian: This paper discusses the ways in which Cellini and Bandinelli promoted a new conception of the court artist as an interpreter of ancient art for the prince. Michelangelo and Raphael, who had already recently given currency to the notion of the artist as connoisseur, served as models for Cellini and Bandinelli in developing this concept for a Florentine context, both as a tool for promoting their individual reputations and as an argument for elevating their artistic practice to the status of a learned humanistic discipline.
Karen-edis Barzman, Binghamton University Presenter: Six late works by Claude, which recreate the legendary journeyings of Aeneas, form a stylistic group within his art. His patrons desired landscapes which should reconstruct the early history of Rome and cast luster on their ancient lineage. Through an imaginative response to Virgil, and to sixteenth-century allegorical readings of the Aeneid, Claude created a new mode of landscape rooted in epic poetry. Rape, Ritual, and the Responsible Citizen: Emblems in Early Modern England Sponsor: Society for Emblem Studies Organizer: In this paper I address the way what was originally Catholic imagery is re-formed in the sense of being formed anew within the context of two Protestant English works: Quarles reuses physical images which originated in Jesuit emblem books and applies them to his Protestant Emblems.
Spenser reuses certain imagery within his own work, such as the image of a woman telling prayer beads, which is first introduced in a negative Catholic context with Corcecca, but is then reintroduced in a positive light with Caelia in the House of Holiness. The paper compares the approaches each of these writers takes in appropriating Catholic images for Protestant ends, and explores what is at stake in reusing or reforming these emblematic and verbal images within the context of a reformed religion. Collington, Niagara University Paper Title: Images of ships tossed at sea have long been employed in emblems to convey the fickleness of fortune and the precariousness of human life.
In the frontispiece, Harington deploys impresa and a visual allusion to the emblematist Sambucus to further his project of self-fashioning, transforming the frontispiece from its Italian model into one that glorifies translator over original author. Italian Art I Chair: This praise must have rankled Giorgio Vasari, a man with his own plans for literary fame. This paper will examine texts by and about the two painter-authors to demonstrate the literary rivalry between the two.
By granting favors and enacting rituals, he strengthened Medici control of government. Reinventing the Female Nude Abstract: When Leonardo returned to Florence in and created the Leda and the Swan — a composition known only from drawings and student copies, thus relatively unstudied — he reinvented the female nude. In this painting, one of the first with a completely uncovered woman as protagonist, Leonardo ignored his own guidelines for the representation of modest poses.
The highly erotic work recalls a little-known statement by Leonardo on the power of images: It soon became the norm for depictions of female nudes in Italy and beyond. Southeastern Renaissance Conference Organizer: Susan Cerasano, Colgate University Respondent: An Early Renaissance Dido: This anonymous, first-person Dido poem is translated from the French by Octavien de St. Gelais, itself a declassicizing and revisionary translation of Heroides 7. Some mention will be made of later Renaissance Didos written by Gager, Marlowe, and others. This talk will display selected images of the pages and the woodcut.
The Parallax of Rank: In England around , non-elite writers needed a job or a patron. The poet Samuel Daniel — had many setbacks, but he received patronage beyond the dreams of most early modern English writers. From a discovery among manuscripts in the Folger, I show that Daniel was a key negotiator in an attempt in to broker a marriage settlement for Lady Anne Clifford. Whereas this assessment has merit, when considering De Revolutionibus readers must also see the work as the end product of over one hundred years of astronomical and cosmological debate.
I will emphasize the extent to which the reform effort of these philosophers ultimately bore fruit in the pages of De Revolutionibus, whose author might well have been the last and greatest of the Renaissance students of astronomy. Seventeenth-century advocates for female learning came from Italy, France, Holland, Spain, Mexico, and England, arguing for female education in diverse ways.
Their texts were addressed to a variety of audiences with a multitude of different justifications. They exported ideas across national boundaries hoping to gain support for female learning and schools over the course of the century. Their lauding of the perceived benefits together with their refutations of the perceived peril in educating girls helps to explain the greater acceptance of female education and the rise in schools across the Continent and British Isles.
The actions and words of these seventeenth-century advocates built upon the humanist and Querelle tradition, and expanded opportunities for female learning by giving girls and women credit for rational capacity and intelligence. It also set the stage for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gains. Educational Ruminations of Tudor-Stuart Women: The first school for children in early modern England was the home. Upper-class parents, mothers in particular, possessed a keen interest in the health, education, and religious practices of their children. A careful examination of the personal writings of mothers and their children, especially sons, illuminates the revered position mothers held as mentors and confidants.
Vanderpool, Baylor University Paper Title: This paper analyzes two of the numerous factors that contributed to her creative conjoining of male knowledge with female learning. More on Rapture and Astral Magic Organizer: This paper explores these questions by focusing on the Vatican Library containing several manuscripts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus , and the possible ties between Roman humanists and those around Ficino. Hanegraaff, Universiteit van Amsterdam Paper Title: Ficino discusses the frenzies in various places of his oeuvre, and has thereby exerted a significant impact on the later development of the tradition.
Continuities and Changes Abstract: This magical text was compiled in eleventh-century Spain and translated into Spanish under Alphonso the Wise between and Aspects of Renaissance Republicanism: Genoa, Venice, and Florence Organizer: Dennis Romano, Syracuse University Chair: This paper uses diplomatic correspondence to explore how republicanism helped shape the political vocabulary of late fifteenth-century Florence. The two-sided, often conflicted, nature of Medici diplomacy in this period placed Florentine ambassadors, mostly hand-picked Medici men, in the awkward position of writing parallel sets of dispatches, one officially to the council for foreign affairs to which they duly reported, the other privately to Lorenzo, whose dynastic interests they actively promoted.
The idea of equality was central to the republican regimes of late medieval and Renaissance Italy. The notion of equality had special significance in republican Venice, where it was cited again and again in legislation of the mid-fifteenth century as the justification for various laws and governmental rulings. Drawing upon that legislation, this paper examines the various meanings the word equality enjoyed in the Venetian republican context.
