Description

With the discovery of America, the European art underwent a decisive impetus to the renewal. With particular attention to the receptive environment of Medicean Florence, this essay analyzes the influence of new ideas and aesthetic suggestions from overseas on the Western imaginary, showing how the widening of cultural horizons determined a surprising change of types of expression, arts and thought. Ranging over painting to cartography, from literature to philosophy, from geometry to construction of myths and legends, the author shows us how the global dimension and the consequent expansion of knowledge was critical to lead the old continent from the conventions of medieval art to the explosion of the Renaissance, to Mannerism and Baroque.