| Summary: | The book examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European event: a commentary on reshaping of the Renaissance in the nineteenth-century perceived as deeply problematic. On the field of an ample range of disciplines—history, literature, music, art, architecture, urban planning-, the Italian Renaissance revival marked the work of a group of figures as diverse as E. M. Forster, Heinrich Geymüller and Adolf von Hildebrand, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, H. H. Richardson and R. M. Rilke, Giosuè Carducci and Francesco De Sanctis. An important theme addressed in the book is that of post-unification Italy’s architecture and attitudes towards the need to materialize in urban spaces the new reality of a united country and culture. The contradiction in attitudes towards the Italian Renaissance emerges also from the studies presented in the volume’s Part IV, ‘Building the Backdrop: The Nineteenth Century City’. Though some perceived the Italian Renaissance as a Golden Age, a model for the present, others consider it as a negative example, comparing the resurgence of the arts with the decadence of society and the loss of a political conscience. The positive model had its detractors, and the reaction to the Renaissance was more complex than it may at first have appeared. Through a series of essays by international scholars, volume editors Lina Bolzoni and Alina Payne ‘recover the multidimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of, and commentary on the connections between the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century modernity’.
|
|---|
