So much is the Italian word piazza a commonplace of how we understand public space that we use the word in English - especially when describing a form of urban space that is rich in public amenities and used for leisure activities. Fabrizio offers a wide-ranging discussion based on his recent boo...

The Florentine Renaissance conjures images of beautiful frescoes and altarpieces, of snow-white marble statues in sinewy poses and the soaring dome of Santa Maria del Fiore—the handiwork of the city’s brilliant artists and architects. But equally if not more important for the centuries to follow ...

"It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow…" writes Italian Jewish author Primo Levi in his well-known memoir of survival, If This is a Man (Se questo è un uo...

What do you think of when you hear the name Leonardo da Vinci – artist, inventor, Renaissance Man? But what about Leonardo as an anatomist, physiologist, cardiovascular researcher, or biomedical engineer?
Beginning around 1510, Leonardo had the opportunity to observe dissections by the great cont...

Renaissance artists’ fascination with the real world led them to explore and depict surprisingly engaging representations of ugly subjects, not just beautiful and idealizing ones. While many people maligned the unfortunate or ugly as evil, artists often found unrecognized beauty and meaning in im...

The case for David’s homoeroticism depends on two suppositions: First, the figure’s alleged prurient physical deportment; for to look at the bronze, as it stands in the Bargello makes it seem camp, gay, sweet, effeminate or any other gender cliché. Secondly, its iconography must be secular, not r...

In 1649, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi told her Sicilian patron Don Antonio Ruffo: “I will show your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do.” Renaissance women’s work as artists and patrons has been overshadowed by more famous men such as Michelangelo and the Medici. In this talk we’ll exam...

Discover the “sprezzatura,” courage, and genius of the fierce and fearless women in Italian literature and history as we look at the real lives and imagined heroines from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. From the eloquence and wit of Boccaccio’s Princess Ghismonda in the Decameron to the innov...

In this exclusive webinar, Dr. Fabrizio Nevola presents a number of illustrated vignettes of street life in the Renaissance city that inform his award-winning Hidden Florence app's many stories - from pub brawls to football games, charitable gift-giving to elite patronage. In so doing he shows ho...

Five days before Italy’s official Dante Day on March 25, 2021, you can get a head start on the 700th anniversary celebrations by “meeting” the Supreme Poet himself, in a LIVE STREAM conversation DIRECT FROM FLORENCE, ITALY, hosted by Professor Eric Nicholson of Syracuse University Florence and NY...

Mention of Renaissance Florence tends to make us think of beautiful frescoes and altarpieces, of snow-white marble statues and Brunelleschi’s dome rising above the city’s cathedral. But Renaissance Florence had other heroes, too: manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, and bo...

For over 700 years, Dante's poetic and moral imagination has inspired generations of readers, artists, writers, and more. This webinar will introduce participants to Dante’s life and will help you to discover what about the Divine Comedy, in particular, makes it a perennially relevant masterpiece...

At age 71, Michelangelo Buonarroti, carver of the Pietà, David, Moses, and painter of the Sistine Chapel -- was suddenly busier than ever. In 1546, Pope Paul III handed Michelangelo control of the beleaguered St. Peter’s project -- a study in architectural mismanagement, plagued by flawed design ...

The late great Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez explained how we can live our lives to tell our tales, but the first great Italian prose author, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375), still shows us how telling tales can keep us alive. How? Thanks to his collection of 100 (actually 10...

The image of The Last Supper is as readily familiar, Kenneth Clark once wrote, as the boot shape of Italy on a map. However, the history of how this famous mural came to be painted, how precisely Leonardo painted it, and who he painted it for, are much less well-known. Ross King will describe how...

Italians have always loved to eat—and show off what they’re eating—so join us in exploring how Renaissance Italians took dining to new heights. Even without tomatoes and cannellini beans (which were just being discovered in the Americas), Renaissance Italians set healthy tables that dazzled the e...

The Renaissance created innovations in finance, commerce, and the power of a personal brand. Ideas of Credit, Faith, and Fortune all took on double-edged meanings that are with us today - and explain why the face of an unknown man by Botticelli sold for $90 million this year.
Quentin Hardy is the...

The extraordinary art collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577-1633), housed in the famous Villa Borghese in Rome, was assembled and commissioned according to the concept of paragone. Based on the famous simile by poet Horace ut pictura poesis (painting is like poetry) in antiquity and theo...

Synonymous with scandal and intrigue, the figure of Giacomo Casanova has enthralled, mystified, and positively tickled the imagination of curious lovers of Venice for centuries. In this seminar, participants will delve deeper into the complex and often contradictory elements of Casanova’s fascina...

When the Romans invaded Britain in 55 and again in 54 BC, Caesar and his men found a land of unfriendly Britons and unwelcoming weather. His incursions led to war, exchange, and trade. By 43 AD Claudius received the surrender of British tribes, and large areas of the country would become part of ...

Just as there can be a thin line between love and hate, so too can several of Shakespeare’s best-known plays dance on the border between comedy and tragedy, thanks to the lively contrasts and dynamic energies of their Italian style. The avant-garde Italian drama of Shakespeare’s time also enabled...

Michelangelo (1475-1564) has an unusual training for an artist of his time insofar as his first training was with a humanist scholar (his father had grand plans for him), followed by apprenticeship in a painting workshop, followed by participation in the Medici sculpture garden where he met sculp...

The Renaissance in Florence was the product of a perfect storm of wealthy bankers, talented artists, ingenious financial instruments, and a new attitude toward money. This new attitude took its cues not from age-old religious injunctions against usury but instead from the even more ancient ideas ...

It is well known that classicizing inscriptions were widely used in Renaissance Italy to mark elite domestic buildings with the authority and identity of their patron-owners. Previous studies have tended to discuss these textual interventions on the designed surfaces of the palazzo as personal st...