Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance

From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance

Rowland, Ingrid D.

Paperback

Series: New York Review Books (Paperback)

Art Criticism & TheoryArt HistoryEuropean Art

Publisher Price: $17.95

ISBN10: 1590172957
ISBN13: 9781590172957
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Oct 1 2008
Pages: 294
Weight: 0.90
Height: 0.80 Width: 5.40 Depth: 8.10
Language: English
From the revelations of classical statuary pulled from the Roman soil as the popes began rebuilding the city in the fifteenth century, to the myth of serenity that Venice constructed to conceal its physical and political fragility, to bloody yet cultured Florence under the Medici, Ingrid D. Rowland traces the worldly, unworldly, and otherworldly strivings of artists, writers, popes, and politicians during that great outburst of mental energy we know as the Renaissance.Here are Botticelli, whose illustrations for the Divine Comedy reveal him to be one of Dante's most careful readers; the multifaceted genius of Leonardo; the astonishing mastery of Titian and the erratic brilliance of artists like Correggio, Caravaggio, and Artemisia Gentileschi; the enigmatic erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the decoding of which was the subject of the recent novel The Rule of Four; the Western fascination with the mysteries of Egypt; and the glittering spiritual ferment of late Byzantium, which as it collapsed passed on so many ideas to Renaissance Italy.But beyond its artistic accomplishments, Rowland writes, Renaissance life at its most distinctive was the intangible, unworldly life of the mind. In her pages astronomers and astrologists, poets and philosophers, pornographers and prostitutes jostle for attention with painters and sculptors. Among them the inquisitive Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher stands out as a polymath who ranged over nearly every field of knowledge. Even though his commingling of scientific observation and hermetic symbolism is now obsolete, he remains for Rowland a builder of connections who insisted on seeing harmony in the midst of disorder-and thus one of the most exemplary Renaissance figures of all.

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