Depending on the circumstances, it was applied to a variety of activities including treatment before the law, the distribution of offices, and access to various mercantile activities. Although the patricians who wrote the legislation usually applied the concept only to members of their own class, they did on occasion expand the notion to include both nobles and commoners. From the mid-fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries, the Republic of Genoa repeatedly came under the rule of other powers — the King of France, the Duke of Milan, even the Marchese of Monferrato.
The submission of the republic to their rule usually came about by agreement, not conquest. Even if the surrender had been negotiated secretly by the doge, with his own interests in mind, the citizens would have had to give at least tacit consent to it. What was their understanding of their position in relation to these lords, and of the implications for the government of their city and its territory? How might this understanding have differed from that of the lords and the officials they sent to govern on their behalf? In the s France witnessed the birth of numerous hybrid works that mixed together cosmography and topography.
Johnson, Harvard University Paper Title: On Spanish Renaissance Encyclopedism Abstract: In the wake of Pliny, Isidore, Nebrija, Aulus Gellius, and Scaliger, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spain was awash with proto-encyclopedic writings. That these texts tended to promote admiration and imitation as much as they tried to give the vernacular lasting epistemological value further suggests they occupy a transitional moment in the history of encyclopedism.
And in their various attempts to compass and so master a particular subject, these texts, I argue, anticipate Francis Bacon in taking as their paradigm the Spanish imperial enterprise. Where the earlier encyclopedists sought to establish a formal similitude between their texts and the structure of human knowledge, their critics suggested a series of methodological innovations that undermined any direct isomorphism between the metaphysical page and its printed instantiation.
I argue that these critiques can be understood as polemics concerning the relationship between knowledge understood as totality scientia and practices of textual organization ordo and dispositio , paralleling the late sixteenth-century debates over dialectic and method. Responding to reconceptualizations of knowledge, method, and truth, the figure of the encyclopedic is redeployed as a dynamic, combinatory, and demonstrative system of concepts Leibniz and a critical delimitation of the negative space of error Bayle. Religion and Literature in Renaissance England Chair: Block, Duke University Paper Title: Eucharistic Semiotics and Literary Representation Abstract: Identity, convention, similitude, fullness: Graham, University of Waterloo Paper Title: This paper examines the role played by the Psalms in early modern English debates about the nature of Christian community.
Although the Psalms were understood to address the nature of penitential discipline, they also raised questions about the disciplinary problem of unrepentant sinners. What distinguishes the good from the wicked? Considering verse translations as well as commentaries, sermons, and popular devotional works — psalm culture — this paper distinguishes several responses to these and other questions and asks the extent to which such responses reflect views of church doctrine and discipline. Psalm culture, it argues, provides a valuable window onto the contested culture of Reformation discipline even as it helps to shape that culture in its early years.
It treats the religious framings of subjectivity available in sixteenth-century representations of the English gentleman and gentlewoman as a negotiation between theology, devotional practice, generic convention, and specific material and political pressures. Boardroom — Panel Title: The Spectacle of the Histoire tragique in France: Long, Cornell University Presenter: Baty, Cornell College Paper Title: Painting Pathos in the Histoires Tragiques — Abstract: While critics have been puzzled at this apparent narrative flaw marriage needs no secrecy , my paper argues that the shift is intentional by considering it in light of the problem of clandestine marriages and post- Tridentine matrimonial reform.
Campbell, Eastern Illinois University Chair: Even so, the personal reputations of these women were for the most part firmly buttressed in print and in manuscript sources by writers extolling their virtues and defending them against slanderous accusations. Larsen, Hope College Paper Title: A Rhetoric of Dissent: The correspondence, five letters written between Rivet and Schurman over a five-year period —37 , contains an intense exchange in which Schurman expresses strong dissent. Using the rhetorical refutatio, Schurman disagrees on the restrictions imposed on the types of study permitted to women.
Rivet, a conservative humanist pragmatist, maintains that it is not useful for the public interest to educate women beyond what they are called to do in their daily lives. Schurman, on the other hand, argues that since women of the elite classes have leisure time and freedom from participation in household management and public affairs, they are free to be educated in all the disciplines. In stating this, Schurman posits a relatively novel concept for the time, the disengagement of higher education from its purely functional ends.
She equates the private woman with the private man: Reading Margaret Cavendish Organizer: Hammill, University of Notre Dame Presenter: Is There a Natural Philosopher in the House? This paper explores the household as a region of knowledge production in the works of Margaret Cavendish and her contemporaries. At the same time, natural magic and its associated technological routines provided materials for the performance of wondrous effects in masques and other entertainments. Identifying several echoes of The Tempest in The Convent of Pleasure, I argue that when we concentrate on the details and functions of her utopian convent we see that Lady Happy fashions herself in the image of Prospero, another temporarily isolated magician dependent on natural magic books and routines.
Poska, University of Mary Washington Presenter: Examples of Christendom and Virtue for All: Drawing on archival material, this paper explores how these teachers provided the practical skills that equipped a new generation of students to extricate themselves from the protective grasp of the Franciscan order, and ultimately gain independence as successful and productive artists. From the Mouth of Friars: Throughout the sixteenth century the friars working in the conversion of the Mexican Indians produced a significant body of didactic literature — catechisms, sermons, sacred songs, guidelines for penitents, among others — in Spanish and indigenous languages.
These works provide a unique window into the process of crosscultural translation that became so essential to the teaching of Christianity as well as to the daily interactions between missionaries and Mexican Indians. In this paper I will focus on a less explored aspect of this production by examining how the friars incorporated into the teaching of Christianity their own particular views about justice, jurisdictions, and legal obligations.
