The emergence of a ruin-aesthetic comes after Petrarch, and is initially owed to architects like Brunelleschi and to painters like Raphael. Architects wanted to build in the Roman manner, all’antica, and painters introduced Roman ruins into the background of their pictures. Such was the commitment to the study and imitation of the Roman style that the need to conserve the ruins was recognised and advocated. Hitherto it had never occurred to anyone anywhere to urge that a ruined structure should be preserved for its historical value. But a further value was now attached to the ruins of Rome, namely the aesthetic: the ruins were looked upon as attractive in themselves. The ruins also became the object of study and analysis by a new breed of scholar, the antiquarian and topographer, such as Flavio Biondo, who also wanted to ensure their preservation for future ages to admire. This is a new feature of ruin-mindedness: whatever is deemed beautiful must be preserved for later generations to study and admire and imitate. Since those later generations will include foreign visitors, tourism comes to be recognised as a sound economic reason for conserving the handsome material remains of ancient Rome.

As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.

Although no direct claim for the autonomy of spheres was advanced in the scholastic speculations discussed in Chapter 5, such notions would be put forward in the circles where humanism and the artistic renewal pursued in contact with it emerged in Renaissance Italy. A powerful example was Giorgio Vasari’s assertion that what caused art and architecture to decline from its ancient heights was the substitution of religious values for aesthetic ones by Christianity as it became established under the Roman Empire. This defense of aesthetic autonomy would become more general and explicit as the expansion of the audience for painting and sculpture and the display of art objects in locations specifically dedicated to them – museums and galleries instead of churches or princely and noble residences – confronted viewers with “art as such,” and it would be theorized in Kant’s aesthetics at the end of the eighteenth century, which removed both religious and social value from judgments about art. But this development was singularly European. No similar move toward attributing autonomy to the aesthetic sphere would take place in India, China, or Muslim territories, despite the many beautiful objects produced in all of them and the exalted position attributed to artists in some.

Opening with Leon Battista Alberti’s celebrated definition of painting as a reflection on the surface of the water according to the ancient myth of Narcissus, the introduction elucidates the analysis of the inset-mirror motif in Renaissance painting as a form of mise-en-abyme that was central to the conceptualisation and reception of early modern art.

This chapter investigates the crucial significance of Lucian for early modern Italian literature and culture. From the late fourteenth century, Lucian’s writings were employed by Italian humanists to learn Greek and contributed considerably towards sparking a remarkable interest in the ancient Greek-speaking world. From Italy, Lucian’s fame travelled to the rest of Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lucian’s fictional dialogues and paradoxical encomia deeply informed the oeuvre of many prominent writers, among them Leon Battista Alberti, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Lodovico Ariosto. Moreover, this study aims to shed light on the variety of different roles played by Lucian within the Renaissance. By taking into account unexplored matters, such as the impact of vernacular translations, it is possible to distinguish between a ‘didactic-moral’, a ‘useful and delightful’, and a ‘heterodox-heretical’ understanding of Lucian in early modern Italy. On the one hand, such differentiation allows to finesse the connections between the reception of his oeuvre and the political, cultural, as well as religious transformations of that time (e.g. the printing revolution and the Counter-Reformation). On the other hand, it shows that some features of Lucian’s poetics – especially humour, satire, and parrhesia – acted throughout the Renaissance as frameworks that influenced the early modern comprehension of fundamental issues, such as literary imitation and fictionality.

Chapter 4 studies the variety of reading practices that characterised the vernacular reception of Aristotle amidst the controversies between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘humanists’ in fifteenth-century Florence. The chapter examines the role played by vernacular translation as a facilitator for the interaction of the two different perspectives. Along with discussions of figures such as Domenico Da Prato and Leonardo Bruni, I explore the proactive role played by readers in shaping the boundaries of philosophical culture in the vernacular. To this purpose, special attention is given to the compositional strategies deployed by cultivated merchants in zibaldoni (notebooks) such as Giovanni Rucellai’s, where conflicts of cultures were resolved under the aegis of the layman’s curiosity. Similar preoccupations inform the manuscript transmission of Bernardo Nuti’s Italian translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (c. 1460). Extant manuscript copies of Nuti’s version (which was based on Leonardo Bruni’s ‘humanist’ rendering of the Ethics) have much to tell us about the social, ideological and political patterns that characterized the reception of Aristotle’s moral philosophy in the period.

Renaissance thinkers affirmed that also in terms of justice and friendship the relationship between the human couple reflected what it was that held together the citizens in the city. This chapter examines the immense importance of thinking about friendship and love for political reflection, and it shows the relationship of civic concord and friendship with the domestic sphere, and particularly with the conjugal relationship. This chapter studies early modern commentaries on Cicero’s De officiis as well as celebrated works of the ‘civic tradition’, namely Leon Battista Alberti’s Della Famiglia and Matteo Palmieri’s Della Vita Civile, showing that the learned Aristotelian tradition we have so far studied found its echoes also in the Ciceronian tradition as well as in the volgare. These commentaries and vernacular writings serve as part of the context necessary to understand more fully Niccolò Machiavelli’s thought on family, friendship, and sociability, which has so far not found adequate attention in historical scholarship. Re-examining some of the ways that Machiavelli constructed masculinity and femininity, and setting them into their intellectual context, this chapter aims to show that Machiavelli’s political thought was characterised by a remarkable openness towards the idea of women as dominant agents in the political sphere and by a sense of what we can term, in a postmodern manner, ‘fluidity’ of gender conceptions, in which ‘biology’ was certainly no determining factor. The chapter thus contributes to the question of the nature of Machiavelli’s stato.