1st Edition
Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580
Biography
Allie Terry-Fritsch is Associate Professor of Italian Renaissance Art History at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her research focuses on the performative experience of art and architecture in fifteenth-century Florence, with a particular emphasis on the political significance of embodiment in the viewing process. She has published widely on audiences for Medici-sponsored works by Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, and others, and is editor of Beholding Violence in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Ashgate/Routledge, 2012). Her next book project on Fra Angelico, Cosimo de’Medici, and the Library of San Marco recently won the National Endowment for Humanities prize for a Summer Stipend.
The first monographic work to investigate Renaissance art and somaesthetics; - Presents a new framework for understanding Medici patronage and political power; - Offers a new methodology for investigating Renaissance embodiment|Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence, Renaissance Art and Political Persuasion, 1459-1580 (2020), provides not only a very nuanced interpretation of the theme indicated in the title, but also has a detailed account of the various philosophers' and Renaissance scholars' concepts of embodiment as a valuable source for shedding new light on the Florentine Renaissance. [The author] shows how the body's epistemology and the embodied experience have gradually occupied an increasingly prominent place in Renaissance research.- Else Marie Bukdahl, The Journal of Somaesthetics vol. 7, no. 2 (2021),
Seamlessly weaving together the social and political circumstances that fostered these dynamic interactions, Terry-Fritsch productively draws from the methodological approaches of ritual and performance studies to bring into focus a variety of viewing strategies employed by Florentine audiences in their daily engagement with art, convincingly demonstrating that the 'act of doing' was understood to be a 'way of knowing' (26).,- Victoria H. Ehrlich, Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 2