Julius Kirshner, University of Chicago Presenter: Syndication in Renaissance Florence and Castile Abstract: Syndication was the most widespread procedure for the control of public officials in late medieval Europe. Following its introduction in the Italian communes in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries, it shortly thereafter found its way into the legislation of the Kingdom of Sicily as well as into the codifications and local statutes of different Iberian kingdoms.
In all these political units syndication was carried out within the legal framework of an inquisitorial process divided in the two distinct phases of an inquisitio generalis and an inquisitio specialis. While the first offered the possibility of addressing complaints in the interest of the entire community, the second allowed for the presentation of private charges leveled by citizens.
Comparative case studies of syndication in the Florentine Republic and in the Kingdom of Castile will show similarities and differences in the application of this procedure in two different institutional settings. Syndication is usually presented as a mechanism for reviewing the administration of the political officials of the Italian communes. This paper will examine how it was also used to ensure that notaries drew up documents and recorded important administrative acts. These normative requirements can be traced in the court register series of the maior sindicus et iudex appellationum of Lucca.
Through a comparison of archival evidence and two cases of syndication in the ius commune, the paper will suggest some conclusions about the general functions of syndication. This paper offers a comparative analysis of the theoretical and practical treatment of corruption within the administration of the sixteenth-century Papal States. Its central question concerns how law was applied, comparing the development of political and juridical thought with the activities of papal judges and expressions of contemporary opinion about them. It takes nepotism as an example and aims to explain how as a practice it was reconciled with wider constitutional norms through the development of distinctions between concepts of legality and legitimacy.
Finally, it compares these conclusions with studies of other notorious aspects of corruption in Rome — bribery, alienation of ecclesiastical property, usurpation of jurisdiction — and suggests a methodology for incorporating them within a framework that maps the relationships and operations of power in papal government. The Audience of the Renaissance ca. This paper puts forward the idea that, around , Renaissance ideas reached a broad popular audience for the first time, and they did so most explosively in the plays of Shakespeare.
Actors who fashioned the selves of the characters whom they played recreated and perhaps reflected a social and political world in which anyone — and everyone — might be playing a series of parts. And if the actor were talented, how could the observer tell that it was a performance? Machiavelli as Sisyphus, or Politics as the Stone Abstract: In the paragraphs preceding this sad and strange confession, Machiavelli told Vettori that he had recently been reading Ovid. John Knox and Mary Stuart Abstract: However, when almost all recent scholarly work on self-fashioning concentrates on a single person or group who shares similar identities and behaviors we lose sight of the bigger picture — the interaction among diverse individuals and groups who each participated in self-fashioning.
It is time to reconsider this approach and try to bring two or multiple patterns of self-fashioning together to have a dialogue. This paper focuses on the interplay of two modes of Renaissance self-fashioning through the famous conversations between John Knox, the Scottish reformer, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. Their dialogues represent the juxtaposition of two personae and two cultures of self-presentation, as well as two lines of political and religious thinking. The Italian Renaissance Reconstructed: Histories of Missing Monuments Co-organizers: Dow, Pennsylvania State University Chair: In Suor Domenica da Paradiso had her confessor, Francesco Onesti da Castiglione, compile an inventory of the holdings of the convent of la Crocetta, which she had founded on Via Laura in Florence.
Suor Domenica was a Savonarolan mystic and an unusually determined woman who founded a new order and amassed significant amounts of land and money for her convent. Rebuilt from the Records: The Chiostro dello Scalzo, frescoed in grisaille by Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio, is a well-known landmark of Florentine Renaissance art.
Commissioned by the disciplinati confraternity of San Giovanni Battista dello Scalzo, the cloister was only one aspect of a large oratory that also included a small entrance, a spogliatoio, the main chapel, a sacristy, and an auxiliary chapel. Statues of the Apostles, sculpted by members of the Scalzo such as Valerio Cioli and Giovanni Caccini, adorned the main chapel.
Drawing on recent discoveries in the Florentine archives, including unpublished inventories and plans, this paper reconstructs the lost rooms and decoration of the Scalzo complex as they appeared at the beginning of the Seicento. The Lost Church of S. Maria Maggiore, Venice Abstract: Maria Maggiore in Venice was one of the eighty monastic and parochial churches closed after the fall of the Venetian Republic in It is currently annexed to the Venetian city jail, and is closed to scholars and interested visitors.
Nevertheless, the Franciscan Observant church played a vital role in the religious life of Renaissance Venice, as it contained an extremely popular miraculous image and a highly regarded collection of artwork, ranging from an altarpiece by Titian to a series of massive canvasses depicting medieval legends of the Virgin Mary that adorned the nave walls.
Using inventories from the few remaining monastic documents, architectural renderings, and the surviving paintings, I have reconstructed the interior of the church as it would have looked in the early seventeenth century, as well as a brief history of the monastery and its nuns. The Life of the Mind: Theories and Technologies Organizer: Blair, Harvard University Chair: Blair, Harvard University Paper Title: Methods of Compilation in the Renaissance Abstract: In this paper I will consider the purposes served by the abundant reading notes collected by various Renaissance scholars.
Manuals on note-taking justified the practice primarily as an aid to composition. But some abundant note-takers wrote little or nothing. Others used their reading notes more or less directly in their compositions. Among the genres most heavily dependent on collected reading notes were compilations of various kinds. In the cases of Conrad Gesner and Theodor Zwinger in sixteenth-century Zurich and Basel respectively I trace how reading notes taken on slips of paper or cut out from printed material were glued onto sheets to form a work which was sent to the printer.
Other examples of abundant writers shed light on the special stresses associated with producing works in haste from messy and disordered notes. Professors in Prison Abstract: In response to that disturbingly frequent early modern phenomenon, imprisonment, many intellectuals settled in and continued to write. Experimental Philosophy and the Workings of the Mind Abstract: This paper explores a significant lacuna in our understanding of the transformation of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century.
