Overview

Gender, Space, and Experience at the Renaissance Court investigates the dynamic relationships between gender and architectural space in Renaissance Italy. It examines the ceremonial use and artistic reception of the Palazzo Te from the arrival of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1530 to the Sack of Mantua in 1630. This book further proposes that we conceptualise the built environment as a performative space, a space formed by the gendered relationships and actors of its time. The Palazzo Te was constituted by the gendered behaviors of sixteenth-century courtiers, but it was not simply a passive receptor of gender performance. Through its multivalent form and ceremonial function, Maria F. Maurer argues that the palace was an active participant in the construction and perception of femininity and masculinity in the early modern court.

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9789462985537

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Reviews

The Palazzo del Te, the extraordinary villa ex-urbana built in Mantua by Duke Federico II Gonzaga in the 1520s and 1530s, is a confounding architectural and artistic tour de force. [...] In this book, Maria Maurer offers new possibilities by combining spatial theory with reception theory to discover the ways the villa became a locus for, and an influence on, the performance of gender by its inhabitants and visitors. [...] In fact, the book itself is a kind of performance, demonstrating the fecundity of Maurer's approach, which is woven around a solid chronological core, tracing a trajectory from the novelty of Giulio's invention at the Palazzo del Te to its dismissal as a bizarre and generally ignored aberration by the eighteenth century. - Sally Hickson, University of Guelph, Early Modern Women Vol. 16 No. 2 (Spring 2022)

Author Information

Maria F. Maurer is an assistant professor of medieval and early modern art history at the University of Tulsa since 2013. Her PhD in the history of Italian Renaissance art from Indiana University was granted in 2012.

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