Courts, Patrons and Poets

The Renaissance, both as a concept and a period, continues to generate lively controversy not only among academics but also among the general public. Ever since the publication, in 1860, of Jacob Burckhardt's classic study of the Renaissance in Italy, scholars have disputed the origins of the movement and its subsequent influence on European culture and thought. This sequence of three course texts and two anthologies, published in association with the Open University, explores the Renaissance from the interdisciplinary perspective of history, literature, drama, religion, the history of art, philosophy, music and political thought. It provides students and general readers with an unprecedentedly thorough analysis of this absorbing stage in the development of Western civilization. The princely courts of fifteenth-century Italy played a central role in the development of Renaissance art and culture. After a general introduction to the notion of 'court patronage', this book examines the phenomenon in detail in case studies of artists and musicians working in Milan under the Sforza (Leonardo, Filarete and Josquin Desprez) and in Florence under the Medici.
Later chapters show how humanist ideas were imported from the continent to Britain, where they were absorbed and ultimately metamorphosed into the glories of Tudor and Stuart poetry and drama. The result is a stimulating study of the position of artists in society and of their changing relationship to, and interaction with, their patrons.