For the writers of compendia of natural philosophy in the earlier seventeenth century, the operations of the intellect were the precondition for doing natural philosophy, and the soul was in an important sense the culmination of that discipline. Yet in the course of the century the soul was written, slowly and painfully, out of natural philosophy.
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I offer an argument about this process in the context of the experimental philosophy pursued by fellows of the Royal Society of London. New Cultural Perspectives Organizer: Spanish translations began to appear in the s and continued into the early seventeenth century. He gives to the project of his shir an important mission: In this paper I will deal with this problematic, and I will examine the role of the Dialoghi in the intellectual and personal iter of Leone Ebreo, as outlined in his poetic work.
Dante and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. This is considered in connection with the sixteenth-century intellectual Christian interest about Kabbalah. Pico della Mirandola used the Kabbalah as a representation of an apparatus or a text where occult correspondences condense themselves into a deeper sacral meaning.
Allegory becomes a necessary vehicle for the conservation of the truth of doctrine, since it can represent the truth on all its various levels, literal or historical, moral, psychological, celestial, and metaphysical. Jewish female musicians were a rarity in the sixteenth century, let alone later times. If she were real, how does that alter our conception of Jewish female participation in sixteenth-century mainstream culture?
But if she were not, then what led Calmo to invent her? Zoraida and the Handless Maiden: To further enrich these episodes, Cervantes has interwoven mythical, historical, and religious stories — yet one source has been overlooked. Applications of Hermetic and Alchemical Studies I: Studies in Hermeticism Chair: Rouland, Baylor University Presenter: Ficino and the Fathers: Patristic Permission for the Corpus Hermeticum Abstract: Such a perception relies on a narrow definition of Christian thought typical of the Reformation but not reflective of classical Christianity.
The distinction is important, for Ficino was not concerned with the Reformation but rather the recovery of the Eastern Christian Fathers in the West and what they represented. Read in this light, the Corpus Hermeticum was not an extraneous source for the Christian tradition but a significant part of it — a part sanctioned by early, important Christian writers. Thus, the spread of hermetic teachings was not a challenge to traditional Christianity but a restoration of it.
John James Mulryan, St. Bonaventure University Paper Title: Three well-respected Renaissance mythographers, L. Gyraldi Historia, , Vincenzo Cartari Imagini, , and Natale Conti Mythologiae, all embrace the idea that the ancients concealed a secret wisdom within classical myth.
Ironically, though, Conti alone recognizes that alchemy is part of this tradition of hidden wisdom, even though he rejects it as a viable source of knowledge. In doing so, he resembles Church Fathers who despised classical myth but cited myth so often that they became important sources for it. Shoulson, University of Miami Paper Title: How Jewish was Alchemy? Raphael Patai has argued that the prestige accorded Jewish alchemy was so great that alchemical treatises written by non-Jewish adepts were often attributed to Jewish authorship.
In fact, some non-Jewish writers were posthumously converted to Judaism to give their work greater authority. Not only are the two trends not unrelated; they both draw upon the socio-cultural phenomenon of religious enthusiasm that, in turn, was enmeshed in a heterogeneous discursive re formulation of the process of conversion at the material, individual, and communal levels. Cesare Baronio — and the Construction of History Abstract: Rediscovering Annius of Viterbo ca.
Annius of Viterbo ? In his Antiquitatum variarum fragmenta of he pretended to publish eleven rediscovered chronicles relating to the earliest European history, written by famous ancient Chaldaean, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, Roman, and Jewish authors.
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He also forged and excavated statuary and inscriptions to corroborate his texts. Although his forgeries were denounced as such immediately, they were also immensely influential for the history of historiography, cultural polemics, and fiction between and Relatively unknown between ca. Signifying the Exotic in Renaissance Art Organizer: Meghan Hughes, Tufts University Chair: Baskins, Tufts University Respondent: Paradoxical Others at Court Abstract: A sizeable number of portraits of human monsters were painted during the Renaissance in several Northern Italian courts.
While it has been assumed that societal rules suppressed the identity of monsters as sentient individuals, epistolary and guardarobe evidence suggests that, in fact, what made them exotic and collectible also guaranteed them positions as courtiers or companions. Monsters, such as a dwarves and hirsutes, entered the closed spheres of early modern Italian courts because of their exotic bodies.
These monstrous bodies became the signifiers of a flawed human space; however, unlike generic curiosities, most human monsters acquired a social mobility that transcended their bodies and allowed them to gain individuality. By looking at their portraits, the status of their juridical personhood, and their active participation in quotidian life, I argue that human monsters successfully introduced the notions of difference and otherness within a homogenous courtly vocabulary.
This paper examines the visual representation of marvelous peoples found in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscript and printed versions of The Travels of Sir John Mandeville. In my study, I will question how the images relate to these textual interpretations. This paper investigates how visual imagery of exotic peoples both reflects and actively constructs European identity formation during the Renaissance.
I argue that the illustrated pages of sciapods with their single foot used for shade in the hot sun, blemmyae with their faces on their chests, and multiple other creatures served to shore up an identity undergoing redefinition and to reassure the viewer of a self that was stable, coherent, and unified. Katz, Reed College Paper Title: This paper investigates the political ideologies embedded within the walls of the Venetian ghetto to explore how Jews in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice negotiated their position as social, cultural, and religious outsiders in a city dominated by Christians but dependent on Jewish credit and trade.
The Spanish Branch I Sponsor: Renaissance Theories of Vision I Organizer: While the Council of Florence of —39 was ultimately unsuccessful in uniting the Latin and Greek Churches, the opportunity for crosscultural exchange during the period of the ecunemical debates was a key step in the development of a Neoplatonic rhetoric and visual language in Florence.
This paper relates the rhetorical expression of the Eastern and Western factions to the visual arts around midcentury and examines the impact of the Council on the Italian humanist conception of the image. It argues that the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius provided a persuasive rhetoric that facilitated East-West communication during the theological discussions, and provided a bridge between Latin and Greek theories of the image that ultimately informed the development of a new artistic style after the conclusion of the Council.
