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Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and the Jesuit cardinal, are closely related figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino's writings offers a new perspective on Bernini's art and artistry and allow us to understand the visual arts in papal Rome as a 'making manifest' of the fundamental truths of faith. Pallavicino's views on art and its effects differ fundamentally from the perspective developed in Bernini's biographies offering a perspective on the tension between artist and patron, work and message. In Pallavicino's writings the visual arts emerge as being intrinsically bound up with the very core of religion involving questions of idolatry, mimesis and illusionism that would prove central to the aesthetic debates of the eighteenth century.
The first collection and translation into English of the earliest biographical accounts of Galileo’s life This unique critical edition presents key early biographical accounts of the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), written by his close contemporaries. Collected and translated into English for the first time and supplemented by an introduction and incisive annotations by Stefano Gattei, these documents paint an incomparable firsthand picture of Galileo and offer rare insights into the construction of his public image and the complex intertwining of science, religion, and politics in seventeenth-century Italy. Here in its entirety is Vincenzo Viviani’s Historical Account, a...
In early October 1935 and without any declaration of war some two hundred thousand men, comprising soldiers and airmen of the Italian armed forces, Fascist ‘Blackshirt’ Militia, Eritrean ascari and Somali dubats, invaded the independent state of Ethiopia (Abyssinia). It was an operation entirely of choice, the chooser being Il Duce: Benito Mussolini. The resultant conflict is often described as a colonial war. while it was certainly launched with the intent of turning Ethiopia into an Italian possession, it was in fact a war of aggression against an independent, sovereign, state with membership of the League of Nations. A state that had, according to one of its nineteenth-century rulers,...
Explores the impact of fascism, communism, and totalitarianism on modern Italy, through the prism of a single family.
Approaching subalternity from a broad Gramscian angle, this edited collection contributes to the understanding of popular politics in parliamentary, autocratic, and colonial contexts. The book explores individual stories and micro-histories of complaints, requests, rumors, and other mediated and unmediated interactions between political institutions and the subjects they claimed to govern or represent. It challenges the approaches of institutionally oriented political historiography and its attention to the top-down construction of political representation, citizenship, and power and powerlessness. The book discusses more subtle forms of agency and the spaces these pertained to, which could ...
This volume provides the first geographically broad, comparative survey of early modern 'sacred history', or writing on the history of the Christian Church, its leaders and saints, and its institutional and doctrinal developments, in the two centuries from c. 1450-1650. With deep medieval roots, ecclesiastical history was generally a conservative enterprise, often serving to reinforce confessional, national, regional, dynastic, or local identities. But writers of sacred history innovated in research methods and in techniques of scholarly production, especially after the advent of print. The demand for sacred history was particularly acute in the various movements for religious reform, in bot...
This book explores the path that led to the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) between Italy and the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in the aftermath of the First World War, when the territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire were allotted to new and existing states, with regard as far as possible to the nationalities of the people living in the various territories in addition to the future of Montenegro and Albania. Based on vast archival documentation and published sources, the contributors to this book discuss the nature of the disputes which arose in the Adriatic area, often as the result of the inhabitants of the different territories being o...
The book presents various investigation into 20th-century European dictatorships, with its focus on Franco`s dictatorship and the Spanish Civil War. Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain (1936/1939-1975/1978) was a modern form of authoritarianism, with a strong totalitarian period, like many other dictatorships of the time. Francoism occupies a place in history alongside other different dictatorships of its age, and a comparative analysis might prove to be a powerful tool in order to understand how, in the middle of the 20th century, such a repressive and authoritarian form of political control emerged. One of the most forgotten fascisms, which at the same time was influenced by and inf...
This book examines the international dimensions of the Greek military dictatorship of 1967 to 1974 and uses it as a case study to evaluate the major shifts occurring in the international system during a period of rapid change. The policies of the major nation-states in both East and West were determined by realistic Cold War considerations. At the same time, the Greek junta, a profoundly anti-modernist force, failed to cope with an evolving international agenda and the movement towards international cooperation. Denouncing it became a rallying point both for international organizations and for human rights activists, and it enabled the EEC to underscore the notion that democracy was an integ...
The tensions between European conceptions of the welfare state and transnational migration have caused heated political, public, and academic debates over the last decades. Historiography, however, has not yet explored in depth how European societies struggled with this dilemma-filled relationship in the formative phases of modern welfare states from the late nineteenth century to the post-war era. The present volume contributes to filling this gap and thus to putting a highly topical issue into historical perspective. The focus is on Europe, but with a wide geographic scope that reaches also across the Atlantic. Following an introductory chapter, eleven case studies deal with four themes. T...