- 320 York Street - Room 522
New Haven CT 0520 - (609) 258-9053
Alessandro Giammei
Yale University, Italian, Faculty Member
- Bryn Mawr College, Italian, Faculty MemberPrinceton University, Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, Post-Doc, and 2 moreadd
- Italian Studies, Italian Literature, Contemporary Poetry, 20th Century Italian Literature, Italian art, Ekphrasis, and 11 moreNonsense, Modern Italian Poetry, Literature and Visual Arts, Postmodern Literature, Avant-garde writing, Concrete Poetry, Contemporary Italian Poetry, Renaissance Studies, Italian Renaissance Art, Renaissance literature, and Transhistorical and cross cultural aestheticsedit
- Alessandro is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. He was previously an Assistant Professor of ... moreAlessandro is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at Yale University. He was previously an Assistant Professor of Transnational Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at Bryn Mawr College. Before that, he was a Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Princeton University, where he taught in the Department of French and Italian and coordinated the Humanities classes of the Prison Teaching Initiative. His work addresses trans-historical and interdisciplinary topics at the crossway of textual and visual studies, Renaissance and modernity. He is currently completing a book about Ludovico Ariosto’s multimedia legacy in the literary, visual, and political culture of the 20th century. His first book, Nell'officina del nonsense di Toti Scialoja, won the Harvard edition of the Edinburgh Gadda Prize in 2015.edit
https://www.edizioninottetempo.it/it/ti-basta-l-atlantico-lettere-1906-1931 Virginia Woolf e Lytton Strachey si sono scritti per venticinque anni. Nelle loro lettere hanno discusso di libri, scrittura e amici che si erano comportati bene... more
https://www.edizioninottetempo.it/it/ti-basta-l-atlantico-lettere-1906-1931
Virginia Woolf e Lytton Strachey si sono scritti per venticinque anni. Nelle loro lettere hanno discusso di libri, scrittura e amici che si erano comportati bene o male, hanno parlato di oceano e natura (Woolf l’amava, Strachey la sdegnava) e preso appuntamenti per il tè, mancandone parecchi. Sono lettere di cene, conversazioni nottambule e confidenze, letture intirizzite vicino al fuoco e viaggi, di ritiri tra brume gallesi o solitudini scozzesi, di ritorni al bel mondo cittadino (amato/odiato), e poi successi editoriali (immediato quello di Strachey, piú lento quello di Woolf) e affilate opinioni letterarie – cosí Dostoevskij è il piú grande scrittore mai vissuto, Henry James scrive romanzi notevoli nonostante manchi completamente di ironia, mentre l’Ulisse di Joyce è insostenibile. Pagine e pagine di mondanità, pettegolezzi, malattie o ipocondrie, una corrispondenza in cui libri e vita, piú che vicini, sono intrecciati, con malinconie ed entusiasmi che si incalzano tra le righe in mezzo a parole di infinita tenerezza – anche se “le cose che contano non si possono dire”. Chiara Valerio, che traduce le lettere di Virginia Woolf, e Alessandro Giammei, che traduce quelle di Strachey, curano la prima edizione italiana completa dello scambio tra i due scrittori, basata sugli originali archiviati in vari fondi internazionali, in particolare alla Mortimer Rare Book Collection dello Smith College in Massachusetts. Il carteggio include una sezione dedicata alla riproduzione di alcuni manoscritti.
