Medical competence, anatomy and the polity in seventeenth-century Rome.
At the centre of this article are two physicians active in Rome between 1600 and 1630 who combined medical practice with broader involvement in the dynamic cultural, economic and political scene of the centre of the Catholic world. The city's distinctive and very influential social landscape magnified issues of career-building and allows us to recapture physicians’ different strategies of self-fashioning at a time of major social and religious reorganization. At one level, reconstructing Johannes Faber and Giulio Mancini's medical education, arrival in Rome and overlapping but different career trajectories contributes to research on physicians’ identity in early modern Italian states. Most remarkable are their access to different segments of Roman society, including a dynamic art market, and their diplomatic and political role, claimed as well as real. But following these physicians from hospitals to courts, including that of the Pope, and from tribunals to the university and analysing the wide range of their writing – from medico-legal consilia to political essays and reports of anatomical investigations – also enriches our view of medical practice, which included, but went beyond, the bedside. Furthermore, their activities demand that we reassess the complex place of anatomical investigations in a courtly society, and start recovering the fundamental role played by hospitals – those quintessential Catholic institutions – as sites of routine dissections for both medical teaching and research. (pp. 551–567)
Guido Reni and the Poets. Painting through a Different Lens
An unprecedented number of poems were written in praise of Guido Reni’s paintings during his lifetime. This paper explores the ways in which the engagement of the beholder with the artwork is thematized in these texts, and how they may relate to the paintings in question. Particular attention will be paid to the way the beholder deals with a tension that is evident in many of the poems on Reni’s paintings, namely that between the illusionism and liveliness of the painted scene and figures on the one hand, and the apparent material qualities of the paintings on the other. Through these texts, it will be argued, we get a sense of how the informed beholder may have looked at Reni’s paintings, or, in other words, what Reni’s paintings looked like through the poet’s lens.
Rome reborn: The Vatican Library and Renaissance culture
Preface Foreword Acknowledgements Contributors Abbreviations The Vatican and Its Library The Popes and Humanism The Ancient City Restored: Archaeology, Ecclesiastical History, and Egyptology The Recovery of the Exact Sciences of Antiquity: Mathematics, Astronomy, Geography Life Sciences and Medicine in the Renaissance World Music and the Renaissance Papacy: the Papal Choir and the Fondo Cappella Sistina Eastern Churches and Western Scholarship Paper Obelisks: East Asia in the Vatican Vaults Chinese, Korean and Japanese Tertns and Naines Notes Suggestions Manuscripts and Printed Books from the Vatican Library listed by Fondi Index.