The paper investigates how this visual rhetoric may be seen to consciously appropriate Greek thought and aesthetic theory, and how this style of painting was once used as a powerful counterpart to the Albertian theory of perspective. Intellectual Substance and Visual Perception: A Baroque Reconciliation Abstract: In recognizing this, a difficult question was raised: This study provides an important reference in my investigations of Renaissance perspective, in particular the manner in which pictorial space constitutes a communicative framework for bringing gesture into appearance.
In a culture that emphasized the virtue of decorum in human action, the representation of gesture takes on redemptive significance in pictorial space. Challenging recent scholarship, I will seek to demonstrate that the fresco holds a mystery about the nature of continuity of Eucharistic and Pythagorean-Platonic traditions. It is common practice to think of Italian fifteenth-century art in rhetorical terms.
Aligned with the humanist project, the primordial language of art criticism nests in ancient rhetorical categories. In this manner, the picture as propositional istoria may be seen to convey sense consistently and comprehensibly, above all for those familiar with Latin rhetorical forms. Considering instead the vernacular — specifically on the literary-oral languages of poetic performance alla Burchia and of pithy mendicant preaching — I should like to propose alternative rhetorical ways of framing two major trends in early fifteenth-century Florentine painting, specifically the styles associated with Lorenzo Monaco, and Masaccio and Masolino.
My goal is not to install a new rhetorical model, but rather to describe the multiple, overlapping, and competing relations between word, image, and the senses, in order to enrich accounts of how a range of Florentines may have experienced their visual culture. Today Verrocchio is best known as a sculptor, but his bustling bottega produced works in a wide variety of media, including manuscripts. The World Upside Down: Tom Morris at St Andrews.
James Patrick of Edinburgh. Witches Wand Brings Elves. Mayor and Lieutenant, Madero. Maderista forces take Atlixco, Puebla. Emisarios de la paz, Atlixco. Esecuadron de Caballeria, Maderistas Fr Madero's Guerrillas Shasta, Detroit Photographic Co.
Posted via Hong Kong. Cloud - Iowa Day - A. Kate hesitated, then shouldered the luggage and trudged toward a transformation of spirit. The grove was primeval and alive—yes, she had been here before. The valley instantly evoked an atmosphere of visceral divinity, as if she had penetrated a time warp to an earlier period on the planet preceding the genesis of man. She walked into the wide shaft of light and looked up, but was blinded as if looking straight at the sun. She rubbed her eyes and instead admired the forest around her, a place of magic: What type of palm is this?
They were tall, ancient trees, the biggest nearly a hundred feet, and some with large, bilobed nuts. A few lay scattered on the ground; Kate picked one up and it was heavy, perhaps fifty pounds. Another had a large crack in its side, from which oozed a white, gelatinous substance. Malnourished, she tasted it timidly with the tip of her tongue—it was sweet and mild—then she devoured the jelly, sucking it vigorously out of the nut until there was no more.
She dropped the nut and looked up at the palms surrounding her. There appeared to be male and female trees, both with erotic reproductive shapes. Her eyes lowered to the forest floor. The rug of dead leaves was good for her blanket and inflatable pillow. The air was so hot and steamy that she would definitely sleep nude. She stripped and stood in the warm light, feeling euphoric and liberated and intensely sexual. In her shadow she could see the outline of her breasts and nipples, the curve of her hips and buttocks, shoulders, and back.
The wind whipped loudly through the treetops. She kneaded her breasts and rubbed her clitoris and pubic area, realizing she had never before so desired the company of a man. Her heart beat furiously and she began to sweat as a tingling sensation shot through her entire body. Her panting grew heavy with soft moaning. The desire to be penetrated ensued as a visceral ache, like an unfulfilled promise, a deep wanting, a deep torment.
Heat and energy flooded the insides of her hips. She sensed an opening of her sacrum, a yearning to be complete and whole. It was an urge to create, to connect, a coil wrenching tighter and tighter inside her pelvis. The air temperature rose and a flowery, fragrant wind whipped her hair, roaring loudly through the palms like a storm.
Light vanished and she was alone in darkness. The wind was dead, like time had stopped. Cessation of movement seemed prescient of the night to come. Is this a result of my suffering and privation? It was an unprecedented lucency. God had again spoken, returning her to that black day in Torrance. She breathed deeply and slowly, feeling her heart relax, inhaling the tranquillity of night beneath this cathedral of palms—a celestial canopy.
The bliss was palpable; the valley was a seductive place. The palms were prescient, the starscape hallucinatory. It was early April. Time was telescoped in the middle of nowhere—an elusive world from a fairytale. Here, moonlit nature afforded clarity to the sounds of the earth—a solace, murmuring. Supine, she gawked at the male trees and their phallic catkins outlined by moon and stars.
The urge to mate overwhelmed her, and she resumed masturbation, envisioning a man; his lips on hers, his sweaty, hairy chest and abdomen rubbing against her sweaty breasts and belly, his penis penetrating deeply. She felt the natural inclination to move her hips, like an animal. The sensation was explosive and wavelike, commencing within as uterine contractions, coursing outward through her stomach and legs, sparking throughout her entire body.
The wind returned and intensified, rattling stiff palm fronds with an immense scratching sound. She woke from postorgasmic sleep. The midday atmosphere was windless and dank, misty and pungent with tropical forest decay and ocean air. Naked and rested, with newfound strength, Kate walked to the water and saw that the beach was virtually unphotographable. Film could never do it justice, and it did not deserve a name: She squinted at the white sand, glary in the dazzling sun, and the lagoon shimmered hotly, like a plate of glass. Judging from this beauty, furious weather was unknown.
Tree trunks were unscuffed, the beach sand pure and trackless, the lagoon a placid, greeny-blue pool of fish and coral—everything was pristine and inviting. It was the epitome of tropical paradise. But the waves had no form, breaking simultaneously over shallow coral.
