The Scholar in His Study: Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy

About this book

Ownership and Experience in Renaissance Italy In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy many leading citizens constructed and furnished distinctive studies for themselves. The study was an individually designed room for private and social use -- as an office library a family archive or treasury as the nucleus of an art collection or as a space for contemplation. This book is an engaging account of the Renaissance Italian study and its contents. Generously illustrated with depictions of studies and the precious and unusual objects they contained the book examines the significance of the study to its owner and visitors its structure and location and the prized possessions that might fill such a special room. To own a personal study was to lay claim to the civility and educated tastes that defined the ruling elite of the Italian Renaissance. Studies were created by members of the administrative and professional classes notaries doctors of law and medicine clerics patricians merchants and bankers. They were also owned by scholars university teachers and students artists and craftsmen. In this book Dora Thornton draws on a variety of sources -- inventories account books contemporary literature visual representations of scholars at work and surviving art objects -- to document activities and collections associated with the study. She shows how urban elites as well as rulers and patrons contributed to the development of the study a fascinating feature of Italian Renaissance culture that came to be widely imitated throughout Europe.