Virginia Woolf e Lytton Strachey si sono scritti per venticinque anni. Nelle loro lettere hanno discusso di libri, scrittura e amici che si erano comportati bene o male, hanno parlato di oceano e natura (Woolf l’amava, Strachey la sdegnava) e preso appuntamenti per il tè, mancandone parecchi. Sono lettere di cene, conversazioni nottambule e confidenze, letture intirizzite vicino al fuoco e viaggi, di ritiri tra brume gallesi o solitudini scozzesi, di ritorni al bel mondo cittadino (amato/odiato), e poi successi editoriali (immediato quello di Strachey, piú lento quello di Woolf) e affilate opinioni letterarie – cosí Dostoevskij è il piú grande scrittore mai vissuto, Henry James scrive romanzi notevoli nonostante manchi completamente di ironia, mentre l’Ulisse di Joyce è insostenibile. Pagine e pagine di mondanità, pettegolezzi, malattie o ipocondrie, una corrispondenza in cui libri e vita, piú che vicini, sono intrecciati, con malinconie ed entusiasmi che si incalzano tra le righe in mezzo a parole di infinita tenerezza – anche se “le cose che contano non si possono dire”. Chiara Valerio, che traduce le lettere di Virginia Woolf, e Alessandro Giammei, che traduce quelle di Strachey, curano la prima edizione italiana completa dello scambio tra i due scrittori, basata sugli originali archiviati in vari fondi internazionali, in particolare alla Mortimer Rare Book Collection dello Smith College in Massachusetts. Il carteggio include una sezione dedicata alla riproduzione di alcuni manoscritti.
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Twenty-six narrative personal essays (one for each letter of the alphabet) on Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, on contemporary America, on what is fiction and why we need it.... more
Twenty-six narrative personal essays (one for each letter of the alphabet) on Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, on contemporary America, on what is fiction and why we need it.
https://www.marsilioeditori.it/libri/scheda-libro/3172992/una-serie-ininterrotta-di-gesti-riusciti
https://www.marsilioeditori.it/libri/scheda-libro/3172992/una-serie-ininterrotta-di-gesti-riusciti
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Research Interests: Italian Studies, Children's Literature, Poetry, Word and Image Studies, Nonsense, and 18 moreAbstract Art, Italian Literature, Literature and Visual Arts, Contemporary Poetry, Postmodern Literature, Prose Poetry, Lewis Carroll, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Literature of nonsense, Contemporary Italian Poetry, Illustrated Books, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Poetry, Comparative Literature, Edward Lear, Toti Scialoja, Poéme en prose, Grandville, Artists’ Books, and Artists' Libraries
Mobilizing the perspective of a Millennial author of comic books (Zerocalcare), a Gen-Xer author (Murgia) and the Boomer filmmaker who adapted her debut book into a film (Virzì), this essay invites to look at the poetics of precarity in... more
Mobilizing the perspective of a Millennial author of comic books (Zerocalcare), a Gen-Xer author (Murgia) and the Boomer filmmaker who adapted her debut book into a film (Virzì), this essay invites to look at the poetics of precarity in 21st century Italian culture through the lens of generational divides. Its main argument is that one of the most generative (and nefarious) shifts of paradigms produced by precarization was an unprecedented overlapping of class and generation. Its main focus is on Murgia's 2006 book Il mondo deve sapere, and on the rhetorical and ideological shifts with which its 2008 adaptation, Tutta la vita davanti, subverted and appropriated its first-hand take on precarity. Articulated from the position of a Millennial Italian who was trained as a literary historian in the late years of Berlusconian hegemony, the essay concludes on an episode from Murgia's 2015 novel Chirù. It interprets its symbolism and power dynamics as a comment on the generational struggle produced by the emergence of precarity in the economic and poetic dimension of Italian art.
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Mussolini donated the oldest surviving edition of the Orlando Innamorato to the Marciana Library in 1933, after receiving it as a gift. Starting from the possible meanings of this gift, the article shows how Boiardo's main supporter in... more
Mussolini donated the oldest surviving edition of the Orlando Innamorato to the Marciana Library in 1933, after receiving it as a gift. Starting from the possible meanings of this gift, the article shows how Boiardo's main supporter in fascist culture, Alfredo Panzini, used quotations to revive and correct the legacy of the Innamorato as a novelist, essayist, and lexicographer. While Panzini initially adopted an anti-pedantic form of generative quotation, the surrounding hostility towards Boiardo – and the very nature of fascist culture – turned his quotations into overwhelming (and even fraudulent) rhetorical weapons.
