The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory

Why did Renaissance art come to matter so much, so widely, and for so long? Patricia Emison's answer depends on a recalibrated view of the long Renaissance – from 1300 to 1600 – synthesizing the considerable evolution in our understanding of the epoch since the foundational 19th-century studies of Burckhardt and Wölfflin. Demonstrating that the imitation of nature and of antiquity must no longer define its limits, she exposes Renaissance style's self-consciously modern aspect. She sets the ...