Habsburg politics and cultures in the 16th century. The cosmopolitan Iberian experience of empires and kingdoms

Abstract

Starting from a political reality, which is, at the same time, artistic and cultural, the book Ars Hasburgica aims to review the still so common historiographical conception of the Renaissance that conceives this period from a geographically Italocentric, artistically classicist and politically centered the idea of "national" arts and schools.

But Renaissance is a more global and complex phenomenon. What this book aims to offer is an idea of the art of that period that considers the role played by the Habsburg dynasty and its various courts in this period, trying to verify whether, by applying other historiographic models, and having the art of the Casa de Austria as a focus, traditional ideas can continue to be maintained well into the twenty-first century. We refer to the so-called "Vasari paradigm", on which art history of the sixteenth century has largely been built over the last centuries. It is also intended to structure concepts about the art of the period not so much around nationalist considerations and identities of the arts, but to raise these issues throughout ideas such as that of the court as a political, artistic and cultural sphere, in the wake of the classical studies by Norbert Elias, Amedeo Quondam or Carlo Ossola.