Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

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.

• List of Illustrations Acknowledgements 1 Activating the Renaissance Viewer: Art and Somaesthetic Experience Somaesthetics and Political Persuasion Patronage and the Construction of the Viewer in Medicean Florence 2 Mobilizing Visitors: Political Persuasion and the Somaesthetics of Belonging in the Chapel of the Magi Sensory Activation and the Signaling of the Patron Somaesthetic Emplacement in Immersive Artistic Programs Staging Belonging in Bethlehem 3 Staging Gendered Authority: Donatello's Judith, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de'Medici's sacra storia, and the Somaesthetics of Justice Medici Garden as a Theater in the Round Somaesthetic Cultivation of Audience and Narrator Collective Witnessing at the Scaffolds 4 Performing Virtual Pilgrimage: Somaesthetics and Holy Land Devotion at San Vivaldo Materializing the Holy Land Experience Somaesthetic Fashioning and Affective Devotion Possessing the New Jerusalem 5 Playing the Printed Piazza: Giovanni de'Bardi's Discorso sopra il giouco del calcio fiorentino and Somaesthetic Discipline in Grand-Ducal Florence The Florentine Piazza as Practiced Space of Calcio Antiquity and Historical Realism in Bardi's Discorso Battle Tactics, Vedute, and Somaesthetic Dominion Ritual Display and Restraint in the Noble Game of Calcio 6 Epilogue: Renaissance Somaesthetics and the Digital Age Index

"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