Kate decided to walk further and find a wave worth surfing. She returned to the campsite for her surfboard and sandals, but nothing else—she would walk nude. Sun scorched her pale skin. Energized by its light, she walked steadily and confidently along the dirt lane she had driven on with Eric, and within an hour she approached a rift—a narrow tunnel—through the tangle of trees and vines. The ground was gouged with wheel tracks and hoofprints heading out to the lagoon. She passed a rickety wood cart attached to an dozy, sulking ox.
Flies buzzed around its eyes and ears, snot oozing from its nose. Its fur was ruffled, faded, dirty; its left horn was broken, and the rope through its nostrils seemed painful. A wiry tail swatted Kate as she walked by. Emerging from the jungle, she studied another arc of white-sand beach, hot and tranquil, its only sound that of the waves peeling around both sides of a narrow reef pass a quarter-mile from shore.
Behind the surf, two dark men sat in a large wooden canoe low in the water, apparently sinking. They carefully paddled through the pass and across the lagoon toward shore; the vessel was packed to its gunwales with large fish, perhaps tuna. These were the first humans Kate had seen since Eric. Shirtless and shaggy, wearing wet floral-print sarongs, they looked middle-aged, with knotted hair and gray beards. One man hopped from the canoe as the other tossed a small stone anchor into the knee-deep water. Both men grabbed a fish by its tail and trudged up the sloped beach toward Kate and the ox cart.
They seemed impassive to her nudity. The ox was unflinching as the men lunged heavy fish into the cart one-by-one.
His voice was extremely hoarse—talking seemed painful. The men walked slowly back down to the canoe. Kate watched the waves. An hour elapsed before the canoe was emptied and the cart was crammed with a slimy, shiny heap of dead fish. They were big and plump and all looked alike. Drooling, the ox was indifferent. It was sedate and unmoving. It winced from the rope looped through its nose. The men mounted the front of the cart, whipped the reins, had the ox reverse its direction, and limped back into the jungle toward the road.
Kate waved at him, wondering if there was a town nearby, but it was of no real concern: Its lagoon was clear and warm, lapping up onto soft, powdery white sand between spectacular granite rocks. Palms and takamaka trees bordered the beach, providing shade from the fierce afternoon heat. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away. She straddled her surfboard atop an incandescent mirror, her back and shoulders warmed by sun dropping into mountain silhouettes.
Meditating, waiting for waves, her legs dangled in an exotic aquarium: Flying fish dashed across the surface, chased by barracudas. On one wave, a large turquoise parrotfish surfed alongside her, as dolphins sometimes did in California. With every turn, the fish mimicked, drawing the same lines underwater. Like surfing with a mermaid. The palmy beach awaited. Between waves, all was Edenic. Vivid light evaporated and morphed from distinct saturation to a flood of pastels…sea and sky glowed violet and ocher as the play of light distracted her from an approaching swell.
Like the rest, this wave was perfect. Purply and tapered, it humped onto the reef and let her in. Facing the sun, it was resplendent of gold spinning around her. The mountains, the sinking sun, the beach fronted by a glassy lagoon—a dream. Nobody saw any of this. And her first surf session, after her first night on her second day, was a hallucination of ecstasy.
It was all unblurred and ethereal, her years of suffering and privation being purged by the sea. Surfing brought her closer to God. Each moment was a month regained from her wayward life, and, back in California, she believed it was here—only here—where this could occur. It was no act of schemed proselytization—He had been with her from the beginning, reluctantly at St.
And now, tonight, He was here, as was she. The ocean is endless and eternal, much like Nirvana, and only God accompanied Kate in the landscape of her unconscious mind. The sun had set…sea with sky. Twilight was mute, psychedelic. In an aqueous crimson baptism, her skin softened, her brow relaxed. All tension and mental knots fell away, pressure replaced with pleasure. Yet the onset of darkness startled her. Thoughts turned to shore. Like a mirage after dusk, the wave came and she stalled into another tube, this one narrow, a teardrop.
The ride was brief. She turned shoreward and began paddling the half-mile in. She could see the beach and coconut palms, fuzzed in darkness. That must be where Eric lives, and where the fishermen took their catch. Her paddling muscles ached. Her nipples and belly were chafed from surfboard wax. Wafts of hibiscus floated through the air. Approaching the tunnel leading back to the road, she looked back at the faint whitewater lines winding around the pass. But surely none of them could compare to this.
It was too perfect. It reminded her of the place she had read about that day in the St. The tunnel was pitch-dark, so she walked slowly, patiently, afraid of nothing, feeling the cool, soft sand underfoot. The darkness was warm, redolent with fruit and flowers—a comfort. Here too she was immune: Kate felt protected, her spirit harbored in the fragrant night. His observations paralleled hers of this island and the valley of great palms in which she slept. Indeed, God had spoken to her there last night. The garden was warm.
They were banished from His garden, the place that had encompassed everything perfect and beautiful on earth, and were never allowed to re-enter it. Yet Kate was here: He made it that way. All the implications illuminated in her consciousness in distinct order. It struck her as simultaneously odd, yet perfect, how the light of reason always shone in the blackest phases of her life, rescuing her time after time.
She considered a walk to the west, to the lights, but felt her pale nakedness confronting a foreign black village would be unsuitable. The valley was her private garden. God allowed her to exist there, exempt from adversity, with plenty to drink and eat, including the aphrodisiacal coconut jelly. Her hair was heavy and wet. The lane was silver with moonlight or was it Godlight?
A specter appeared in the middle of the lane ten yards ahead. Dismissing it as a hallucination of night and expecting it to vanish, Kate walked toward it then stood still, looking for a face in the moonlight. The wraith was recognized: He was sweaty and jittery and still smelled strongly of musk aftershave.
