Why do the paintings and poetry of the Italian Renaissance―a celebration of classical antiquity―also depict the Florentine countryside populated with figures dressed in contemporary silk robes and fleur-de-lys crowns? Upending conventional interpretations of this well-studied period, Charles Dempsey argues that a fusion of classical form with contemporary content, once seen as the paradox of the Renaissance, can be better understood as its defining characteristic.Dempsey describes how Renaissance artists deftly incorporated secular and popular culture into their creations, just as they interwove classical and religious influences. Inspired by the love lyrics of Parisian troubadours, Simone Martini altered his fresco Maestà in 1321 to reflect a court culture that prized terrestrial beauty. As a result the Maestà scandalously revealed, for the first time in Italian painting, a glimpse of the Madonna’s golden locks. Modeled on an ancient statue, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus went much further, featuring fashionable beauty ideals of long flowing blonde hair, ivory skin, rosy cheeks, and perfectly arched eyebrows. In the only complete reconstruction of Feo Belcari’s twelve Sybilline Octaves, Dempsey shows how this poet, patronized by the Medici family, was also indebted to contemporary dramatic modes. Popularizing biblical scenes by mixing the familiar with the exotic, players took the stage outfitted in taffeta tunics and fanciful hats, and one staging even featured a papier maché replica of Jonah’s Whale. As Dempsey’s thorough study illuminates, Renaissance poets and artists did not simply reproduce classical aesthetics but reimagined them in vernacular idioms.

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture (The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance Delivered at Villa I Tatti)

Arts & Photography

Dempsey, Charles

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style

J.J. AUGUSTIN

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent

Widely acknowledged as a prime manifestation of Florentine humanist culture under Lorenzo de'Medici, Botticelli's Primavera cannot be fully interpreted without considering the poetics that expressed the Laurentian cultural program and, in turn, the Renaissance itself. In this analysis Charles Dempsey examines the poetry written by Lorenzo and his literary clients in order to give definition to the cultural context in which the Primavera was created. A celebration of Love, the painting is shown to incorporate both public and private imaginative realms while embracing the ideal and the actual experiences of the present.
 The Primavera, depicting Venus as the spirit of Love and springtime, is simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, rooted in International-Style vernacular conventions and evincing a nascent classical vocabulary. After describing the profoundly humanist classical foundation of the invention of the Primavera, Dempsey identifies its genre with rustic song, then relates the painting to the conventions of vernacular love poetry. A close reading of the painting in relation to works by Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, and other poets working to elevate vernacular expression by infusing native Tuscan with Latin forms suggests how the idea of Love portrayed by Botticelli in the form of Venus incorporates not only the ancient springtime renovatio mundi but also the actual cultural renovation--the Renaissance--imagined and sponsored by Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Princeton University Press

Widely acknowledged as a prime manifestation of Florentine humanist culture under Lorenzo de'Medici, Botticelli's Primavera cannot be fully interpreted without considering the poetics that expressed the Laurentian cultural program and, in turn, the Renaissance itself. In this analysis Charles Dempsey examines the poetry written by Lorenzo and his literary clients in order to give definition to the cultural context in which the Primavera was created. A celebration of Love, the painting is shown to incorporate both public and private imaginative realms while embracing the ideal and the actual experiences of the present.
 The Primavera, depicting Venus as the spirit of Love and springtime, is simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, rooted in International-Style vernacular conventions and evincing a nascent classical vocabulary. After describing the profoundly humanist classical foundation of the invention of the Primavera, Dempsey identifies its genre with rustic song, then relates the painting to the conventions of vernacular love poetry. A close reading of the painting in relation to works by Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, and other poets working to elevate vernacular expression by infusing native Tuscan with Latin forms suggests how the idea of Love portrayed by Botticelli in the form of Venus incorporates not only the ancient springtime renovatio mundi but also the actual cultural renovation--the Renaissance--imagined and sponsored by Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Nicolas Poussin

By investigating the important cultural figures who were close to the painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), Elizabeth Cropper and Charles Dempsey allow the reader to enter not only the Rome where he lived but also the Rome of antiquity, which he admired and tried to reconstruct. The authors argue that Poussin's works were structured by his friendships, as well as by his study of ancient history and early Christian archaeology, his exploration of the poetry and mystery of ancient places, and his conception of his paintings as gifts rather than commercial objects. By looking into this rich background, they also show how Poussin introduced into his theory and practice of painting a new concept of the inherent expressiveness of form that was quite different from the then prevailing conventions for depicting the passions and affections.
 The first two chapters treat Vincenzo Giustiniani, the most sophisticated patron and art collector of his day, whose purpose and rationale for collecting ancient sculpture deeply influenced Poussin and the Flemish sculptor Francois Duquesnoy. Among other topics, the succeeding sections take up Poussin's deep readings of Montaigne and his friendships with the poet Giovanni Battista Marino, with artists such as Pietro Testa and Matteo Zaccolini, and with patrons and true friends, among them Cassiano dal Pozzo and Paul Fréart de Chantelou, for whom Poussin painted a special self-portrait, which the artist said stood for "The Love of Painting and Friendship."

