Art, Family, and Memory in Renaissance Florence. Giovanni Ciappelli , Patricia Lee Rubin
morality and honor, to work, play and life cycles, the book illuminates the social and cultural world of the Renaissance at the level of individual and collective experience. Included are materials from documents which exemplify the authors' observations and small reproductions of woodcuts depicting the patterns of quotidian life. The style is clear, breezy and perfect for the general reader or undergraduate, although with sufficient original scholarship from primary sources to interest a specialist. There is beneath the disarming charm of the narrative a sophisticated understanding of the complexity of early modern Italian life and how the various elements are deeply intertwined. The examples not only provide evidence of the wider points being made but they reflect the serious original research of the authors into the society of the Renaissance. The obvious conclusion that any reader must draw from this remarkable collection of insights into the early modern Italian mind is that the past is very much a different country which one must enter carefully, without preconceptions but with an open mind. At the end of the book, it is impossible not to look at Renaissance Italy more clearly through the eyes of those who lived there, and whose experience, assumptions and attitudes were so very different from our own.