Sassetta, the subtle genius from Siena, revolutionized Italian painting with an altarpiece for the small Tuscan town of Borgo San Sepolcro in 1437–1444. Originally standing some six yards high, double-sided, with a splendid gilt frame over the main altar of the local Franciscan church, it was the Rolls Royce of early Renaissance painting. But its myriad figures and scenes tempted the collectors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and today its disassembled panels can be found in twelve museums throughout Europe and the United States. 
To produce this landmark volume, experts in art and general history, painting technique and conservation, woodworking, architecture, and liturgy have joined forces across the boundaries of eight different nations. A model of collaboration, it opens new windows onto the creative process of the artist as he confronted a late-medieval church at a crossroad of cultures, the miracle-working body of a holy man, and a community of Franciscan friars breathing the exhilarating air of reform. To confront such challenges, Sassetta raised the most spiritual school of early Italian art, the Sienese, to a higher level of understanding, grace, and splendor.

Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece (Villa I Tatti) 2 volume set

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Villa I Tatti

The twenty-two essays collected here delve into recent research on the development of humanism and art in the Hungary of King Matthias Corvinus and his successors. Richly illustrated with new photography, this book eloquently documents and explores the unique role played by the Hungarian court in the cultural history of Renaissance Europe.

Italy and Hungary: Humanism and Art in the Early Renaissance. Acts of an International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 6–8, 2007 (Villa I Tatti Series)

For half a century the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), often described as the first anthropologist of the New World, worked with his indigenous colleagues at the Collegio Imperial at Tlatelolco (now Mexico City) on an encyclopedic compendium of the beliefs, rituals, language, arts, and economy of the vanishing culture of the Aztecs. Colors Between Two Worlds examines the most richly illustrated manuscript of this great ethnographic work, the Florentine Codex, which is in the collection of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, through the issue of color.
 The Codex reveals how the colors the Aztecs used in their artistic production and in everyday life, as well as the names they gave each color, illuminate their understanding of the world around them, from the weather to the curing of disease. The pigments and dyes that indigenous artists used to illustrate the Codex reflect a larger dialogue between native and European cultures, which the Florentine Codex records more fully than any surviving document from colonial New Spain.

Colors Between Two Worlds: The Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún (Villa I Tatti Series)

The 177 essays in these two richly illustrated volumes represent the cutting edge of Italian Renaissance scholarship in nearly every one of its fields and were gathered to honor Joseph Connors, Director of Villa I Tatti from 2002 to 2010. Demonstrating I Tatti’s pivotal role as the world’s leading center for Italian Renaissance studies, the essays cover all the branches of art history, as well as many aspects of political, economic, and social history, literature, and music, from the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century. Appropriately, the volumes also include a selection of contributions devoted to Bernard Berenson and his legacy as both a collector and a scholar. Each of the authors―a group representing dozens of countries―was a Fellow or associate of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies during the eight years in which Connors served as Director.

Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, Volumes 1 and 2 (Villa I Tatti Series)

The Medici controlled fifteenth-century Florence. Other Italian rulers treated Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492) as an equal. To his close associates, he was “the boss” (“master of the workshop”). But Lorenzo liked to say that he was just another Florentine citizen. Were the Medici like the kings, princes, and despots of contemporary Italy? Or were they just powerful citizens? The Medici: Citizens and Masters offers a novel, comparative approach to answering these questions. It sets Medici rule against princely states such as Milan and Ferrara. It asks how much the Medici changed Florence and contrasts their supremacy with earlier Florentine regimes. Its contributors take diverse perspectives, focusing on politics, political thought, social history, economic policy, religion and the church, humanism, intellectual history, Italian literature, theater, festivals, music, imagery, iconography, architecture, historiography, and marriage. The book will interest students of history, Renaissance studies, Italian literature, and art history as well as anyone keen to learn about one of history’s most colorful, influential, and puzzling families.

The Medici: Citizens and Masters (Villa I Tatti Series)

History

Europe

The act of eating is a basic human need. Yet in all societies, quotidian choices regarding food and its consumption reveal deeply rooted shared cultural conventions. Food goes beyond issues relating to biological needs and nutrition or production and commerce; it also reveals social and cultural criteria that determine what dishes are prepared on what occasions, and it unveils the politics of the table via the rituals associated with different meals. This book approaches the history of food in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy through an interdisciplinary prism of sources ranging from correspondence, literature (both high and low), and medical and dietary treatises to cosmographic theory and iconographic evidence. Using a variety of analytical methods and theoretical approaches, it moves food studies firmly into the arena of Late Medieval and Renaissance history, providing an essential key to deciphering the material and metaphorical complexity of this period in European, and especially Italian, history.

