Description

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Looking beyond the marble elegance of Michelangelo’s David, the pugnacious, passionate, and—crucially—important story of Renaissance manhood.
 
Making the Renaissance Man explores the images, objects, and experiences that fashioned men and masculinity in the courts of fifteenth-century Italy. Across the peninsula, Italian princes fought each other in fierce battles and spectacular jousts, seduced mistresses, flaunted splendor in lavish rituals of knighting, and demonstrated prowess through the hunt—all ostentatious performances of masculinity and the drive to rule. Hardly frivolous pastimes, these activities were essential displays of privilege and virility; indeed, violence underlay the cultural veneer of the Italian Renaissance. Timothy McCall investigates representations and ideals of manhood in this time and provides a historically grounded and gorgeously illustrated account of how male identity and sexuality proclaimed power during a century crucial to the formation of Early Modern Europe.

About the Author

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Timothy McCall is associate professor of art history at Villanova University, Philadelphia. He is coeditor of Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe and the author of Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy.

Praise For…

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"McCall explores Renaissance court culture as a ritual process for the formation of elite males. Chivalry, humanist pedagogy, jousting and hunting, oath-taking and lovemaking were mimetic activities, centered on the glamorous and eroticized male body—the dominant subject of court art in Ferrara, Mantua, Naples, and Milan. While focusing on the relations between princes and their male relations, rivals, and entourages, Making the Renaissance Man is no less attentive to women at the courts. Women like Cecilia Gallerani, the teenage mistress of Ludovico Sforza famously portrayed by Leonardo da Vinci, emerge here as a state of exception in this erotic economy of power, throwing new light on portraiture as a means of negotiating a perilous and mirage-like world."
— Stephen J. Campbell, Henry and Elizabeth Wiesenfeld Professor, Johns Hopkins University

"McCall’s groundbreaking research unveils aristocratic men’s love for resplendent clothes and jewellery in a foundational period for the history of fashion."
— Jill Burke, professor of Renaissance visual and material cultures, University of Edinburgh

“Gathering together a marvelous treasury of visual and literary sources, McCall looks beneath the civilized sheen of the heroic renaissance man to reveal the brutality of everyday aristocratic life, a precarious and often violent world dominated by toxic rivalries, strained matrimonial alliances, and lavish material display. Teeming with gossip about badly behaved lords, knights in shining armor, clever young brides and mistresses, conniving parents and patrons, and the circumspect artists these men and women commissioned to project, reinforce, and normalize their extreme power and privilege, Making the Renaissance Man brings to life the multisensory world of Italian Renaissance courts.”
— Maria H. Loh, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and author of "Titian’s Touch"