From Heaven To Arcadia
Back of the Book
From the revelations of classical statuary pulled from the Roman soil as the popes began rebuilding the city in the fifteenth century, to the myth of serenity that Venice constructed to conceal its physical and political fragility, to bloody yet cultured Florence under the Medici, Ingrid D. Rowland traces the worldly, unworldly, and otherworldly strivings of artists, writers, popes, and politicians during that great “outburst of mental energy” we know as the Renaissance.Here are Botticelli, whose illustrations for the Divine Comedy reveal him to be one of Dante’s most careful readers; the multifaceted genius of Leonardo; the astonishing mastery of Titian and the erratic brilliance of artists like Correggio, Caravaggio, and Artemisia Gentileschi; the enigmatic erotic novel Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the decoding of which was the subject of the recent novel The Rule of Four; the Western fascination with the mysteries of Egypt; and the glittering spiritual ferment of late Byzantium, which as it collapsed passed on so many ideas to Renaissance Italy. But beyond its artistic accomplishments, Rowland writes, “Renaissance life at its most distinctive was the intangible, unworldly life of the mind.” In her pages astronomers and astrologists, poets and philosophers, pornographers and prostitutes jostle for attention with painters and sculptors. Among them the inquisitive Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher stands out as a polymath who ranged over nearly every field of knowledge. Even though his commingling of scientific observation and hermetic symbolism is now obsolete, he remains for Rowland “a builder of connections who insisted on seeing harmony in the midst of disorder”–and thus one of the most exemplary Renaissance figures of all.
We Love It Because
Ingrid Rowland traces the literary and artistic transformations within a period that is so often referred to in contemporary literature, that From Heaven to Arcadia allows readers to re-conceive their favorite works of literature and tackle them with a deeply thoughtful and informed background. Rowland is able to envelop readers into the workings of the Renaissance, so much so that the reader can keep pace with the very tides of time that being sweeping and revolutionary change.
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