Games and Sports in Renaissance Italy

This book offers a cultural, visual, and material history of games in Renaissance Italy. Games in the Renaissance offered an inventive and imaginative understanding of the world for their players, one founded not only on iterative performances but also through a visual and material culture imbricated in early modern Italy’s ideologically inflected artistic, scientific, and social systems.

As this book demonstrates, the materia of play took part in shaping the imaginary of the Cinquecento and its roots in the Quattrocento within a network of interwoven courts, intellectual circles, and civic centers situated on the Italian peninsula. For makers, players, viewers, and patrons, for lords, professional athletes, and gambling workmen, the visual culture of games – the art of play – stood at the very center of the world we have long known as the Renaissance.

Games and Sports in Renaissance Italy above all focuses on how the material and visual cultures of games shaped their performance and practice and, crucially, our knowledge of the past. The structure of this book echoes infamous gambler and polymath Cardano’s categorization of games as Games of Wit (including both skill and mixed skill and chance), Games of Fortune (including both chance and Terence’s fate), and Games of Vigor (including athletics of agility and strength). This book will resonate with scholars and students of Renaissance studies, art history, and cultural history, offering fresh perspectives on the material and visual cultures of games.