R Williams

Francesco Bocchi's the Beauties of the City of Florence. a Guidebook of 1591 (Studies in Medieval and Early Renaissance Art History) R Williams Annotated edition

The text presented here, Francesco Bocchi's Le Bellezze della città di Fiorenza (The Beauties of the City of Florence), originally published in 1591, is one of the most remarkable of Renaissance writings on art and thus an especially valuable document of the culture within which and for which Renaissance art was made. It is not exactly the first guidebook, nor is it entirely an art guidebook in the modern sense of the word, but it marks an important step in the history of guidebook literature, perhaps the definitive step in the formation of the modern genre. It seeks to direct people's attention to outstanding objects, but also to offer instruction in how to look, what to think, and what to say. Scholars find it useful for purely archaeological reasons, as a record of numerous minor works of art and their locations, for instance, but its deepest source of interest is the lively discursive engagement with art to which it attests, and the passionate and eloquent way in which it makes the case that such engagement is a matter of the greatest urgency and importance. For this reason, the book has much to offer the non-specialist - anyone who visits Florence and gives any thought at all to what it means to look at art - and the desire to reach this kind of reader has been the real motivation behind the preparation of this translation. This translation is thus an invitation to enter into a dialogue with history; its deeper purpose is to stimulate modern visitors to Florence to objectify their own processes of looking, thinking, and speaking, and in so doing to develop a new degree of self-consciousness, a new, historical perspective on themselves.