Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on the Editors

Notes on the Contributors

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1 Introduction: The Figure of the Nymph in Early Modern Culture

Part 1 Nymphs between the Visual Arts and Literature

Chapter 2 Pleasures of the Imagination: Narrating the Nymph, from Boccaccio to Lope De Vega

Chapter 3 Salmacis, Hermaphrodite, and the Inversion of Gender: Allegorical Interpretations and Pictorial Representations of an Ovidian Myth, ca. 1300–1770

Chapter 4 The Sleeping Nymph Revisited: Ekphrasis, Genius Loci and Silence

Chapter 5 ‘Who, Then, is the “Nympha”?’ An Iconographic Analysis of the Figure of the Maid in the Tornabuoni Frescoes

Part 2 Literary Representations

Chapter 6 Lamenting, Dancing, Praising: The Multilayered Presence of Nymphs in Florentine Elegiac Poetry of the Quattrocento

Chapter 7 An Epiphanic Figure with the Power to Bind: Lia’s Role in Boccaccio’s Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine

Chapter 8 Renaissance Nymphs as Intermediaries in Early Modern German Territorial Politics

Chapter 9 Discursive Sisters of the Arts, Raw Material of Inspiration: The Early Pegnitz Flower Society’s Nymphs

Part 3 Garden Architecture

Chapter 10 The Mediality of the Nymph in the Cultural Context of Pirro Visconti’s Villa at Lainate

Chapter 11 Nymphs Bathing in the King’s Garden: La Granja de San Ildefonso and Caserta

Part 4 Music

Chapter 12 Venez plorer ma desolation: Lamenting and Mourning Nymphs in Culture and Music around 1500

Chapter 13 The Nymph’s Voice as an Acoustic Reflection of the Self

Part 5 Aetiology and Antiquarianism

Chapter 14 Founding Sisters: Nymphs and Aetiology in Humanist Latin Poetry

Chapter 15 Our White Ladies on the Graves: Historicisations of Nymphs in Early Modern Antiquarianism

Index Nominum