Cropper, Elizabeth

Drawing Relationships in Northern Italian Renaissance Art

Vasari's celebration of the art of the central Italian cities of Florence, Rome and Venice, has long left in shadow the art of northern Italy. The economic and historical decline of the region compounded this effect with the dispersal of the treasures of the Farnese to Naples, the Este to Dresden and the Gonzaga to Madrid and Paris. Each chapter in this volume celebrates a stunning work from the region, among them Correggio's famed Camera di San Paolo in Parma, Parmigianino's Camerino in the Rocca Sanvitale near Parma, the studiolo of Alberto Pio at Carpi, and the Tomb of the Ancestors in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. The volume as a whole offers fascinating insights into the tussle between the maniera moderna and the maniera devota in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the unity between the elegance and beauty of art and its religious significance came under debate. Around the year 1550, when Michelangelo's Last Judgement came under attack for impiety and lasciviousness and the reformists called for an art that would invoke in the viewer a devotional response that identified manifestations of the divine with human feelings and emotions. In northern Italy, it was on the foundation laid by Correggio, with his tenderness and ability to evoke the softness of living flesh, that the Carracci brothers built their reform of painting.

Drawing Relationships in Northern Italian Renaissance Art: Patronage and Theories of Invention

Routledge

The magnificent frescoes in chapels and town halls across Italy together represent one of the greatest achievements of Renaissance art. Commissioned both by private patrons and by the Church, artists responded with images of matchless beauty. Leading scholars treat the works selected for this series in their artistic and historical contexts; each cycle is illustrated with a complete set of the highest quality color reproductions.

Annibale Carracci: The Farnese Palace, Rome (Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)

George Braziller

The figure of the putto (often portrayed as a mischievous baby) made frequent appearances in the art and literature of Renaissance Italy. Commonly called spiritelli, or sprites, putti embodied a minor species of demon, in their nature neither good nor bad. They included natural spirits, animal spirits, and the spirits of sight and sound, as well as hobgoblin fantasies, bogeys, and the spirits contained in wine. Among the sensations ascribed to spiritelli were feelings of love, erotic arousal, and startling frights. After discussing the many manifestations of the putto-spiritello in fifteenth-century Italian art and literature, Charles Dempsey offers parallel interpretations of two works: Botticelli's Mars and Venus, a painting in which infant Satyr-putti appear as the panic-inducing spirits of the nightmare, and Politian's Stanze, a poem in which masked cupids appear to the hero in a deceiving dream. He concludes with an examination of the function of such masks in the poetry and public masquerades sponsored by Lorenzo de'Medici and in Michelangelo's scheme for the decoration of the Medici Chapel.Throughout, Dempsey advances a larger argument about the nature of Italian Renaissance art. Rather than simply reviving classical forms, he says, the art accommodated and fused them within local, vernacular, and modern Italian traditions, both literary and pictorial.

Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

Univ of North Carolina Pr

This catalogue, which accompanies a collaborative exhibition between the Dresden State Museums and the J. Paul Getty Museum that brings together Bolognese Baroque paintings from both Dresden and Southern California public and private collections, provides an engaging survey of one of the most important and influential schools of Italian painting from 1575 to 1725. The exhibition will be on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from December 16, 2008, through May 3, 2009. The book's essays strive to make these paintings--the majority of them deeply religious and as a whole extremely innovative in their time--understandable to and appreciated by a modern audience. Charles Dempsey's introduction gives an overview of the history of Bolognese painting, while Andreas Henning and Scott Schaefer lay out the history of the collecting of Bolognese paintings in Dresden and Southern California. Additional essays on Carracci, portraiture, cabinet pictures, naturalism, classicism, and the concluding eighteenth-century developments under Giuseppe Maria Crespi further illuminate these incredible works.

Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna 1575-1725 (Getty Distribution)

Schaefer, Scott

Feigenbaum, Gail

Henning, Andreas

Hipp, Elisabeth

Kerber, Peter

Pierguidi, Stefano

Senkevitch, Tatiana

Oxford University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dempsey, Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dempsey, Charles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dempsey, Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Early Renaissance and Vernacular Culture (The Bernard Berenson Lectures on the Italian Renaissance Delivered at Villa I Tatti)

Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of Baroque Style

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent

The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent

Nicolas Poussin

Nicolas Poussin

Drawing Relationships in Northern Italian Renaissance Art: Patronage and Theories of Invention

Annibale Carracci: The Farnese Palace, Rome (Great Fresco Cycles of the Renaissance)

Inventing the Renaissance Putto (Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History)

Captured Emotions: Baroque Painting in Bologna 1575-1725 (Getty Distribution)