He had a slight weave to his gait and breathed heavily, smacking his lips, obviously drunk; Kate could see the dirty, dagger-like fingernails of his left hand coiled around a bottle of rum. His right hand raked his greasy gray hair, slicking it back, and he was in the same soiled, wrinkled white clothes he wore on the airplane. The front of his pants had an obvious bulge—an erection.
His crucifix necklace gleamed from the reflection of a light Kate could not see. Suddenly she became aware of her nakedness and felt ashamed that John could see her womanhood. His breathing deepened, and he wiped sweat from his brow with a dirty shirt sleeve. His gaze slowly scanned her up and down, returning to her breasts and pubic region. Noticing this, Kate used her surfboard to partially hide her young body from his old, eerie mind.
He gives women beauty then takes it away from them with age. You, my dear, are young and beautiful. You deserve this nectar of the gods. He laughed loudly and leaned back, guzzling messily from the bottle, spilling rum down his chin. He thrust the bottle at her face. She jerked her head back. He stood very close to her now; she could smell his awful aftershave and rancid breath. He pursed his lips, smiling vaguely, revealing black, fangish teeth. He spoke quietly in a beastly voice. It will help you. She frowned and stepped back; he matched her movement and stepped forward.
He held the bottle at her mouth. The rum smelled of death. Its clear cracked glass was smudged with greasy fingerprints, and its label was missing. Bits of cork and viscous saliva floated on top of the amber fluid, which looked undrinkable. He guzzled again and raised the bottle to her eyes, shaking the bottle, agitating the rum. He continued to walk into her, breathing hotly onto her face. She stepped back until she was trapped between John and the impenetrable foliage lining the road. He pressed his body to hers; she felt his erection on her crotch and the heat of his skin.
His shirt was soaked in sweat. His offensive breath and aftershave made her gag. Beads of sweat dropped from his face and chin onto her chest, burning her breasts. It is the finest of…the finest of sacrament drinks.
She could not speak. Her arm hurt from holding the surfboard, but it was her only defense. Then John paused serenely, with a sudden aura of death in his complexion. He looked as if he were to die right then and there. Then he shook the bottle violently at her, his bloodshot eyes widening.
Her eyes distracted by the bottle, John discreetly touched her left breast. She immediately swatted his hand away, his sharp nails scratching the tops of her fingers. Instinctively she kneed his erection. John was crippled; he lurched over and grasped his groin, groaning with pain. He hissed and lunged wildly at her with his left hand, slashing at her buttocks as she turned to run away.
His nails scratched her soft skin, and she screamed louder than she ever had. She gripped the surfboard and sprinted from John as fast as she could. He was grounded in immense pain, panting and cringing, and could not stand up to chase her. Kate ran all the way back to her campsite in the valley.
When she stopped, she gasped uncontrollably, shocked at how far she had run, and how fast, and how she had not fainted. She had never run like that before, not even at St. She always thought she was a poor runner, but this was not of herself. It was as if a supreme athlete had been placed inside of her, and that she could run for miles and miles without falter.
She could run anywhere, quickly and steadily, and this was a euphoric sense of new strength and endurance, things she never had. Registering fresh safety and relief, Kate stood motionless by her bags. The valley soothed her. Her heart slowed and beat normally, and a wave of comfort flushed through her body. All was mute besides the sporadic whistle of a black parrot. Moonlight bathed the massive palms, fronds splitting the soft light, spilling it across the forest floor. She walked to a nearby freshwater stream she found the previous day. She put her lips to the stream and gulped vigorously—her first drink of the day.
The coconuts had milk. She found a green one, cracked it with a rock, and let the clear, sweet liquid drain into her mouth, dripping it down her face and body to her toes and the fertile soil. This is the nectar of the gods. She strolled back to her bags and laid down. The leaves and sleeping pad felt feathery.
She closed her eyes and listened to the woods. The presence of the place enveloped her. Kate was in Torrance again, living with her mother. Days were sunny and warm, nights of stars and pleasant dreams. Her mother was rarely home, occupied with work and a tall, skinny boyfriend from Hermosa Beach. Kate rejected the non-attention as being perfidy—she was an adult, on her own. Not that it was ever any different. There they consoled one another, talked and downed shots of bourbon, fumbling quarters into the jukebox, throwing darts and shooting billiards until 2 a.
Mother, if she came home at all, would stumble incoherently through the door at 3 a. Kate had removed herself from this. Natural light fueled her like caffeine—an emission of constant solar energy. Each dawn was a blank slate, a daily twenty-four-hour chapter of growth and upliftment. Her previous life had never known such truth and love. She welcomed everything and everybody. It all made sense to her. Gone were the pale-skin days of pants and long-sleeved shirts on the sands of L. Her beachwear was bikini.
She was a bronzed, blonde goddess to the young men who pursued her. Her love life had at last blossomed, particularly with a thirty-year-old painter named Paul who lived alone in San Pedro. He understood Kate and had heard her rite of passage, vicariously reliving it with her, from here to there and back again. They surfed together, explored together, slept together, laughed together, ate together.
They drank postprandial wine and massaged by candlelight with oil and incense. They drove to Oregon and hiked its majestic coast, an adventure Kate had yearned for but prevented from by inner weakness. They immersed themselves in a cosmic, cloudless week there. Paul swore the experience changed his life—it never could have happened without Kate, he said. But Kate mentally did not need Paul for internal content. She required no one. Her redemption was her two healthy feet on solid ground today.
Paul was but her first sweetheart and companion; rarely was she onanistic. All else was within her, twenty-four years after birth. Trust, hope, and the embracing of love were so obvious now. One bright, surfless morning, Kate took a stroll into town, passing familiar storefronts with faces both fresh and faded.
She wore her favorite leather sandals, tight white shorts, and a logoless white tank top with no bra beneath. She stepped from front door and looked up: Soundness of mind paced her routine, adrift in the space between self-understanding and inner peace. Torrance became a place of refuge and tradition, something it never was, eliciting reflections for her from which to flourish.
