Description
Book SynopsisExplores artistic depictions of the ostrich from ancient Egypt to the Renaissance works of Raphael. Traces the history of shifting interpretations given to the ostrich in scientific texts, literature, and religious writings.
Trade Review“[Raphael’s Ostrich] covers a vast time-span comprising a rich collection of events and stories, some of which are novel while others are well known. But it is the unusual point of view from which these stories unfold that makes the book such a pleasure to read. Throughout, a wealth of texts and images of skillfully interwoven, making this book important for the study of the ostrich’s iconography in Italian art to 1600.”
—Sylvia Ferina-Pagden Burlington Magazine
“Who would have thought that an ugly, earthbound bird, perceived as a hybrid monster, would play such a significant part in Renaissance art? In her fascinating and scholarly study, Una Roman D’Elia has meticulously demonstrated how and why ‘these images of hybrid creatures are both marginal and central to major cultural shifts in attitudes toward nature—at the crossroads of art, religion, myth, and natural history.’”
—Simona Cohen Journal of Modern History
“Including excellent images and an ample scholarly apparatus, this is a book for those fascinated by iconography in art, in particular the iconography of the ostrich. Recommended.”
—A. V. Coonin Choice
“This is a delightful, massively erudite, well-written, and well-composed treatise on an unexpected subject. It will be of interest to art historians, classicists, medievalists, literary scholars, social historians, iconographers, scholars of the classical revival, historians of science, experts in Renaissance emblems, and (above all) scholars of sixteenth-century art, especially scholars of the grotesque. It is the history of a particular bird, along with its various meanings and implications, and deals with the tension between naturalism and allegory, carrying us from ancient Egypt and Israel through Greece and Rome to the Middle Ages, the High Renaissance, and beyond.”
—Paul Barolsky,University of Virginia
“Raphael's Ostrich is a learned, ambitious, and very original book. Taking as its starting point a curious detail in a painting generally credited to Raphael, it throws new light on Italian sixteenth-century ideas about artistic invention and about the ways in which works of art were meant to be understood or enjoyed by the audience for which they were made.”
—Charles Hope,The Warburg Institute, University of London
Table of ContentsContents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Raphael’s Disputed Legacy
1 A Brief History of the Ostrich: Antiquity and the Middle Ages
2 The Eagle and the Ostrich: The Court of Urbino
3 Pope Leo X and Raphael’s Ostriches
4 Raphael’s Heirs
5 Farnese Ostriches and Vasari’s Raphael
6 Fortune Is an Ostrich: Discontent in the 1550s and 1560s
7 Curiosity and the Ostrich in the Counter-Reformation
8 Taming the Ostrich: Ripa and Aldrovandi Notes
Bibliography
Index
