Arezzo as a Center of Learning and Letters in the Thirteenth Century
The variety of cultural patterns that marks the Italian scene in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a historical phenomenon as familiar to the general historian as to the student of all the special fields to which Italy made its contributions at that time. Inquiry into the conditions determini...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge University Press
1953
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| In: |
Traditio
Year: 1953, Volume: 9, Pages: 321-391 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | The variety of cultural patterns that marks the Italian scene in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a historical phenomenon as familiar to the general historian as to the student of all the special fields to which Italy made its contributions at that time. Inquiry into the conditions determining the characteristics of some of the cities will point in different directions : to leading artists and scholars and their ‘schools’; to the taste and interest of individual or collective patrons; to outside influences, and so forth. Very often such an inquiry will uncover strands that lead back deep into the medieval past of the city. Yet medievalists, in writing monographs on one or another city, have found themselves mostly involved in the political and economic problems of the Italian scene, and indeed in the diversity that marked each city, but have paid little attention to local culture. Still, as shown by one brilliant example — the analysis by Robert Davidsohn of Florentine culture in the time of Dante — the task is an extremely rewarding one. For not only medieval Florence — thirteenth-century Florence which gave birth to Dante and the art of Giotto and Arnolfo da Cambio—but many other cities of northern and central Italy, great and small, wove the general influences and ideas of the age into their own pattern of culture, each with a design of its own. To be sure, many cities show similarities in their cultural growth just as they do in their political and economic development, but a more thorough analysis will reveal differences in the pace of their development as well as in the ‘selection’ of trends that determine their character. Potentialities and dispositions for leadership were apparent in several centers of Tuscany and northern Italy, and it would have been difficult at that time to predict which among them was to achieve a leadership that would last longer and extend over larger areas than that of one of its rivals. |
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| ISSN: | 2166-5508 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Traditio
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0362152900003767 |