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For ninety years, a variety of sources (from 20th century encyclopedias and biographies to postwar scholarship and Wikipedia) reported that Alberto Savinio’s Persée premiered in 1924 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. However that... more
For ninety years, a variety of sources (from 20th century encyclopedias and biographies to postwar scholarship and Wikipedia) reported that Alberto Savinio’s Persée premiered in 1924 at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. However that ballet, written in Paris in 1913 for Michel Fokine’s choreography, was never performed on stage. This article investigates the origins of such ‘fake news’ and shows how it spread in various languages up until today. It links Savinio’s 1913 Persée to Fokine’s 1924 Medusa, a shorter but similar ballet that did indeed premiere at the Met, but to music by Tchaikovsky. Drawing on dispersed documents, newspaper clippings, and archival material, we show that, in the Twenties, both Savinio and Fokine distorted the facts about Persée and Medusa in the media, and we argue that they did so in order to self-fashion as modern artists adapting to two opposite cultural systems: fascist Italy and interwar America.
Research Interests: French Studies, Italian Studies, Surrealism, Avant-Garde Theater, Modernism, and 15 moreClassical Reception Studies, Dance, Ovid (Classics), Ballets Russes, Self-Fashioning, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Medusa, Ovid Metamorphoses, Alberto Savinio, Giorgio de Chirico, John Singer Sargent, Reception of Ovid, ópera, Fake News, and Mikhail Fokine
Modern revivals of the ‘golden’ age of Italian chivalric epic are widely studied. This essay addresses the less explored legacy of fifteenth-cen- tury chivalric poems, traditionally regarded as ‘silver’ models of the genre in terms of... more
Modern revivals of the ‘golden’ age of Italian chivalric epic are widely studied. This essay addresses the less explored legacy of fifteenth-cen- tury chivalric poems, traditionally regarded as ‘silver’ models of the genre in terms of language, structural harmony and literary ambition. After profiling a more general Quattrocentismo in early twentieth-century art and literature, I consider two specific cases: Alberto Savinio’s creative uses and intentional misuses of the Morgante maggiore, and Alfredo Panzini’s neo-classical revivals of the Orlando innamorato. Savinio works on fifteenth-century epic as an archaeologist, Panzini as a restorer. By analyzing the importance of Pulci and Boiardo as ethic and aesthetic models for such apparently opposing intellectuals (a protagonist of international vanguardism and a fascist erudite author of popular novels), I move to define the Quattrocento masters as ‘quicksilver’ rather than ‘silver’ auctoritates. I conclude by showing their continuing influ- ence beyond the end of modernism.
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Research Interests: Italian Studies, Modern Art, Archaeological Method & Theory, Michel Foucault, Ovid, and 14 moreModernism, Ovid (Classics), Italian Modernism, Picabia, Francis Picabia, Ovid Metamorphoses, Alberto Savinio, Dragons, Giorgio de Chirico, Originality and Copy, Originality in art, Reception of Ovid, Savinio, and Arnold Böcklin
Nanni Balestrini’s experimental poetry has always been interpreted as a pure process deprived of any significant content. When the pre-texts that are quoted or re-written in his poems are analyzed by critics, it is always by looking at... more
Nanni Balestrini’s experimental poetry has always been interpreted as a pure process deprived of any significant content. When the pre-texts that are quoted or re-written in his poems are analyzed by critics, it is always by looking at the quoted or re-written excerpts and in terms of form and interaction, not provenance and cultural/editorial context. This paper argues for a closer look to these varied insignificant sources, asking why and how they reached Balestrini’s textual lab in the 60s and 70s. After paralleling Balestrini’s “procedimenti” with the current critical practice of Distant Reading (and conceiving informal poetry in general as a form of Distant Writing), the paper shows how revealing a "close reading of distant writing" can be by investigating the sources of Tape Mark I (1962). It then offers an example of the proposed reading method by applying it to De cultu virginis.
