In Your Face concentrates on the Renaissance concern with "self-fashioning" by examining how a group of Renaissance artists and writers encoded their own improprieties in their works of art. In the elitist court society of sixteenth-century Italy, where moderation, limitation, and discretion were generally held to be essential virtues, these men consistently sought to stand out and to underplay their conspicuousness at once. The heroes (or anti-heroes) of this book-Michelangelo Buonarroti, Benvenuto Cellini, Pietro Aretino, and Anton Francesco Doni-violated norms of decorum by promoting themselves aggressively and by using writing or artworks to memorialize their assertiveness and intractable delight in parading themselves as transgressive and insubordinate on a grand scale. Focusing on these sorts of writers and visual artists, Biow constructs a version of the Italian Renaissance that is neither the elegant one of Castiglione's and Vasari's courts-so recently favored in scholarly accounts-nor the dark, conspiratorial one of Niccolo Machiavelli's and Francesco Guicciardini's princely states.

Book Information
ISBN 9780804762151
Author Douglas Biow
Format Hardback
Page Count 272
Imprint Stanford University Press
Publisher Stanford University Press