Category Archives: Renaissance

Magnificence: a very short introduction

I was shocked to realise that I received my Ph.D. twenty years ago this year. Because the subject I chose – an examination of the writings on art and architecture of the Bolognese notary and author Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (c. 1443-1510) – divided neatly into two halves, it was never really book-shaped, and so the only real publications I’ve managed to extract from it over the years were my Apollo article on looking at coins (which I wrote about recently here),1 and two articles in books, based on the second half of the thesis, which dealt with the concept of magnificence.2

Continue reading Magnificence: a very short introduction

  1. Rupert Shepherd, ‘A Letter Concerning Coins in Sixteenth-century Ferrara’, Apollo, Volume CXLIX, Number 443 (New Series) (January 1999), pp. 40-43; full text. []
  2. Rupert Shepherd, ‘Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti and a Practical Definition of Magnificence in the Context of Renaissance Architecture’, in Mary Rogers and Francis Ames-Lewis eds, Concepts of Beauty in Renaissance Art, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 52-65; Rupert Shepherd, ‘Republican Anxiety and Courtly Confidence: The Politics of Magnificence and Fifteenth-Century Italian Architecture’, in Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch, eds, The Material Renaissance: Costs and Consumption in Italy, c.1400-1650, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 47-70. []

A note about an article about a letter about looking at coins

A few months ago, I received an email via the contacts page on this website from Franco Saetti, an Italian numismatist, asking me to send him a copy of an article [5 MB PDF] I had written many years ago, discussing a letter which describes a group of people looking at, and discussing, newly-minted coins in Bologna in 1505.1

I scanned a copy of the article and sent it to Ing. Saetti. I was delighted to receive a packet from him a few weeks later, containing a couple of offprints of his own which discussed the same coins as my article.2 I read Ing. Saetti’s articles with interest, and they led to some further thoughts about my article. Continue reading A note about an article about a letter about looking at coins

  1. Rupert Shepherd, ‘A letter concerning coins in sixteenth-century Ferrara’, Apollo, new ser., 149/443 (January 1999), pp. 40-43. []
  2. Franco Saetti, ‘Immagini prospettiche nella monetazione rinascimentale italiana: il doppio ducato di Alfonso I d’Este, Rivista italiana di numismatica e scienze affini, 101 (2000), pp. 113-137; id., ‘“Prove” in rame di monete del rinascimento italiano con ritratto’, Rivista italiana di numismatica e scienze affini, 116 (2015), pp. 329-358. []