Description
Book SynopsisAnalyzes texts and art objects from the 15th to the late 16th centuries to show that Renaissance theories of emulating classical heroes generated a deep skepticism about representation, as these theories forced men to construct a public image that seemed fixed but could adapt to changing circumstances.
Trade Review"This smart and engaging book argues that from the mid-fifteenth century onward, Italian courtiers, authors, and artists understood exemplarily as the negotiation between the hidden inside of a person and the words, actions, or images that reveal that person to the world." -- Maarten Delbeke -Renaissance Quarterly " In Gaylard's persuasive reading, the faltering transmission of ancient virtues find increasing compensation in the pre formative posture, that monumental pose in which timeless values and pellucid examples rematerialize as self-conscious representation." -- Eileen Reeves -Modern Language Quarterly "Susan Gaylard has produced a powerfully suggestive study of the relation between writing and the desire for a kind of secular personal permanence that was the closest thing to immortality in the estimation of Italians during the century and a half before 1600." -- -Walter Stephens The John Hopkins University "Gaylard undertakes a richly detailed, fascinating inquiry into the ways in which early modern theories of imitation (rhetorical and corporeal) intersect with practices of representation used by contemporaries to convey verbal and visual images of exemplary individuals, especially notable figures from the classical past, to quattrocento and cinquecento audiences." -Choice