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By analyzing both texts and paintings by the de Chirico brothers this study shows that Ludovico Ariosto was a primary source of inspiration for the Scuola Metafisica, possibly Italy’s most influential contribution to international... more
By analyzing both texts and paintings by the de Chirico brothers this study shows that Ludovico Ariosto was a primary source of inspiration for the Scuola Metafisica, possibly Italy’s most influential contribution to international modernism. It demonstrates that Ariosto—hardly mentioned by scholars, but influential throughout the brothers’ lives—is the “poet in marble” in Savinio’s Hermpahrodito and “the great metaphysician” in de Chirico’s eponymous masterpiece. A double revelation triggered by the poet’s monument in Ferrara’s cityscape during WWI inspired a turn in the de Chiricos’ poetics and aesthetics, and Ariosto’s model permeated their interwar theories, self-portraits, novels, and so-called ‘romantic’ paintings.
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By analyzing the most visual poems by Giulia Niccolai (namely the concrete ones in Humpty Dumpty and the meta-typographical ones in Poema & Oggetto), this article shows that the author’s experimental method throughout the 1970s coincided... more
By analyzing the most visual poems by Giulia Niccolai (namely the concrete ones in Humpty Dumpty and the meta-typographical ones in Poema & Oggetto), this article shows that the author’s experimental method throughout the 1970s coincided with an exploration of her own subaltern condition as a woman within the patriarchal context of Italy’s Neo-Avant-Garde. Rather than a process towards the reclaiming of her own authorial voice—as it has been described by previous scholarships—the self-marginalization of the ‘Mulino di Bazzano’ creative phase is interpreted as an original and ironic way to smash the patriarchy from a proudly lateral position. Manganelli’s interpretation of Niccolai as a “Sherezade” (as well as her own identification with Desdemona) is put into question through the poet’s own meta-literary comments in the early 1980s; and her intention to undermine phallogocentrism is retraced to its roots in the very opening of her first book of poems. Her writing by proxy, her borrowed languages, and her voiceless cut-up experiments (conducted both on texts by others and on actual objects) are read as feminist gestures.
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Within the field of Italian Studies, ‘nonsense’ has been traditionally considered either as a historical, anglophone-only literary phenomenon, or as a broad linguistic and philosophical concept with no specific chronotopes. Drawing on... more
Within the field of Italian Studies, ‘nonsense’ has been traditionally considered either as a historical, anglophone-only literary phenomenon, or as a broad linguistic and philosophical concept with no specific chronotopes. Drawing on previous research on the Italian legacy of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, this paper argues that ‘nonsense’ is actually describable as a specific literary genre within modern Italian comic poetry. Three major features are identified for this purpose. First, the impossibility for potential translators to establish a formal equivalence with nonsense texts without reproducing the processes—or programs—which originally presided over their conception (e.g. portmanteau or corpus-based lexicon, meta- and peri-semantics, or specific forms of parody). Second, the ability to camouflage senseless or trivial content through recognizable shapes and structures appropriated from models of the canon—a very specific characteristic of Italian nonsense-verse. Third, a special relation with place names, and with geography in general as a linguistic repertoire. The final part of the study is devoted to a reading of three books that are proposed as the seminal models for the nonsense-verse genre in Italy: Fosco Marini’s Gnòsi delle Fànfole (1966-1994), Giulia Niccolai’s Harry’s Bar e Altre Poesie (1969-1981) and Toti Scialoja’s Versi del Senso Perso (1971-1989).
