Altichiero in the Fifteenth Century

Altichiero was the dominant north Italian painter of the later Trecento. In Padua, in the 1370s and early 1380s, he worked for patrons close to Petrarch and his circle and perhaps in direct contact with the poet himself. By the time of the second edition of Vasari’s Vite (1568) the memory of Altichiero’s work had suffered significant occlusion, and Vasari’s account of him is little more than an appendix to his life of Carpaccio. Only since the later nineteenth century, and particularly in the last fifty or so years, has Altichiero’s reputation been restored. It is the purpose of this paper to examine aspects of that reputation throughout the century or so after the painter’s death (by April 1393)

Exploring minor clerics in early medieval Tuscany

The article examines minor clerics (clerici) in Carolingian texts. Comparing episcopal capitularies from Italy and Francia suggests that clerici played a more prominent role in Italian church life. An analysis of charters from the monastery of Monte Amiata reveals a high proportion of clerici. They appear as a rurally-based group, with varying levels of education, but of some local social standing, and were often mature men with children. The prevalence of such clerici may be related to the northern Italian structure of pievi, and the opportunities these provided for mixed patterns of father-son and uncle-nephew inheritance of church office. The blurring of the lay/clerical divide by such clerici may have particularly worried eleventh-century church reformers coming to Italy from other regions of Western Europe

«Duas cartas unius tenoris per alphabetum divisas scripsi». Contributo a una geografia delle pratiche documentarie nell'Italia dei secoli XII e XIII

This study is inspired by the recent finding of some chartae partitae from the decades between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries preserved in the City Library and in the Diocesan Historical Archive of Viterbo and by the consequent discovery of a documentary phenomenon never noted by scholars until now for this city. As well as studying this particular documentary and unknown practice of the notaries of Viterbo, the Author extends the focus on the Italian panorama, comparing the case of Viterbo with those of Piedmont, Liguria and Sicily, where in the same centuries notaries used this documentary form for legal acts such as agreements, conventions, treaties and other bilateral actions, analyzing the reasons that led to the notaries of these different historical areas to use the charta partita, and identifying three different documentary areas inside which it was employed: the public one, the mercantile one and that of the instrumentum publicum. Finally, the Author considers in what way the words cyrographum, charta (or instrumentum) per alphabetum (or per ABC) partita (or partitum) were used in Italian documents. The artiche gives also, for the first time, the critical edition of five previously unpublished documents and an analytical description of the external features of al

Pisa alla conquista delle Baleari (1113-1115): il lessico delle armi nel Liber Maiorichinus

Il saggio analizza il lessico delle armi del Liber Maiorichinus, un poema epico storico dedicato al racconto della spedizione navale effettuata da contingenti pisano-catalani contro le isole Baleari (1113-1115

Framing Clement III, (Anti)Pope, 1080-1100. Preface

La vicenda terrena dell’(anti)papa Clemente III e gli sviluppi postumi della sua memoria sono esplorati per mettere in luce sia le complesse dinamiche in cui si inserisce questo ecclesiastico di rango assurto al soglio pontificio in una fase cruciale della riforma della Chiesa, sia le implicazioni legate al prefisso "anti"