In Your Face: Professional Improprieties and the Art of Being Conspicuous in Sixteenth-Century Italy

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
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 11/24/2009
Pages: 272
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.80d
ISBN: 9780804762168

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

About the Author
Douglas Biow is Professor of Italian & Comparative Literature, Director of the Center for European Studies, and Superior Oil Company Linward Shivers Centennial Professor in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy (2006).