Reflections on Renaissance Venice

Lavishly illustrated throughout, this collection of essays honours the scholarship and publications of Patricia Fortini Brown, one of the pre-eminent scholars of Venetian art and history and professor emerita in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. The essays address topics that range from painted Venetian narrative cycles of the late fifteenth century to the rebuilding of the Campanile in the early twentieth century. Each contribution adopts Fortini Brown's academic approach to the art of Renaissance Venice, examining objects, images and texts to reveal how meaning in Venetian art can be as fluid as the city's natural environment. The transformative qualities of Venetian art and architecture are cast in various lights, creating the opportunity for new reflections on artists as diverse as Mantegna, the Bellini family, Giorgione, Pietro Lombardo, Veronese, Palladio and Piranesi. Fortini Brown's interest in material culture is reflected in essays that address the use of religious objects in the domestic realm, where to shop for antiquities and the market in gems in Cinquecento Venice. Copious colour illustrations bring the essays to life. Inspired by Patricia Fortini Brown's scholarship and teaching, the volume is derived from papers given in Fortini's honour in 2010 at the Renaissance Society of America in Venice and at the Giorgione Symposium held at Princeton University on the occasion of Fortini Brown's retirement from Princeton, where she spent her career. Fortini Brown was dissertation advisor to both editors of the volume.