Patricia Rubin

Art, memory, and family in Renaissance Florence

Introduction Part I. Memory and its Materials: 1. The historical material of memory Patrick Geary 2. Family memory: functions, evolution, recurrences Giovanni Ciappelli 3. Family, memory, and history Nicolai Rubinstein 4. Poetry as politics and memory in Renaissance Florence and Italy Lauro Martines Part II. The Imagery of Memory: 5. Art and the imagery of memory Patricia Lee Rubin 6. The memory of faces: representational choices in Florentine portraiture Alison Wright 7. Giovanni Bencis patronage of the nunnery, Le Murate Megan Holmes 8. Monument and memory in Renaissance Florence Andrew Butterfield Part III. Family Identity: 9. Artisan family strategies: proposals for research on the families of Florentine artists Margaret Haines 10. Florentine palaces and the memories of the past Brenda Preyer 11. Memory of place: Luogo and lineage in the fifteenth-century Florentine countryside Amanda Lillie 12. Family values: sculpture and the family in fifteenth-century Florence Geraldine Johnson Part IV. The Transmission of Memory: 13. Names, memory, public identity in late Medieval Florence Anthony Molho 14. The memory of exiled families: the case of the Strozzi Lorenzo Fabbri 15. Memoria and family in law Thomas Kuehn 16. Collective amnesia: family memory and the mendicants: a comment Samuel K. Cohn Jr.

Raphael and the Rhetoric of Art

In 1759 there appeared an edition of engravings after the heads in Raphael’s tapestry cartoons, at that time displayed at Hampton Court (now in the Victoria and Albert Museum). Titled The School of Raphael or The Student’s Guide to Expression in Historical Painting, this drawing book was intended to supply examples from the ‘inimitable Cartoons of Raphael’ useful both to experienced painters and to novices to ‘encourage the study of the most profound part of Painting, the Characteristics of the Passions’.1 The index lists the various passions and their subdivisions in alphabetical order, indicating the plate number of the appropriate head from the cartoons. Ranging from affection to zeal, they include ‘Arrogance, dejected’, three types of surprise and six forms of fear. Occupying a distinct place in the histories of eighteenth century sensibilities and artistic practices, these engravings are also emblematic of Raphael’s position in the history of visual eloquence. In the first extended account of the artist, Vasari’s biography of 1550, he is characterised as ‘always seeking to represent histories as they are written’ and his compositions are described in terms that both establish and emphasise the connection between painting and writing.2 As part of his strategy for the advancement of the visual arts, Vasari adopted a rhetoric of appreciation that placed Raphael in the ‘discourse of letters’.

Leonardo Da Vinci, the Hayward Gallery, London, 26 January-16 April 1969

Reviews an exhibition of the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci at the Hayward Gallery, London, that presents Leonardo as artist, scientist, and inventor and attempts to reveal his characteristic ways of seeing and patterns of creativity.