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C.H.BECK
Susanne Simor
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The Power of Beauty

Volker Reinhardt

A Cultural History of Italy

As, over centuries, cities, princes and popes competed against each other for the most accomplished artworks, Italy developed unprecedented diversity and innovation in its art. Volker Reinhardt guides us through a thousand years of Italian cultural history and shows what makes idiosyncratic artists and works nonetheless quintessentially Italian.

The legacy of antiquity, Arabian influences via Sicilly, Byzantine traces in Venice, German, French and Spanish rulers: Italy was as strongly shaped by outside forces as by its inner diversity. With an authority lent by decades of research, Volker Reinhardt elucidates how Italian culture has grown since the 11thcentury. Reinhardt brings to life paintings, buildings and gardens, poetry, opera and film, political thinkers and scientists, culinary culture and design. The book takes the long view: from Sicilian barons to the mafia, from the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, from Boccaccio’s proximity to working class people to their importance for Fellini. Italian culture emerged out of crises and catastrophes and is yet shaped by an optimistic vitality and zest for life.  This book is an invitation to readers to immerse themselves in that vitality and to be enchanted by the power of beauty.

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Book

Published by C.H.Beck , ISBN: 9783406741050

Main content page count: 688 Pages

ISBN: 9783406741050

Comments

‘One of the most distinguished Renaissance historians of his generation’ Benjamin Paul, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung