Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> This book imagines the Renaissance afresh by considering people’s appearances: what they wore how this made them move what images they created of their looks and how all this shaped men and women’s identities. It rediscovers appearances as part of a rich symbolic world capable of transmitting compact information that people responded to. misunderstood had fun with or fought over. I became fascinated by this subject over a decade ago when looking at images of the period I was supposed to be familiar with and found I was not. What is happening? I asked myself as I looked closely at an African gondoliere with striped hose and a violet wig in one of the Venetian artist Carpaccio’s paintings. What is going on? I wondered when I discovered a hardly known Nurem- berg manuscript from the 1560s depicting three kinds of street sweepers in flamboyant dress. I began to take note of intriguing comments like the French essayist Michel de Montaigne’s noting that he felt closer to a naked savage than to overdressed peasants in the next village. Then there was the amusing fact that the notion of the ‘blonde’ ap- peared in seventeenth-century France with reference to bewigged male fops the ‘blond- ins. Sixteenth-century Spanish men meanwhile were known for their use of glasses to create a discerning look. The richer they were the larger the glasses could be. (MP)