The Center for Early Cultures Presents
A Book Launch Presentation by
Timothy McCall, Villanova University
“Gathering together a marvelous treasury of visual and literary sources, McCall looks beneath the civilized sheen of the heroic renaissance man to reveal the brutality of everyday aristocratic life, a precarious and often violent world dominated by toxic rivalries, strained matrimonial alliances, and lavish material display. Teeming with gossip about badly behaved lords, knights in shining armor, clever young brides and mistresses, conniving parents and patrons, and the circumspect artists these men and women commissioned to project, reinforce, and normalize their extreme power and privilege, Making the Renaissance Man brings to life the multisensory world of Italian Renaissance courts.” -- Maria H. Loh, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and author of "Titian’s Touch."
Humanities Gateway 1030
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
1:00 p.m. Luncheon
RSVP here for lunch by Monday January 22nd
Timothy McCall is Professor of Art History and Director of the Art History Program at Villanova University. His research centers on Italian Renaissance courts and on visual intersections of power and gender (particularly masculinity) more broadly, in addition to histories of fashion and material culture. McCall co-edited the volume Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2013), and has received year-long fellowships from the Villa I Tatti and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2022, he published Brilliant Bodies: Fashioning Courtly Men in Early Renaissance Italy, with Penn State University Press. He is currently co-editing (with Catherine Kovesi) the six-volume Bloomsbury Cultural History of Luxury. The short monograph Vibrant Banners: The Material Culture of Battle Standards in Renaissance Europe, co-written with John Gagné, will appear in 2024 in Cambridge University Press’s Elements in the Renaissance Series. Future projects include Matters of Renaissance Fashion, co-authored with Gagné and Emanuele Lugli, All Consuming War.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Art History Program in Visual Studies, the Department of European Languages and Studies, and the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies