Gender, Space and Experience at the Renaissance Court

Maria F. Maurer is an assistant professor of medieval and early modern art history at the University of Tulsa since 2013. Her PhD in the history of Italian Renaissance art from Indiana University was granted in 2012.

"The Palazzo del Te, the extraordinary villa ex-urbana built in Mantua by Duke Federico II Gonzaga in the 1520s and 1530s, is a confounding architectural and artistic tour de force. [...] In this book, Maria Maurer offers new possibilities by combining spatial theory with reception theory to discover the ways the villa became a locus for, and an influence on, the performance of gender by its inhabitants and visitors. [...] In fact, the book itself is a kind of performance, demonstrating the fecundity of Maurer’s approach, which is woven around a solid chronological core, tracing a trajectory from the novelty of Giulio’s invention at the Palazzo del Te to its dismissal as a bizarre and generally ignored aberration by the eighteenth century."- Sally Hickson, University of Guelph, Early Modern Women Vol. 16 No. 2 (Spring 2022)

• The Palace in Cyberspace: a note on the virtual tour, List of figures, Acknowledgments, Chapter 1: The Performative Palace, Chapter 2: Spaces of Ceremony, Chapter 3: The Palace in Time, Chapter 4: The Unbounded Palace, Chapter 5: Troubling Space Epilogue: Ruin and Rebirth, Bibliography