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Research Interests: Italian Studies, Galileo Galilei, Modernist Literature (Literary Modernism), Giacomo Leopardi, 20th Century Italian Literature, and 7 moreLuigi Pirandello, Italo Calvino, Ludovico Ariosto, Letteratura italiana moderna e contemporanea, Massimo Bontempelli, 20th Century Classicism, and Classicism and Modernity
Il primo volume confezionato dall’Officina Bodoni di Verona per ‘I Cento Amici del Libro’ di Ugo Ojetti consiste, significativamente, in una preziosa edizione a tiratura limitata dell’Aminta di Tasso. La stampa della favola – una sorta di... more
Il primo volume confezionato dall’Officina Bodoni di Verona per ‘I Cento Amici del Libro’ di Ugo Ojetti consiste, significativamente, in una preziosa edizione a tiratura limitata dell’Aminta di Tasso. La stampa della favola – una sorta di crocevia per i destini di alcuni tra i più eminenti intellettuali italiani legati alla storia del libro nel Novecento – è corredata da un apparato illustrativo architettato con cura e coincide col primo uso, per un’edizione, del leggendario carattere Griffo, concepito da Mardersteig sulla base dell’aldina del De Ætna bembiano.
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Research Interests: Advertising And Social Culture, Experimental Literature, Neo-Avant-Garde, Contemporary Italian Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Poetry, Comparative Literature, and 11 moreSemiology, Italian Poetry, Visual Poetry, Modern and Contemporary Italian literature, Italian concrete and visual poetry 1960s & 1970s, Poesia Visiva, Emilio Villa, Stelio Maria Martini, Gruppo 70, Linea Sud, and Fotoromanzo
Research Interests: Cold War and Culture, Dante, Art and Aesthetics of the Cold War, Postmodernism (Literature), Charles Baudelaire, and 10 moreContemporary Italian Poetry, Postmodern poetry, Arthur Rimbaud, Modern and Contemporary Italian Literature, Poetry, Comparative Literature, Contemporary Milan, British Poetry Revival, Sperimentalismo, Giulia Niccolai, Milo De Angelis, and Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Fiction, and Drama
Research Interests: Visual Studies, Art History, Art Theory, Italian Studies, Interdisciplinarity, and 17 moreContemporary Art, Poetry, Gender, Culture, Italian Literature, Literature and Visual Arts, Artists' Books, Artistic Research, Postmodern Literature, Art writing, Curation, Gruppo 63, Neoavanguardia, Corrado Costa, Writing in Visual Art, Artists’ Books, and Art ‘beyond the gallery’
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A cultural history of Italian nonsense from the reception of Carroll and Lear to postmodern authors adopting the genre in Italian (Toti Scialoja, Giulia Niccolai, Fosco Maraini).
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Italy’s most famous late-modern poet, novelist, war hero, and viveur was also a collector (and forger!) of medals, a peruser of antique illustrated books, and an exquisite interior decorator. Such peculiar qualities made Gabriele... more
Italy’s most famous late-modern poet, novelist, war hero, and viveur was also a collector (and forger!) of medals, a peruser of antique illustrated books, and an exquisite interior decorator. Such peculiar qualities made Gabriele D’Annunzio an extraordinary re-user and re-inventor of Renaissance and Baroque word-image devices called emblems and imprese. However, this sophisticated line of work has been ignored or misunderstood by scholars, by readers, and by the many devotees that today repeat (and even retweet) his memorable mottos ignoring their erudite 17th century humanistic origins. Through the analysis of decorated stationary, bookplates, and furniture—most notably, of a wardrobe—I will take a tour in D’Annunzio’s emblematic masterpiece: his villa in Gardone, a mysterious theatre of modernized verbal and visual allegories that still awaits to be deciphered.
