Italian Renaissance literature

Heraldry is a well-defined subject and, almost by definition, a narrow one. It is a “feudal language” with codified rules, attributes, and a well-consolidated history. Originating in medieval Europe around the invention of full-body armor, the culture of jousting and tournaments, notions of heredity, strong corporate institutions, and the practice of genealogy, heraldry was common throughout the so-called ancien régime. Its fortunes are widely thought to have declined in the Italian Renaissance because of its incompatibility with some of the very features that have characterized the Renaissance as a distinctive cultural configuration and revolution, including the rise of the humanism and return to classical antiquity, the emergence of the individual, the emancipation of the artist.

Renaissance Heraldry calls these theses into question with evidence of the vitality of heraldic forms in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy; and with evidence that "medieval heraldry" as we know it today (and as we call it today) was a construction of certain strands of Renaissance culture, tied to the construction of the very concept and study of the Middle Ages. My point of entry into the subject is not the point of origin, or the origin (his)story, of the heraldic image. Instead, it's a popular fifteenth-century poet, who has been famously neglected in Italian literary history with respect to the scope of his accomplishments: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441ca. - 1495). Boiardo brings us also to one of the off-center centers of the peninsula’s pre-modern political geography, where he was born and where he operated: the Este states, with their capital at Ferrara, and their centuries-long tradition of “feudal” rule under a single dynasty.

Specifically, Boiardo’s romance epic, the Inamoramento de Orlando (1482/3, 1495), and the history of its continuation and reception in the Renaissance are used as occasions here to investigate the competing discourses that circulated around a spectrum of images relating to identity, property, authority, and the law, both in the Este states and elsewhere on the peninsula. The words these images were called by, the attributes they were said to possess, their histories, meanings, cultural and territorial associations, and the protocols governing their use, were actively questioned and contested. The technologies of philology and antiquarianism shaped the answers, and the means of arriving at them, that we are most familiar with today; our “grammars of signs,” as I call them here. However, the Este dynasty at times nourished humanisms that brought different resources - different philologies, different antiquarianisms, different historiographies and poetics - to the task of organizing and reproducing signs from the past.

In addition to heraldry, imprese, and literary studies, this project is in conversation with research that has emphasized the particularities and contributions of the so-called Rinascimento Estense from different disciplinary points of view, from political history to the history of art. It is invested in studying the resources that (re)invented the heraldic image around the Este capital between 1430 and 1598. It begins to propose that these resources constitute essential contributions, still vital, to the humanist tradition in its capacity for anachronic thinking and creativity beyond positivism.

Il De instituendis liberis principum è un breve trattato sull’educazione del principe scritto dal nobile regnicolo Belisario Acquaviva (ca. 1464-1528) è un trattato politico-pedagogico scritto all’inizio del Cinquecento nella Napoli già vicereale e pubblicato un’unica volta nel 1519 presso l’editore Pasquet de Sallo. L’operetta fa parte di una sequenza di quattro scritti tutti dedicati all’institutio dell’uomo d’alto rango; le altre sono: De venatione et de aucupio; De re militari et singulari certamine; Paraphrasis in Economica Aristotelis. Nel De instituendis liberis principum vengono ripresi in modo massiccio e si direbbe ostentato temi e preoccupazioni propri dell’umanesimo aragonese di età ferrantina – dalla teoria della virtus a quella della mutua caritas, dalla maiestas alle attività di svago dei sovrani. Questo intervento intende riportare al cenbtro dell’attenzione critica un testo assai poco studiato e mai più édito da allora, interrogandosi sulle ragioni e i modi di tale operazione di recupero dottrinale e letterario, sugli scarti e le differenze rispetto alla dottrina umanistica e pontaniana in particolare, spia delle quali può essere il nuovo rilievo assunto dalla religio, la minuta classificazione della prudentia o l’attenzione, maggiore che in passato, alla dimensione militare. L’obiettivo è delucidare le ragioni per cui un nobile, militare e umanista, certamente legato alla dinastia aragonese (aveva combattuto a Ferrara e a Otranto) e forse scontento del nuovo potere spagnolo, si impegna nel proporre un’immagine del princeps in un’epoca in cui Napoli non è più sede reale.

Panel 9 "Partire per descrivere: il viaggio scientifico nella letteratura,  nel giornalismo e nelle arti" a cura di Pasqua De Cicco e Federica Rossi.

Tra la fine del XVI e la metà del XVII secolo in Italia nacque una moda epica consacrata alla narrazione della Scoperta del Nuovo Mondo, i cui pincipali esponenti furono Giovanni Giorgini, Tommaso Stigliani e Girolamo Bartommei. L’intervento vorrà analizzare alcuni passaggi-chiave delle loro opere che si soffermano sulla rappresentazione del paesaggio e delle popolazioni amerinde, sottolineando i modi retorici utilizzati dai poeti per veicolare l’esperienza - soltanto immaginata e filtrata dalle descrizioni di navigatori e conquistadores - dell’alterità geografica e antropologica che si estendeva al di là dell’Oceano. L’importanza di tali poemi risiede, infatti, nell’aver plasmato l’immaginario sulle Americhe di un’ampia cerchia di lettori e lettrici che trovarono nella poesia un modo per avvicinarsi al Nuovo Mondo. Oggetti culturali di estremo interesse, dunque, tali poemi rappresentano la possibiltà di ricostruire la percezione italiana della Scoperta e di quello che lo storico Alfred W. Crosby negli anni ’70 definì con la formula di Columbian Exchange.

Villa Madama, Raphael’s late masterwork of architecture, landscape, and decoration for the Medici popes, is a paradigm of the Renaissance villa. The coming-into-being of this important, unfinished complex provides a remarkable case study for the nature of architectural invention. Drawing on little-known poetry describing the villa while it was on the drawing board as well as groundplans, letters, and antiquities once installed there, this book reveals the design process to have been a dynamic, collaborative effort involving humanists as well as architects, from the earliest stages. This study explores design as a self-reflexive process, as well as the dialectic of text and architectural form, thereby illuminating the relation of word and image in Renaissance architectural practice. This revisionist account of architectural design as a process engaging different systems of knowledge, visual and verbal, has important implications for the relation of architecture and language, meaning in architecture, and the translation of idea into form. With a critical edition and translation of Francesco Sperulo’s 1519 poem, Villa Iulia Medica versibus fabricata /The Villa Giulia Medicea Constructed in Verse (BAV, Vat. Lat. 5812) by Nicoletta Marcelli, and gloss by the author.

The paper discusses the special role the infant characters play in the tragedies of Lodovico Dolce, a 16th century Venetian playwright. His Senecan adaptations: "Hecuba", "Giocasta", "Ifigenia", "Medea", "Thieste" and "Le Troiane", are taken into consideration as well as his original, and probably the most famous: "Marianne", a drama based on the tragic fate of Herod the Great' s wife and his two sons

L’intervento riconsidera la questione dell’influenza dei lirici toscani del secolo XIII sui poeti napoletani della fine del XV secolo focalizzandosi sui Sonetti et canzoni di Sannazaro. L’ipotesi che vi sia stato un influsso della lirica toscana più antica mediato dalla Raccolta Aragonese viene affrontata inquadrandola da una prospettiva differente. Dopo aver esaminato la presunta fonte, in particolare per quel che riguarda le circostanze della sua disponibilità una volta arrivata in mano a Federico d’Aragona e le modalità di diffusione della tradizione che da essa ha origine, vengono vagliati i punti di contatto tra i Sonetti et canzoni e il contenuto dell’antologia donata da Lorenzo de’ Medici.

The work reconsiders the issue of thirteenth century lyric poets’ influence on late fifteenth century Neapolitan poets focusing on Sannazaro’s Sonetti et canzoni. The hypothesis of an influence of early Tuscan lyrics mediated by the Raccolta Aragonese is reassessed starting from a different perspective. After re-examining the presumed source, especially with regard to the circumstances of its availability once it came into the hands of Federico d’Aragona and how the tradition originating from it was transmitted and disseminated, we analyse the points of contact between Sannazaro’ Sonetti et canzoni and the content of the anthology commissioned and donated by Lorenzo de' Medici.

Some insights on L’idea del theatro of Giulio Camillo Delminio and its critical reception.

Angelo Maria Monaco
Preliminary draft of a work in progress, the essay is given as a reasoned recognition of the critical reception of Giulio Camillo Delminio’s L’idea del theatro (1550). Intended, on the one hand, as a compendium useful to orient Scholars in the magmatic bibliography on L’idea, on the other hand, as a starting point for new study hypotheses about Camillo as an iconographer. Divided into three sections, the essay focuses, first, on the relevant role played by images in the architecture of L’idea. The second part is a sort of annotated bibliography that starts from Frances Yates’ famous essay, published in 1966. In the third part, two new proposals are discussed. The first one deals with the origin and meaning of the name ‘Delminio’, explained from a philological point of view as a latinization aiming at Camillo’s own self-fashioning. The second one highlights the helpfulness of the list of annotated images in a manuscript in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, recently rediscovered, to clarify the meaning of some cryptic images in L’idea.

Resumen: A lo largo del Quattrocento y del Cinquecento, se escribieron un número considerable de obras y se hicieron una serie de traducciones de textos que presentaban un contenido satírico y una fuerte carga sexual. Mi intención es ver cómo estas obras llegaron a conformar un corpus homogéneo, teniendo en cuenta que fueron escritas en épocas y tradiciones diferentes, y cómo la lectura lúdica se impuso a las verdaderas intenciones de sus autores. Abstract: During the Quattrocento and the Cinquecento, a considerable number of Italian works with satirical content and a strong sexual element were published in Venice, along with a series of translations of similar texts. My intent is to analyze how these works came to configure a homogeneous corpus, considering that they were written in different periods and traditions, and how the ludic reading was imposed on the true intentions of their authors.