The Italian Renaissance: art, literature and political thought
Winter School

[EN] Employment prospects: Class attendance - held entirely in English - will allow students to gain the knowledge and skills they will be able to use internationally in various areas throughout the business world, especially related to teaching (literature, history, philosophy, art history, etc.), to museum and historical research, and to cultural communication: publishing, tourism, journalism, and information dissemination through the media (traditional and new).

[ITA] La frequenza al corso - tenuto interamente in lingua inglese - permetterà di acquisire conoscenze e competenze spendibili a livello internazionale in vari settori del mondo del lavoro, legati soprattutto all'insegnamento (letteratura, storia, filosofia, storia dell'arte, ecc.), alla ricerca storica e museale e alla comunicazione culturale: editoria, promozione turistica, giornalismo, diffusione informazioni attraverso i media (tradizionali e nuovi).

Period: II Semester - February to April 2020

Programme Director / Direttore del corso: Prof. Antonio Corsaro - Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Urbino.

Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Ferrara 1993-2001. Visiting Professor at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA, 1985), at Dublin UCD (1988, 1998), at The University of Leuven (1998, 2003), at the Centre d'Etudes Supérieurs de la Renaissance, Univ. De Tours (2007). Coordinator of the project of Archiviazione informatica of the letters of Micheangelo il Giovane (Florence, Museo Buonarroti, 1991-93). Studies in the Renaissance Literature with special interests in History of Culture and of Thought. Essays and editions of texts on comical, satirical and burlesque Poetry between XV and XVII centuries (Burchiello, Ariosto, Berni, Bentivoglio), and a volume on the same subject in 1999. Publications and conferences on the relationship between literature, religious censorship and the print in the XVI century, among which the recent international conference Sixteenth-Century Italian Art and Literature and the Reformation, London, Warburg Institute, 30-31 January 2004; the International Seminar Forms of Faith. The influence of religious change on artistic, musical and literary culture in sixteenth-century Italy (Univ. of Cambridge - University of Leeds, March 2007); the International Conference Lectura y culpa en la Europa del siglo XVI, San Millan de la Cogolla (Spain), Cilengua / Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, March 2009. Studies on the culture and religious thought in the epoch of the Counterreformation, partially published in the volume: Percorsi dell'incredulità. Religione, amore e natura nel primo Tasso (Rome 2003). Member of the Scientific Board for the exhibition: Vittoria Colonna e Michelangelo (Florence, Museo Buonarroti, December 2004). Scientific supervisor of the International Conference Autorità modelli e antimodelli nella cultura artistica e letteraria fra Riforma e Controriforma (Univ. di Urbino 2006). Critical editions of the "Paradossi" of Ortensio Lando (Rome 2000; reissued for the series "Les Belles letters" in Paris, 2012); of the Literary Works of Machiavelli (Rome 2012); of the Poems and Letters of Michelangelo Buonarroti (Milan, 2016).

Scientific Committee / Comitato di direzione scientifica:

• Prof. Antonio Corsaro (DISTUM)
• Prof. Giovanna Perini (DISTUM)
• Prof. Nicoletta Marcelli (DISTUM)
• Prof. Raffaella Santi (DISTUM)
• Dr. Marcella Peruzzi (Urbino University Library)

Courses taught / Insegnamenti

1. Italian Renaissance Art (15th-16th centuries) — Storia dell'arte moderna: L-ART/02 - 6 Credits/CFU

Course description. This course aims to show the main artistic trends in Italy between the 15th and 16th centuries, through the study of the great masters: Giotto, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Masaccio, Leon Battista Alberti, Piero della Francesca, Sandro Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Donato Bramante, Raffaello, Michelangelo, Giorgione, Tiziano, and Federico Barocci. Artistic productions of this period will be analyzed through investigating style, iconography, technique, patronage, function, connection with classical antiquity, as well as historical, geographical, and social context. Special attention will be given to pictorial and architectural masterpieces of the Renaissance in Urbino, with a focus on the artists Piero della Francesca and Raffaello.

Course objectives. The purpose of this course is to give students, through a stylistic and iconographical reading of the art work, the basic knowledge and methodological tools required to correctly contextualize the movements, artists, and works in their specific historical, social, and geographical context.

Lecturer: Dr. Marilena Luzietti - After completing a degree in History of Medieval and Modern Art in 2009 at the University of Urbino "Carlo Bo", Marilena Luzietti received a PhD in History of Modern Art in 2013 from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" with a dissertation on the "Iconography of the True Cross during the Counter-Reformation", which has since been published online at www.padis.uniroma1.it. Her publications include a monograph on Saint Joseph's Oratory of Urbino ("Arte e devozione nella Urbino degli Albani: l'Oratorio di San Giuseppe di Urbino", Centro Studi G. Mazzini, Fermignano, 2012) in addition to essays on art in the Marche Region. She now teaches History of Art in a "Liceo Classico" (High School) in Pesaro.

