Dennis Romano

Commentary: Why Opera? The Politics of an Emerging Genre

The reason why opera became the preeminent musical form of the seventeenth century not only in Venice but also throughout Europe lies in the profound changes among European elites at the time, particularly regarding notions of nobility and individual roles within family strategies. The lyricism of operatic music became the ideal vehicle to express the eras social transformations.

A Depiction of Male Same-Sex Seduction in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Effects of Bad Government Fresco

I n h I s b o o k P i c t u r e s a n d P a s s i o n s : A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts, James M. Saslow observes that as the repression of homoerotic behavior increased in europe beginning in the thirteenth century, after a period of relative tolerance in the earlier and central Middle Ages, the number of images of sodomy (as homoerotic behavior was labeled at the time) actually increased, and these images grew more explicit in their depiction of “taboo behavior.” inspired at least in part by Dante’s Commedia (The Divine Comedy), where unrepentant sodomites are condemned to the seventh circle of Hell “to run ceaselessly among a rain of fire reminiscent of Sodom itself,” images of the Last Judgment, including several produced in fourteenthand fifteenth-century italy, show sodomites suffering horrible tortures that mimic their crimes against nature. For example, in the Collegiate Church of San Gimignano, not far from Siena, the painter Taddeo di Bartolo depicted a devil ramming a pole up the anus of a man who is labeled a “SOTOMiTTO”; the pole reemerges through the mouth of the sodomite, whence it then penetrates the mouth of another damned figure (fig. 1). in this way, the artist managed to convey two of the sexual acts of which male sodomites stood accused: anal and oral sex. The sodomites were accompanied in this particular section of hell, identified as the area reserved for those who committed the sin of concupiscence (“LA LUSURiA”),

Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Italy: The Structure of Diplomatic Practice, 1450-1800@@@War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690-1720

List of illustrations Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Map: the Savoyard state, 1690-1720 Introduction 1. The Savoyard army, 1690-1720 2. Savoyard finance, 1690-1720 3. Savoyard diplomacy, 1690-1720 4. Government and politics in the Savoyard state, 1690-1720 5. The Savoyard nobility, 1690-1720 6. Regions and communities in the Savoyard state, 1690-1720 Conclusion Select bibliography Index.