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In the 500 years long story of Ariosto’s immense legacy in modern literatures and arts, a substantial chapter has been always skipped by historians and critics. Re-writings, illustrations, adaptations, and influences have been retraced... more
In the 500 years long story of Ariosto’s immense legacy in modern literatures and arts, a substantial chapter has been always skipped by historians and critics. Re-writings, illustrations, adaptations, and influences have been retraced and commented up until the chivalric enthusiasm of international Romanticism. Then, after World War II, the rise of postmodernity suggested new readings of the Orlando Furioso, which keeps on inspiring writers and film-makers also in the new millennium. But in between Goethe and Ronconi, before Calvino and after Böcklin, a less noticed, yet lively and articulate revival of Ariosto’s myth has secretly crossed the visual, literary, and political culture of modernism and of the so called return to order. This paper aims to reveal how Ariosto’s poetry shaped highly visible movements and trends of the early 20th century such as symbolism, metaphysical painting, magical realism, acmeism, and the second wave of Italian futurism. I will also discuss the ways in which Ariosto’s model was used by intellectuals to oppose totalitarianism, and I will show that fascist propaganda appropriated the Furioso to express local frondism and noncomplying cultural tendencies within the regime.
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Humanized animals are a basic feature of moral and instructional narratives, from Aesop to cartoons. At the same time, they are used as counterparts of human characters or historical figures in parodies. This paper argues that the... more
Humanized animals are a basic feature of moral and instructional narratives, from Aesop to cartoons. At the same time, they are used as counterparts of human characters or historical figures in parodies. This paper argues that the depiction of humanized mice and frogs in Leopardi’s Paralipomeni (both satirical and pedagogical) merges two distinct horizons of expectations, offering to the reader both an enjoyable rhetorical architecture of comic poetry and a tragic à-clef path through the verses. Using the uncannily double traditional function of allegorical animals, the author puts human society into question in a way that will inform a number of modernist masterpieces such as Grandville’s La vie privée et publique des animaux, Alberto Savinio’s cycle of paintings about mythological couples commissioned by Léonce Rosenberg, T. S. Eliot’s The Hyppopotamus, and, of course, George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
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This seminar approaches the two most studied phases of Italian history, the Renaissance and the Twentieth century, by placing otherness at the center of the picture rather than at its margins. The main aim is to challenge traditional... more
This seminar approaches the two most studied phases of Italian history, the Renaissance and the Twentieth century, by placing otherness at the center of the picture rather than at its margins. The main aim is to challenge traditional accounts of Italian culture, and to look at pivotal events and phenomena (the rise of Humanism, the rise of fascism, courtly culture, the two World Wars, Sixteenth century art, the avant-garde) from the point of view of non-white, non-christian, non-heterosexual witnesses , authors, and fictional characters. In class, we will adopt a trans-historical, intersec-tional, and interdisciplinary perspective: themes and issues will be analyzed at the crossing of the two historical phases and of the three topics in exam, and the material will include historical and theoretical analyses, narrative texts of different genres, poems , films, and works of visual art.
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The very concept of 'avant-garde' is steeped in a masculine warlike imagery, and the founding manifesto of Futurism even glorifies the 'contempt for the woman'. Yet, feminine, queer, androgynous, and non-binary perspectives on sexual... more
The very concept of 'avant-garde' is steeped in a masculine warlike imagery, and the founding manifesto of Futurism even glorifies the 'contempt for the woman'. Yet, feminine, queer, androgynous, and non-binary perspectives on sexual identity played a central role — from Rimbaud to contemporary experimentalism — in the development of what has been called 'the tradition of the new'. We will explore such a paradoxical anti-traditional tradition through texts, images, sounds, and videos. We will unearth the stories and works of great experimentalists who have been neglected because of their gender. We will deal with poems made up entirely of place names, of recorded noises, of typographical symbols. We will try to read texts with no words, surreal stories, performances, objects.