2. Culture and Literature in the Italian Renaissance (15th-16th centuries) — Letteratura italiana: L-FIL-LET/10 - 6 credits/CFU

Course description. The course will consist of 18 lessons of two hours each. After a preliminary introduction to the Renaissance period in Italy (15th-16th centuries), the course will focus on some main authors and literary gendres. A general pattern will be reconstructed about the principal cultural and literary events of the period in the Italian peninsula, using a thematic perspective and an interdisciplinary pausing approach (focusing on some Renaissance capital cities). A special attention will be given to the territories of Urbino and Florence, analyzing some of the foundation texts of this period ("Il libro del cortegiano", "Il Principe"). 

Course objectives. The aim is to introduce students to a first approach to the complex territory of Italian Renaissance Culture and Literature, with a particular stress on its main authors and characters.

Lecturer: Prof. Nicoletta Marcelli -   M.A. degree at the University of Florence -  Ph.D. at the SISMEL (Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino) and in 2012 a second Ph.D. at the University of Florence. 2007 : Frances A. Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute of London for a project on Guarino Veronese. 2012 : Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies / Villa I Tatti in Florence. Her fields of research are focused on Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, Italian and Neolatin philology. Her main publications are devoted to eminent Florentine authors like Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Luigi Pulci, and Cristoforo Landino. Since 2006 she was entrusted to collaborate with the National Edition of the Works of Niccolò Machiavelli and she published the critical edition of the Capitoli (ed. Salerno, 2012). She is also member of the editorial board of the international journals «Interpres. Rivista di studi quattrocenteschi», founded by Mario Martelli and directed by Francesco Bausi, and «Studi Petrarcheschi» directed by Giulio Firpo, Giuseppe Frasso, and Gino Belloni.

3. PRIVATE LIFE AND MATERIAL CIVILIZATION at the beginning of the modern age - M-STO / 01 - 6 credits CFU

Course description: The course proposes a series of lessons about private life in the West from the end of the Middle Age until the Modern Age. It will highlight the specific features of a system that included the individual and the family in a world that was neither private nor public (as we mean it), in order to show the relationship between private and public dimensions of life. We will study the daily life, specifically its public dimension, the community control on individuals and the control inside the familial environment.

Course objective. The aim is to introduce students to a first approach to the complex territory of History of Material Life, including private life, food, private architecture, religious life and feelings.  

Lecturer: Prof. Antonio Corsaro and other guest teachers

The final exam of the course "Italian Renaissance Art (15th-16th centuries)" (Prof. Luzietti) will be held through a written test.

The final exams of the two other courses will be oral. 

The exams will take place at the end of the course. The student is expected to discuss the subjects of the classes, including the lectures held by other guest teachers, and to demonstrate the knowledge and comprehension of the matters treated according the syllabus. The marks will be decided according the following criteria: (1) Konowledge of the matter. (2) Capacity of reasoning adequately on the subjects requested. (3) Capacity of exposing the matter with an appropriate language.

Le prove avranno luogo dopo la conclusione dei corsi. Lo studente dovrà doscutere le materie dei rispettivi corsi (comprese le lezioni tenute da eventuali docenti ospiti), e dovrà dimostrare la conoscenza e la comprensione degli argomenti trattati secondo il programma. La valutazione sarà assegnata seconmdo i seguenti criteri: (1) Conoscenza della materia. (2) Capacità di ragionare adeguatamente intorno alle domande poste. (3) Capacità di esporre la materia con proprietà di linguaggio. 

Setting of the Winter School on the Italian Renaissance.

The University of Urbino - founded in 1506 - is a Renaissance-era institution; in parallel fashion Urbino itself is the quintessential context in which to learn about the Italian Renaissance - its prestigious status as ..“UNESCO
World Heritage Site’ was awarded in 1998 with the following motivation”… Urbino attracted some of the most outstanding humanist scholars and artists of the Renaissance, who created there an exceptional urban complex of remarkable homogeneity, the influence of which carried far into the rest of Europe. Urbino represents a pinnacle of Renaissance art and architecture, harmoniously adapted to its physical site and to its medieval precursor in an exceptional manner’ (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/828).

Nowadays the University of Urbino’s facilities remain at one with the beautiful town itself. Study abroad participants are offered the unique opportunity to enter directly into town as well as campus life, and to experience the collective history of these institutions in a personal way.

The university dorms just outside the old town center and multi-site cafeteria system offer U.S. students the opportunity to socialize with Italian students as well as the approximately 150 exchange students from the E.U.’s Erasmus program who are provided meals and lodging there as well. In three words the advantagious setting of the University of Urbino campus can be summed up as as ‘Small - Safe – Social’