The Anglo-Florentine Renaissance

The ambivalent title heralds a rather baffling collection of essays, edited by Cinzia Maria Sicca and Louis A. Waldman. The book is the result of a conference held in Florence in 2007. It begins with an excellent survey of Anglo-Florentine relations generally in the early sixteenth century by Steven Gunn, written with his customary lucidity and capacity to spot the unexpected in the detail. It is also refreshingly cool in approach, undercutting the title (as do many other contributors); Italy mattered less than North-West Europe in English eyes, while, within Italy, Florence mattered less than Venice diplomatically and commercially, less than Bologna and Padua in scholarship, and less than Rome for antiquities. The core of the book concerns the actual and projected tombs for English royalty, and for Cardinal Wolsey. These bring together life records of the artists involved from Italian manuscripts, usefully printed and translated, detailed study of the works attributed to them (often only recently) in Italy, and the remaining fragments and designs, widely dispersed and again often only recently identified, of the uncompleted tombs, to produce powerful and rounded accounts of this impressive sequence of high-quality works

Art · Art history · Italian Renaissance · Literature · Scholarship · The Renaissance · Classics · History · Law · Renaissance and Early Modern Studies