Food, Social Politics and the Order of Nature in Renaissance Italy (Villa I Tatti Series)

Cookbooks, Food & Wine

Grieco, Allen J.

Cooking Education & Reference

The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of Persian Manuscripts and Paintings at I Tatti presents an in-depth analysis of the little-known Persian manuscripts and paintings collected by the world-renowned art historian, art critic, and connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959). It focuses on three manuscripts and four detached folios (containing over fifty paintings) from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century produced in Iran and Central Asia (with a later addition in Mughal India). Fourteen essays are written by an international team of specialists in art history, Persian literature, statistics, conservation, and conservation science. The first two essays introduce Berenson's collecting of these art works as an individual and as a trend among other collectors. The rest of the essays explain individual works of art. The Timurid Rasa'il and the Safavid manuscripts Shahnama of Firdawsi and Farhad va Shirin of Vahshi are examined in groups of essays ranging from art historical to literary, statistical, and codicological analysis. The detached folios studied as single essays originate from the famous Great Mongol Shahnama, the 1436 Timurid Zafarnama of Sharaf al-Din #703Ali Yazdi, a Turkman Shahnama, and the dispersed Imperial Mughal Album also known as the Minto, Wantage, and Kevorkian albums. The appendix refers to the materials and techniques of the paintings in the volume.

Persian Manuscripts & Paintings from the Berenson Collection (Villa I Tatti Series)

About the Author\nKate van Orden is a cultural historian and the Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University. Her prizewinning publications include Materialities: Books, Readers, and the Chanson in Sixteenth-Century Europe and Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. In 2016, she received a French Medaille d’Honneur. She began a term as president of the International Musicological Society in 2022 and is also a professional performer on the baroque and classical bassoon.\nSeachanges brings together original essays examining human and cultural mobility from a musical perspective. Musicians have always been migratory frontrunners, and musical encounters have always generated nodes of cultural complexity. But hearing past musicking that took place in diaspora and foreign lands requires new methodologies designed to center unsettled lives and ephemeral practices in history.\nEmploying interpretive strategies from musicology, ethnomusicology, historical performance practice, sociolinguistics, and cultural history, the contributors intentionally complicate national and regional accounts of music from 1550 to 1800. Repertorial subjects include Spanish guitar music in Italy, Italian songs in Bohemia, Turkish songs in France, Jewish rituals on Corfu, Jesuit hymns in the Greek Archipelago, and Ottoman court music; further chapters recover the experiences of Indigenous musicians in colonial Latin America, the diaspora of Neapolitan singers, fictional cartographies of Baroque opera, and the careers of enslaved Black musicians in Venice and pre-revolutionary Haiti. They promote a new theoretical vocabulary that coalesces around orality, voice, performers, and performance as matters to foreground in mobility studies.\nSeachanges illustrates how musical microhistories can address mobility at the macro level of Mediterranean and Atlantic Studies while respecting the tempo of individual human lives and musical timeframes.

Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds, 1550–1800 (I Tatti Research Series)

Music

Ariosto and the Arabs: Contexts for the Orlando Furioso (I Tatti Research Series)

Literature & Fiction

When Europeans came to the American continent in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were confronted with what they perceived as sacrificial practices. Representations of Tupinamba cannibals, Aztecs slicing human hearts out, and idolatrous Incas flooded the early modern European imagination. But there was no less horror within European borders; during the early modern period no region was left untouched by the disasters of war.\nSacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World illuminates a particular aspect of the mutual influences between the European invasions of the American continent and the crisis of Christianity during the Reform and its aftermaths: the conceptualization and representation of sacrifice. Because of its centrality in religious practices and systems, sacrifice becomes a crucial way to understand not only cultural exchange, but also the power struggles between American and European societies in colonial times. How do cultures interpret sacrificial practices other than their own? What is the role of these interpretations in conversion? From the central perspective of sacrifice, these essays examine the encounter between European and American sacrificial conceptions―expressed in texts, music, rituals, and images―and their intellectual, cultural, religious, ideological, and artistic derivations.

Sacrifice and Conversion in the Early Modern Atlantic World (I Tatti Research Series)

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