Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance(23 DQR Studies in Literature)

One of the most noticeable features of the Renaissance is what Jacob Burckhardt called the rise of the individual - in politics and religion, in its social life and in the arts, and in the mentality of Renaissance man, with his inclination to explore, to invent and to make new discoveries. Yet this characteristic is also very puzzling to modern people, who see that although the categories of art which depict particular people increased to a spectacular degree in a period when biography and portrait painting were among the most popular genres, and autobiography began to emerge as a genre in itself and painters began to produce self-portraits, an interest individuals is not necessarily the same thing as the more recent interest in the purely personal aspects of individuals. Literary and artistic traditions, social and ideological backgrounds, and the motives for the production of literature have changed profoundly: Renaissance biography and autobiography, portraiture and self-portraiture have little to do with their modern counterparts. Therefore this book stresses that the Renaissance is not predominantly a mirror of modernity, but rather a period of stimulating difference or alterity. The contributors to this collection of essays aim to create a better understanding of Renaissance biographies and portraits through the analysis and reconstruction of the traditions, contexts, backgrounds and circumstances of their production.

Table of Contents:
Karl ENENKEL and Peter LIEBREGTS: Introduction. Karl ENENKEL: Modelling the Humanist: Petrarch's Letter to Posterity and Boccaccio's Biography of the Poet Laureate. Anton W.A. BOSCHLOO: Perceptions of the Status of Painting: The Self-Portrait in the Art of the Italian Renaissance. Jan L. de JONG: Portraits of Condottieri. Wolfgang NEUBER: The Red Indian's Body: The Physiognomy of the Indigenous American between Exoticism and Learned Culture in the Early Modern Period. Sonia V. ROSE: The Great Moctezuma: A Literary Portrait in Sixteenth-Century Spanish American Historiography. Anne C.E. van GALEN: Body and Self-Image in the Autobiography of Gerolamo Cardano. Paul J. SMITH: Rabelais' Pantagruel and Gargantua as Mock-Biographies. Eric Jan SLUIJTER: The Painter's Pride: The Art of Capturing Transience in Self-Portraits from Isaac van Swanenburgh to David Bailly. Frans R.E. BLOM: What Has Been My Weight on Earth: The Autobiography of Constantijn Huygens. Anton J.E. HARMSEN: Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Biographies of Dutch Poets. Karl ENENKEL: A Critical Edition of Petrarch's Epistola Posteritati with an English Translation. Notes on Contributors. Index of Names. Index of Subjects. Index of Petrarch's Epistola Posteritati.