Publisher's Synopsis
If the fifteenth century in Italy has been seen as the moment when the constellation of disciplines known as 'the humanities' begins to take shape, it was also a time when a 'crisis in the humanities' - their value, their limits, who and what they included or excluded - was also manifest. A largely nineteenth century construction of 'Renaissance humanism' has indelibly cast humanist pursuits in terms of writing, with arts of making or techne sometimes idealized as a second order manifestation of humanist ideas. This book re-examines the career of one socially and intellectually ambitious artist, Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) and his intellectual network, to re-open questions of the locations of humanism, the notion of 'humanist art ' or painting as a form of discourse that far from being ancillary to poetry, history, or rhetoric, served as a model for all three. It will be shown that the place of normativity or typicality that Andrea Mant
