Edited by Lina Bolzoni and Alina Payne, the volume The Italian Renaissance in the 19th Century. Revision, Revival, and Return (Officina Libraria, 2018) will be presented at the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca on November 16, 2018.
The volume examines the Italian Renaissance revival as a Pan-European phenomenon of critique, commentary and re-shaping of a nineteenth-century present perceived a deeply problematic. Sweeping the humanistic disciplines—history, literature, music, art, architecture, collecting etc—This phenomenon located between historical nostalgia and critique of the contemporary world marked the oeuvre of as diverse a group of figures as Jean August Dominique Ingres and EM Forster, Heinrich Geymüller and Adolf von Hildebrand, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, H.H. Richardson and Rainer Maria Rilke, Giosuè Carducci and Francesco de Sanctis. Though some perceived it as a “Golden Age”, a model for the present, some cast it as a negative example, contrasting the resurgence of the arts with the decadence of society and the loss of an ethical and political conscience thus revealing that the triumphalist model had its detractors and that the reaction to the Renaissance was more complex than it may at first appear. Through a series of essays by a group of international scholars the volume recovers some of the multi-dimensionality of the reaction to, transformation of and commentary on the Italian Renaissance and its ties to nineteenth-century modernity, as seen both from within (by Italians) and from without (by foreigners, expatriates, travellers, scholars etc). The essays seek out the connections between the Italian Renaissance and the nineteenth-century present, comparing different visions and interpretations and bringing out the characteristic features of the phenomenon: from the reformation of Italian history in popular culture to the interest in the strong personalities of literature, from artistic ambitions to recreate Renaissance architectural works to the fascination with Giotto and fifteenth-century Florence.