Pietro Aretino

Luba Freedman

After classical antiquity, the Italian Renaissance raised the portrait, whether literary or pictorial, to the status of an important art form. Among sixteenth-century Renaissance painters, Titian made his reputation, and much of his living, by portraiture. Titian's portraits were promoted by his friend, Pietro Aretino, an eminent poet and critic, who addressed his letters and sonnets to the same personages whom Titian portrayed. In many of these letters (which often included sonnets), Aretino described both an individual patron and Titian's portrait of that patron, thus stimulating the reciprocal relation between a verbal and pictorial portrait. By investigating this unprecedented historical phenomenon, Luba Freedman elucidates the meaning conveyed by the portrait as an artistic form in Renaissance Italy. Fusing iconographical analysis of the most famous Titian portraits with rhetorical analysis of Aretino's literary legacy as compared to contemporary reactions, Freedman demonstrates that it is due to Titian's many portraits and to Aretino's repeated simultaneous writings about them that the portrait ceased being primarily a social-historical document, preserving the sitter's likeness for posterity. It gradually became, as it is today, a work of art, the artist's invention, which gives its viewer an aesthetic pleasure.

Titian's Portraits Through Aretino's Lens

This book deals specifically with sixteenth-century depictions of the Olympian deities, the twelve supreme deities of ancient Greece and Rome. As the Renaissance revived several aspects of antiquity, some great works of art represented the Olympians in imitation of the classical style. These deities were rendered as autonomous figures, in the form of representation adapted for depicting saints and Christian rulers. This form of depicting the Olympians, or the pagan gods, was not unanimously accepted by sixteenth-century viewers. The book highlights the problematic framework surrounding the creation, display and acceptance of such thought-provoking works of art.

The Revival of the Olympian Gods in Renaissance Art

Titian's Independent Self-portraits

"The book is about a new development in Italian Renaissance art; its aim is to show how artists and humanists came together to effect this revolution, it is important because this is a long-ignored but crucial aspect of the Italian Renaissance, showing us why the masterpieces we take for granted are the way they are, and thre is no competitor in the field. The book sheds light on some of the world's greatest masterpirces of art, including Botticelli's Venus, Leonardo's Leda, Raphael's Galatea, and Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne"--

Classical Myths in Italian Renaissance Painting

Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich

Die Beitrage, die im vorliegenden Band unter dem Titel Wege zum Mythos vereinigt sind, untersuchen aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln die Zugange, durch die sich seit Beginn der Neuzeit Literatur und Kunst Europas der antiken Mythologie genahert haben. Dieser Aneignungsprozess hat uber Jahrhunderte hinweg sowohl in visuellen wie auch in textuellen Medien seine Spuren hinterlassen. Die vorliegende Publikation tragt, wie auch schon die vorausgehenden Bande der Reihe, diesem Doppelaspekt dadurch Rechnung, dass sie kunst- und textwissenschaftliche Forschungsansatze gleichermassen zu Wort kommen lasst. Die Schriftenreihe der Beihefte versteht sich als Forum fur den interdisziplinaren Dialog zwischen Text- und Kunstwissenschaft zu Fragen des griechisch-romischen Mythos und seiner Rezeption. Wahrend die bislang publizierten Bande entweder Kongressakten oder Beitrage zu Vortragsreihen enthielten, sind fur die Zukunft auch andere Konstellationen denkbar: So muss die Thematik nicht unbedingt vom Programm eines Symposiums oder eines Arbeitsgespraches bestimmt sein. Zur Einsendung von Manuskripten und gegebenenfalls von Anregungen zur Konzeption der Reihe wird hiermit ausdrucklich eingeladen.

Luba Freedman

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