Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence

Emanuele Lugli

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Hardback

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English

University of Chicago Press
27 June 2023

Art Treatments & Subjects

An interdisciplinary study of hair through the art, philosophy, and science of fifteenth-century Florence.

In this innovative cultural history, hair is the portal through which Emanuele Lugli accesses the cultural production of Lorenzo il Magnifico’s Florence. Lugli reflects on the ways writers, doctors, and artists expressed religious prejudices, health beliefs, and gender and class subjugation through alluring works of art, in medical and political writings, and in poetry. He considers what may have compelled Sandro Botticelli, the young Leonardo da Vinci, and dozens of their contemporaries to obsess over braids, knots, and hairdos by examining their engagement with scientific, philosophical, and theological practices.

By studying hundreds of fifteenth-century documents that engage with hair, Lugli foregrounds hair’s association to death and gathers insights about human life at a time when Renaissance thinkers redefined what it meant to be human and to be alive. Lugli uncovers overlooked perceptions of hair when it came to be identified as a potential vector for liberating culture, and he corrects a centuries-old prejudice that sees hair as a trivial subject, relegated to passing fashion or the decorative. He shows hair, instead, to be at the heart of Florentine culture, whose inherent violence Lugli reveals by prompting questions about the entanglement of politics and desire.

By: Emanuele Lugli
Imprint: University of Chicago Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 513g
ISBN: 9780226822518
ISBN 10: 0226822516
Pages: 344
Publication Date: 27 June 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

ONE Prologue: Hair Care TWO Learning to See Thinness THREE Desiccated Smoke FOUR Tie Me Down, Burn Me Up FIVE Superfluities SIX Achonciare SEVEN Never Just Itself EIGHT Raking the Skin NINE On the Politics of a Comb TEN Split Ends: A Conclusion Appendix: Maps Acknowledgments Illustration Credits Notes Index

Emanuele Lugli is assistant professor of art history at Stanford University. He is the author of The Making of Measure and the Promise of Sameness, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews for Knots, or the Violence of Desire in Renaissance Florence

Knots is the opposite of academic hair-splitting. Adopting a self-aware and approachable voice that's attuned to both contemporary and historical concerns, Emanuele Lugli reorients our understanding of Medicean Florence around hair, a borderland of the body usually treated as trivial. He braids together Renaissance art, science, literature, and philosophy into a new way of imagining what cultural history can be. -- Rebecca Zorach, Northwestern University In this lovely study of hair's meanings in Renaissance culture, Lugli unveils ways in which people naturalize cultural values regarding age, race, class, gender, and sexuality. Beautifully illustrated, meticulously researched, and engagingly written, Knots will engage scholars, students, and lay readers alike. -- Katharine Park, Harvard University