The death of the child Valerio Marcello
Margaret King shows what the death of a little boy named Valerio Marcello over five hundred years ago can tell us about his time. This child, scion of a family of power and privilege at Venice's time of greatness, left his father in a state of despair so profound and so public that it occasioned an outpouring of consoling letters, orations, treatises, and poems. In these documents, we find a firsthand account, richly colored by humanist conventions and expectations, of the life of the fifteenth-century boy, the passionate devotion of his father, the feelings of his brothers and sisters, the striking absence of his mother. The father's story is here as well: the career of a Venetian nobleman and scholar, patron and soldier, a participant in Venice's struggle for dominion in the north of Italy. Through these sources King also traces the cultural trends that made Marcello's century famous. Her work enlarges our view of the literature of consolation, which had a distinctive tradition in Venice, and shifting attitudes toward death from the late Middle Ages onward. For the depth and acuity of its insights into political, cultural, and private life in fifteenth-century Venice, this book will be essential reading for students of the Renaissance. For the grace and drama of its storytelling, it will be savored by anyone who wishes to look into life and death in a palace, and a city, long ago. -- Publisher description
Biography
xviii, 484 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
9780226436197, 9780226436203, 0226436195, 0226436209
29637872
Ch. 1. The Death of a Child
Ch. 2. The Birth of a Book
Ch. 3. Marcello in Word and Image
Ch. 4. Marcello in War and Peace
Ch. 5. Father and Son
Ch. 6. In Sympathy
Appendix One. Marcello Family and Monuments. I. The Marcello Family. II. Birth and Death of Jacopo Antonio and Valerio Marcello. III. Buddings and Monuments. IV. Excerpts
Appendix Two. Chronology
Appendix Three. Texts. I. Works by Jacopo Marcello or Compiled at His Direction. II. Consolatory Works to Jacopo Antonio Marcello for the Death of Valerio. III. Other Works Written to or about Jacopo Antonio Marcello. IV. Form of Citation of Texts in Notes
English, Italian, and Latin
The illuminated ms., De obitu Valerii ..., which is discussed in this work is located in the University of Glasgow Library
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