7-8 page long research paper on Visible and Invisible cities (political theory, Renaissance literature)

Our next two classes (2 and 7 April) are devoted to textual and visual descriptions of the Italian

Renaissance city. This segment of the course is more diverse in terms of source material and method

than other segments of the course. We will continue our focus on literary and intellectual culture,

looking at a famous oration by the Tuscan humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444) in praise of the city

of Florence, imitated from a Greek model, but we will also look at material from social history and

from the history of cartography and visual culture.

For 2 April we are reading an extract from Bruni’s Panegyric of the City of Florence, considered one

of the most important works of Florentine and Italian “civic humanism” (humanism focused on the

polis and on urban and political life). The part we are reading, the opening of the speech, describes

Florence’s physical beauty and splendor. The second part describes Florence’s military successes, the

wisdom of the city’s political organization, and the virtue of its ruling elite, representing Florence as

a kind of real-life utopia and the rightful heir to the glories of ancient Rome.

The second reading for 2 April, which is optional, is a piece by a social and cultural historian, Robert

Davis, describing the social geography of Renaissance cities through the lens of gender. Which parts

of the city’s public space were dominated by men, and which by women? How were these divisions

formally and informally policed?

The preparatory reading for 7 April is a segment of a chapter from my 2015 book A Short History of

the Italian Renaissance (pp. 84-92 of the chapter “The Renaissance and the Modern”) describing the

intersection of humanism and geography (including cartography) in the fifteenth and sixteenth

centuries.

In addition to reading this, you should familiarize yourself with the main two maps we will look at in

detail, Jacopo de’ Barbari’s 1500 map of Venice, and Leonardo da Vinci’s 1502 map of Imola. Links to

an animation of Barbari’s map and a catalogue entry for Leonardo’s map are available in this folder.