She walked down the same sidewalk she loathed each day of her scholastic youth and its idioms of hopelessness, confined to her remote mother and the nuns of St. Homes along the sidewalk were decorated with barbecues and plastic swimming pools and lawn chairs—accessories of summer. Scents of charcoal and sunscreen and visions of happy families pleased Kate, and, one day, she thought, she too would live in a home like these, with a loving man and perhaps a child.
She plucked an orange poppy flower from the dirt and slipped it behind her left ear, like tropical maidens did.
The avenue was clogged with traffic. Men hooted and catcalled at Kate. Waves of heat quivered above the asphalt and the engine hoods of cars, a stench of exhaust flooding the westerly breeze. Her brow and sides of her face were laced with sweat; the air temperature hovered in the low nineties. It was lunchtime; the peak of summer. Each smell was similar but different: Yet a certain vibe resurfaced as she passed the Italian deli, its outdoor patio full of eaters.
It was the bridge over Clark Street. Here she was, and here she had been so many times, so many years ago. She stopped at its mid-point and squinted down at the six standstill lanes of every vehicle imaginable, shimmering in the midday glare. It looked like a parking lot. Drivers cursed and honked horns. A terrible, stressful scene, loaded with anguish and bad timing for everyone.
But up there, on the bridge, stood a young woman with a flower in her hair, dressed in white, smiling at all of this. She turned and walked away, down the sidewalk, across the bridge, to a place in her mind she never knew existed, but was well aware of today. Yonder was a rare surf spot. With a beer I sat on a low stone wall facing moored boats just north of the reef. A genteel Creole man appeared from a nearby shack.
He was smiling, mustachioed, sixtysomething, wearing a heavy brown coat. Sans one leg, he limped with a cane. He asked if I liked deep-sea fishing and pointed at his speedboat, bobbing in the chop, the sole vessel with two outboards. He said mid-year trades were too strong but in season he roamed forty to sixty miles out. He lived to hook billfish. He ran charters through a luxury resort. For eight hundred euros, he took four to six anglers out for the day. But business was sinking. He blamed Arabs and mentioned the Plantation Club, sold to the Seychelles government which sold it to sheikhs who now used it for their personal playground.
We used to take our clients to that beach to barbecue the fresh catch but now, since it is Arabs, they try to prevent anybody from going on the beach. At Maia right now? The Arabs want to buy everything here. And they bring all their own staff on their private jets. Only the hotels get the money. The Emirates airline is trying to build a hotel too. But the young Seychellois, they will stop this in the future—foreigners coming in and buying everything.
Please tell people in America about this. On Instagram the Indian Ocean is smoothly blue and sun-kissed. This morning it was again a thrashed gray. I began walking to the car rental office in time for another dense, soaking squall. Now we have water. Usually this happens with the full moon. Lasts for three days. If we had no wind, it would last longer, but we have wind, so it will not rain for long. Tourists to the honeymoon hotspot of the Seychelles are being warned to take extra care following a rise in the number of robberies and attacks.
The Foreign Office said there had been a spate of incidents on and around the Cote D'Or beach on the island of Praslin. Incidents have taken place both after dark and during daylight hours. The man followed and knocked on the passenger window. He introduced himself as Christopher. It is very hard for me to make money.
I sell a little bit of compost, but we are struggling. That is why I wanted to talk to you. I saw that you were alone and might want somebody to talk to. Maybe we could help each other. Tomorrow will have more sun, believe me. Always around full moon there is rain. Maybe so I can buy something to eat?
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- ?
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- Cloned Lives.
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- Jem (and Sam): A Revengers Tale.
I can talk about these things. I can just ask you instead of being a thief. Rain blurred sky, flooded roads. The surf still sucked. Off seaweedy beaches the water was brown, far from Instagram opulence. Drove to Anse Lazio, cool and dark but where tourists still swam. I had surfed there in Island storms seemed to mute and privatize humankind—locals stayed at home, tourists hid in hotels. From my bungalow for hours I watched the winds whip and clouds drain. On Praslin, the rough weather stayed stuck on repeat. No sun, no surf, no Instagram, no rare reefbreak. Palm fronds danced in the wind. I was quite alone, as sooner or later we are all meant to be.
Leaning against the yellow-cedar beam bar he made, sipping a pint of ale he made, Jonathan Hawkins laughed at the memory, a quip from the Great American Beer Festival, one month after Hawkins first brought his Portland Kettle Works 5bbl Hopmaster online. A lifelong beer lover, Hawkins, 43, spent much of his time between Gold Beach, Ore. In April he moved to the quaint seaside village of Bandon pop. In he and his wife bought the historic 9,square-foot McNair Building as a new home for Bandon Vision Center Nicole has been a local optometrist for 13 years and briefly shared walls with the pizzeria Hawkins bought.
Valuable Rare Postcards
I was going to do wood-fired pizzas, and I was going to make beer. She was gracious enough to agree with that, and away we went. So many people have been encouraging and supportive, showing me their operations, offering advice and suggestions. Residents and visitors have really embraced us. We wrote out the terms and everything right there in Redfish. You had the diabolically opposed on each side, and taverns kind of opened that space up. I call brewpubs the new churches, places where people from all walks of life can get together and discuss ideas, art, jokes—whatever. Ultimately Hawkins aims to offer nine taps of in-house beer, plus five guest taps.
From the copper-covered Wood Stone oven, my pizza emerged. Out on the street, a horseman rode past. P-Pass has been unridden since last season and is ready to turn on. The crew of Pohnpei Surf Club eagerly anticipate the first surfers of the new season to arrive to share their tropical surfing paradise. Pohnpei offers a great balance and variety of waves for intermediate and advanced surfers, not just pit hungry pros. Pohnpei Surf Club have capped the surfer numbers to 20 for your enjoyment! But they serve a purpose. He has never been to Pohnpei.