Concerned about sanitation during a severe bout of plague in Milan,
Leonardo da Vinci designed an ideal, clean city. Leonardo was far
from alone among his contemporaries in thinking about personal and
public hygiene, as Douglas Biow shows in The Culture of Cleanliness
in Renaissance Italy. A concern for cleanliness, he argues, was
everywhere in the Renaissance.Anxieties about cleanliness were
expressed in literature from humanist panegyrics to bawdy carnival
songs, as well as in the visual arts. Biow surveys them all to
explain why the topic so permeated Renaissance culture. At one
level, cleanliness, he documents, was a matter of real concern in
the Renaissance. At another, he finds, issues such as human
dignity, self-respect, self-discipline, social distinction, and
originality were rethought as a matter of artistic concern.The
Culture of Cleanliness in Renaissance Italy moves from the clean to
the unclean, from the lofty to the base. Biow first examines the
socially elevated, who defined and distinguished themselves as
clean, pure, and polite. He then turns to soap, an increasingly
common commodity in this period, and the figure of the washerwoman.
Finally he focuses on latrines, which were universally scorned yet
functioned artistically as figures of baseness, creativity, and fun
in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. Paralleling this social
stratification is a hierarchy of literary and visual artifacts,
from the discourse of high humanism to filthy curses and
scatological songs. Deftly bringing together high and low-as well
as literary and visual-cultures, this book provides a fresh
perspective on the Italian Renaissance and its artistic legacy.
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