A Guide to Italian Renaissance Art and Architecture

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General Topics on the Italian Renaissance

• La Renaissance: Italy From the WebMuseum, Paris.
• Backgrounds to the Early Italian Renaissance By Richard Hooker at Washington State University.
• Early Modern: the Italian Renaissance Also by Richard Hooker.
• The RenaissanceAn experimental, multimedia site. Survey level.
• Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance Web site for the PBS programs. Note that one of the distinguishing characteristics of the project was the casting of actors who looked as closely as possible to portraits of the historical person. The actor portraying Lorenzo de'Medici is a spooky twin to Vasari's portrait of Lorenzo.

Renaissance Societies

• Villa I Tatti Remember if you get to go here its verboten to speak of Bernard Berenson.
• Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies At the University of Toronto. This seems to be the largest such program in North America, with undergraduate and graduate programs, and more programs than you (or at least I) could ever attend.
• The Renaissance Society of America Also the major Renaissance organization [sic]; for example see the 300+ pages of the 2009 conference handbook.
• UCLA Medieval-Renaissance Center
• Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, Ferrara
• University of Oklahoma Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Looks like this hasn't been updated since 2002!

Image Collections for the Entire Period

• The Web Gallery of Art "a virtual museum and searchable database of European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 15,400 reproductions."
• The Renaissance and Baroque Prof. Chris Witcombe's exhaustive collection of image sites
• The Art of Renaissance Science Galileo and Perspective.

Renaissance Architecture: Churches, Villas, and Gardens

• Italy in the Time of the Renaissance and Baroque Style Part of the larger Gardens site.
• Garden Tours of Italy
• The Enchanted Gardens of the Renaissance
• Classical Italian Villas & Gardens: A Tour in the Footsteps of Edith Wharton A 2003 tour sponsored by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America.
• Villa Gamberaia. Located just outside Florence.
• Architecture in Renaissance Italy From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
• Architecture and Public Space
• Palladio's Italian [sic] Villas
• Papal Villas of Latium A small site on the Villa Lante in Bagnaia.

Online Texts for the Italian Renaissance

Many of these texts are in Italian.

• OPAL Libri Antichi This is an online publication of nearly 4000 texts from the 16th and 17th centuries held by the library of the Facolta' di Lettere e Filosofia at the Universita' degli Studi di Torino.
• Vasari's Lives of the Artists With illustrations and bibliography (in process).
• Vasari: Lives Rather mysterious in origin: uses the George Bull translation (did the editor ask permission?) and the identity of the editor remains unknown. Handsome design and has a search engine.
• The Italian Renaissance: Internet Archive of Texts and Documents Large collection of texts from Petrarca to Vasari. Plus Burckhardt; modern articles are links to JSTOR that won't work for you if you are not among the anointed.
• Renaissance: from the Medieval Sourcebook Links to online texts from Dante to Burckhardt.
• Italian Renaissance Reader Small collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Pico della Mirandola.
• Oration on the Dignity of Man by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
• The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli 1515. This is a 1908 translation. Also in Italian.
• The Book of the Courtier Sir Thomas Hoby's 1561 English translation. Published 1900.

Dante (1265-1321)

• On Dante From the Catholic Encyclopedia, 1908.
• The Digital Dante Project At Columbia University.
• The Princeton Dante Project
• Dante on the Web Full texts--sometimes several editions of his works--and commentary. Distracting background--editor's attitude is "too bad."
• The World of Dante. Editor: Deborah Parker.
• Roberto Benigni recites Canto V of the Inferno.

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304-1374)