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Research Interests: Reception Studies, Italian Studies, Word and Image Studies, Italian Cultural Studies, Futurism, and 13 moreGenre Theory, Metaphysical Realism, Ludovico Ariosto, Neoclassicism, Magic Realism, Massimo Bontempelli, Transhistorical and cross cultural aesthetics, Luchino Visconti, Realismo magico Magic realism, Alberto Savinio, Giorgio de Chirico, Renaissance Revival, and Metaphysical Painting
In the early summer of 1917, summoned to his native Greece as a translator for the royal Italian army, Andrea de Chirico left his elective homeland on a steamboat, like a modern Jason. He and his brother had no passport, and even if they... more
In the early summer of 1917, summoned to his native Greece as a translator for the royal Italian army, Andrea de Chirico left his elective homeland on a steamboat, like a modern Jason. He and his brother had no passport, and even if they were conceiving Italy’s most distinctive and influential contribution to modernism after Futurism, some military service was still the only failsafe way to officially become subjects of Vittorio Emanuele, whose grandfather’s equestrian monument still looms in Giorgio’s Turinese canvasses and in Andrea’s Chants de la mi-mort. Among the small crew of vanguardist flâneurs that were sharing, within the Renaissance ramparts of Ferrara, the same seminal aesthetic vision, the younger de Chirico (better known by his nom de plume, Alberto Savinio) is the first to abandon the intellectual battlefield of the metaphysical city to get to an actual frontline, but his adventure is just another dreamlike flânerie, utterly incomparable with the eagerness of futurist...
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motifs, their language and style, their use of Dante, the position of the academy toward Bembo’s theories, and the implicit poetic of academy’s cultural program. This fixed structure facilitates comparisons between the case studies and... more
motifs, their language and style, their use of Dante, the position of the academy toward Bembo’s theories, and the implicit poetic of academy’s cultural program. This fixed structure facilitates comparisons between the case studies and allows for the assessment of the peculiarities of each anthology, and its position within the panorama of sixteenth-century lyric poetry. Oberto analyzes in depth the content of these collections, as well as the presence of Petrarchan and Petrarchist words, rhymes, expressions, and metrical forms within. The result is a remarkable demonstration of how such production becomes increasingly unacceptable in the light of Bembo’s program and its emphasis on formal matters. The lyric poetry produced within Italian academies fills the empty space of subject matter with new doctrinal contents such as science (in the case of the Academy of the Argonauti), philosophy, and religious as well as obscene themes (Cortese). This results in the undermining of Bembismo, and in “a process of disintegration of Petrarchism” (358). The superficial respect of Bembo’s model (from the linguistic and technical, i.e., metrical point of view) is, in fact, enriched with the recourse to Dante and to authors excluded from the canon of the Prose. As Oberto aptly suggests, Petrarchism can only be saved as far as it works in the service of its new doctrinal content or, in other words, toward the poeticizing of an otherwise hard philosophical or scientific matter (357). It would probably have been advisable to offer a slightly more nuanced view of the opposition between Bembo’s model and the alternative choices later pursued by individual authors or academies. Little space is devoted to the different strains of Petrarchist poetry and to those authors who challenged Bembo’s views in the first decades of the century (Pietro Aretino, Antonio Brocardo, Bernardo Tasso). However, this rich and insightful book eloquently shows the erosion of Bembo’s model of poetry along the Cinquecento and the rise of a new style of poetry.
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Painted in Paris on the eve of World War One, the Metaphysical cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) redirected the course of modernist painting and the modern architectural imagination alike. Giorgio de Chirico and the... more
Painted in Paris on the eve of World War One, the Metaphysical cityscapes of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) redirected the course of modernist painting and the modern architectural imagination alike. Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City examines the two most salient dimensions of the artist’s early imagery: its representations of architectural space and its sustained engagement with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Centering upon a single painting from 1914 – deemed by the painter “the fatal year” – each chapter examines why and how de Chirico’s self-declared “Nietzschean method” takes architecture as its pictorial means and metaphor. The first, full-length study in English to focus on the painter’s seminal work from pre-war Paris, the book places de Chirico’s “literary” images back in the context of the city’s avant-garde, particularly the circle of Guillaume Apollinaire. Merjian’s study sheds light on one of the most influential and least understood figures in 20th-c...