Somaesthetic Experience and the Viewer in Medicean Florence

Viewers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were encouraged to forge connections between their physical and affective states when they experienced works of art. They believed that their bodies served a critical function in coming to know and make sense of the world around them, and intimately engaged themselves with works of art and architecture on a daily basis. This book examines how viewers in Medicean Florence were self-consciously cultivated to enhance their sensory appreciation of works of art and creatively self-fashion through somaesthetics. Mobilized as a technology for the production of knowledge with and through their bodies, viewers contributed to the essential meaning of Renaissance art and, in the process, bound themselves to others. By investigating the framework and practice of somaesthetic experience of works by Benozzo Gozzoli, Donatello, Benedetto Buglioni, Giorgio Vasari, and others in fifteenth- and sixteenth century Florence, the book approaches the viewer as a powerful tool that was used by patrons to shape identity and power in the Renaissance.

Terry-Fritsch Allie :

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.

"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