Lost in translation: Urban settings in fifteenth-century literary compositions and their audiences. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2021
This article analyzes the distinct literary and art historical decisions made by Marco Boschini (1602-1681) in his Carta del Navegar Pitoresco (Venice, 1660) in the cultural context of two of Venice's eminent literary academies (the Accademia Delfica and the Accademia de' Incogniti), to which he belonged. 1 Boschini-a painter, engraver, cartographer and producer of glass pearls-embodied the quintessentially hybrid intellectual culture associated with literary academies in seventeenth century Italy. This culture influenced his art theoretical decisions such as writing the Carta in the Venetian vernacular and associating it with disciplines such as literature and alchemy. The Carta therefore serves as a critical vehicle for investigating the role of literary academies as hybrid intellectual contexts and the nature of their influence on early modern intellectual culture. Li terary academies and a culture of acutezza Dedicated to the honing of encyclopedic erudition of the predominantly male citizen, literary academies focused on perfecting linguistic and rhetorical knowledge, history, literature, as well as natural philosophy. 2 In focusing on intellectual pursuits, these academies served as spaces that facilitated communication across socially segregated classes by uniting aristocrats and bourgeois (cittadini) toward collectively accumulating knowledge that was considered essential for a citizen. The training imparted in these literary academies enhanced rhetorical as well as intellectual skills and facilitated a lively exchange between intellectuals of different stripes, including artists, scientists, and poets. These complex spaces also served as important centers for the formation of "modern" knowledge with hybrid roots. Therefore, literary academies are acknowledged to serve as "trading zones" of knowledge or "heterotopic spaces", which fostered a "culture of curiosity". 3 Literary academies promoted a culture of acutezza-an early modern term for acute, rational, and metaphorical thinking that aims at an insightful analysis of objects and an intuitive association between conceptually separated ideas. 4 A rhetorical category deriving from antiquity, acutezza became a central theme of several seventeenth-century rhetorical treatises. 5 Acutezza also functioned as a fundamental impulse for the cross-pollination between ideas deriving from different disciplines. It was upheld as an intellectual virtue-even a gift-of curiosi across all disciplines: one could read, write, or *This paper was originally written as a response-paper for the conference "Multitemporalitäten, Heterochronien, novantiquitates" held on April 4-5, 2019 in Berlin. I am grateful to Valeska von Rosen for her invitation to comment on her research project on the Venetian art theorist Marco Boschini (1602-1681). In doing so, she introduced me to the fascinating research of the DFG-Forschungsgruppe FOR 2305 Diskursivierungen von Neuem. About the general aims of this research group see HUSS 2016.
History or pre-history? Recent revisions in the eighteenth-century novel in Italy
Journal of Romance Studies, 2001
Rewriting literary history After a century of almost total critical neglect, a recent revival of interest in Italy in the indigenous eighteenth-century novel breaks with a long-standing tradition which identifies the origins of the modern Italian novel with Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi (1825-7). For the Romantics, Manzoni's intention to educate his readership in the civic and religious values of the Risorgimento lent respectability to a genre that had been otherwise widely condemned, and his novel has since come to be seen as a cornerstone in the foundation of a national culture and language. In this review article I shall attempt to trace the ways in which recent developments in approaches to the novel and its readers have begun over the past quarter century to impact on the established history of the novel in Italy and are contributing to a rethinking of eighteenth-century narrative, of what makes a narrative a novel, and of the different reading practices it produces. But before turning to the question of critical reception, I shall begin with a brief outline of the development of the pre-nineteenth-century novel in Italy. Thanks to the recent work of critics such as Folco Portinari, Alberto Asor Rosa and Carlo Madrignani among others, we have been reminded of the existence of an autonomous seventeenth-and eighteenth-century narrative tradition which is the novel in all but name. What is curious about this history is that, from the point of view of authorship, the Italian novel appears to have had not one beginning but two. A rapid historical sketch conducted today would date the inception of the modern Italian novel as an autonomous genre in prose at about 1625. This is followed by a long period between roughly 1670 and 1740 during which Italian authors turned away from the novel but Italian readers continued to demand it. Seventeenth-century theorists, however, still had considerable difficulty in placing the romanzo [novel], as Attilio Motta's interesting study of the evolution of the word romanzo through dictionary and encyclopedia entries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows (Motta 1997: 65-78). He notes that the first edition of the authoritative (and conservative) Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca of 1612 offers the succinct definition Poema eroico [Heroic poem], later modified in 1691 with Sorta di [A kind of ] inserted in front of poema, so allocating it, as the entry notes, among the sottogeneri [subgenres] of poetic narration. To find a definition which takes into account recent developments in the genre at home as well as abroad, one has to wait until the fourth
‘Walking in the Way of Metaphors and Enigmatic Images’: Piero Della Francesca's PerugiaAnnunication
Australian Journal of Art, 1987
G iven the abundance of studies devoted to the iconography and perspectival organisation of the Renaissance Annunciation, it is surprising that the rather prominent example of Piero della Francesca from the Polyptych of St. Anthony in Perugia has not been given much attention (Figs. l, 2). While Domenico Veneziano's Annunciation from the predella of the St. Lucy altarpiece (Fig. 3) is favoured as a paradigmatic Quattrocento composition in which the harmony of spatial construction matches the harmony of its theme, the closely connected Annuniciation by Veneziano's pupil, Piero della Francesca, is criticised for a fanatical and unnecessary preoccupation with geometry. Over the years, scholars have been unanimous about the awkwardness of the work, some, like Roberto Longhi, attributing its characteristics to an over-refined ludic manner, others, such as Creighton Gilbert, to an 'absurd obsession with perspective and architecture'. 2 At the same time, however, its formal architectural theme is that aspect of the work which marks it as one whose antecedent is Masaccio's. lost Annunciation panel from San Niccolo sopr'Arno. 3 Veneziano's Annunciation is of the same lineage; all Annunciations of this type show the Virgin and the Archan positioned within a portico, or outside, before a deep spatial recession leading to a door or gate. As the fifteenth century progressed, the architectural enclosure of Annunciations assumed a more and more complex and elaborate form, at times reflecting, as Andre Chaste! has observed, fantastic sets from theatrical sacre rappresentazionU Piero della Francesca's Annunciation is from the later part of this' development, between the exemplum ofMasaccio and thejantasia ofCarlo Crivelli. 5 Importantly, it is at least twenty years later than Veneziano's St. Lucy altarpiece Annunciation and therefore cannot be expected to exhibit the clear, relatively uncomplicated rhythms of that work.
Simultaneous vision in Paolo Fiammingo's A Vision of the Holy Family near Verona
Colnaghi Studies Journal, 2021
A truly bizarre sixteenth-century Italian painting Holy Family near Verona has confounded interpretations of its unusual appearance or its authorship. Two overlapping, semi-transparent compositions—a nocturnal view of the city of Verona and the Holy Family in a landscape—are joined and separated by the illusionistic rendering of a canvas rolling down to reveal the image beneath. A cartellino offers information about the work’s date and locus—1581 Verona—but fails to reveal the artist’s name. Instead, it is just one of several illusionistic layers that destabilize a cohesive interpretation of the entire work, including its categorization as a trompe l’oeil. Rather than trick the eye, this work challenges the viewer to contemplate these interwoven images simultaneously. This article proposes the painting is by Pauwels Franck, called Paolo Fiammingo (ca. 1540-1596), a Flemish artist active in the Veneto in the late sixteenth-century, and considers it in relation to historical modes of vision, illusionism, veiling, and revelation in Italian Renaissance painting.