Painting can only be thought in relation to the image. And yet, with (and within) painting what continues to endure is the image of painting. While this is staged explicitly in, for example, paintings of St. Luke by artists of the Northern Renaissance—e.g., Rogier van der Weyden, Jan Gossaert, and Simon Marmion—the same concerns are also at work within both the practices as well as the contemporaneous writings that define central aspects of the Italian Renaissance. The aim of this (...) paper is to begin an investigation into the process by which painting stages the activity of painting. This forms part of a project whose aim is an investigation of the way philosophy should respond to the essential historicity of art (where the latter is understood philosophically). (shrink)

In The Theatre of Dionysus in Athens Dr. Pickard-Cambridge includes a most useful and convenient collection of south Italian vase-paintings which have been held to throw light on the stage-settings of Greek tragedy. He concludes that they give no evidence for Athens in the fifth century and in particular do not justify the assumption that interior scenes were played in a porch in front of the central door. The second conclusion is true, but some of the vases do show (...) that the central doors could be thrown wide open to display an interior scene. The first conclusion is formally correct, but it should be remembered that the “plays came from Athens, and it is at least possible that the south Italian producers modelled themselves on Athenian producers. In any case these vases are worthy of further consideration. (shrink)

Cretan icons often displayed a precious decoration of golden halos with incised, stippled, and/or impressed designs. The present study points out that these motifs should not be interpreted as manifestations of nostalgic and anachronistic attitudes on the part of post-Byzantine painters working in Candia for Greek Orthodox and Catholic clients. Rather, they appear already in several early Cretan works dating around 1400, which took inspiration from technical devices and ornamental motifs worked out in the workshops of Venice during the second (...) half of the fourteenth century and appropriated in icon painting probably through the mediation of mixed-style works produced in both the lagoon region and Venetian-ruled Candia. (shrink)

Italian ms 63, now in the John Rylands Library, contains fifty-four images of monstrous births, both human and animal. The manuscript was probably completed in the mid-eighteenth century and was owned by Edward Davenport of Capesthorne Hall and later by the Manchester-based physician David Lloyd Roberts. This article explores the possible sources for some of the images, which range from descriptions or illustrations in well-known publications on monsters, to popular pamphlets, to drawings and paintings. An analysis of the choice (...) of subject matter and the ways in which the source material has been used places the manuscript within eighteenth-century collecting practices and emphasises the multivalency of the monstrous. (shrink)

SUMMARYEarly modern artists who did not have access to Roman Antiquity or needed quick access to it could refer to prints after monuments such as those issued by Antoine Lafréry. But Du Choul's Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des Romains [ … ] De la Religion des anciens Romains was also successful among artists, particularly painters. It was in vernacular language and widely available in French, Spanish and Italian; it was affordable and compact in format ; it (...) had plenty of woodcuts; and it focused on the Roman military life, besides the monuments, for which information could also be found in travel guides. The present essay aims to study how Du Choul's volume circulated, with several examples from Spain and Italy. The Discours will be used as a case study of artists as readers, and I will study aspects previously overlooked such as the book's market price in the early modern period, examples of use of copies of the book by artists and, more broadly, the troubles and challenges encountered by these readers when representing subjects from ancient history. (shrink)

La pensée du corps. Un parcours esthétique chez le dernier Merleau-PontyLe but de cette contribution est de chercher à reconstruire un parcours théorique, entre plusieurs autres possibles, en mesure de montrer comment l’art, en particulier la peinture, incarne chez le dernier Merleau-Ponty la possibilité d’un autre type de pensée. Il s’agit de la tentative de suivre une idée qui semble faire son chemin au sein de la réflexion que l’auteur consacre à la Nature et puis à l’Etre brut et sauvage, (...) ou bien aussi dans celle d’une pensée enracinée dans la corporéité, qui devient une chose qui pense et qui fait penser. Une hypothèse de sens qui ouvre à une investigation de la chair humaine, et qui aboutit au résultat visible de cette pensée qui est corps et qui trouve dans la vision de l’art moderne ses signes les plus paradigmatiques.Il s’agit d’un itinéraire exégétique qui propose, en substance, un double plan: d’une part, une lecture de l’essence du corps, dans la facticité primordiale de la Nature, dans lequel se loge une sorte d’ontologie de la cavité et, de l’autre, le résultat philosophique possible d’une corporéité qui pense et qui, à travers l’art de la peinture, fait voir une pensée non plus fondée sur la représentation, en dernière instance, une pensée post-métaphysique. Et cela n’est pas sans conséquences pour le rapport de l’homme avec le monde et avec la philosophie.The Thought of Body. An Aesthetic Path in the Final Merleau-PontyThe purpose of this contribution is to try to reconstruct a theoretical path, between several other possibilities, capable of showing how art, in particular painting, incarnates in the final Merleau-Ponty the possibility of another type of thinking. What is at issue is an attempt to follow an idea which seems to make its way within the reflection that Merleau-Ponty dedicates first to Nature, and then to brute and wild Being, or as well in that of a thought rooted in corporeity, which becomes a thing which thinks and which requires thinking. We are following a hypothesis concerning the sense which opens to an investigation of human flesh, and which leads to the visible result of this thought which is body and which finds its most paradigmatic signs in the vision of modern art.What is at issue is an exegetical itinerary which proposes, in substance, a double plan: on the one hand, a reading of the essence of body, in the primordial facticity of Nature, in which a sort of ontology on the cavity lodges itself and, on the other hand, the possible philosophical result of a corporeity which thinks and which, through the art of painting, makes see a thought no longer founded on representation, and is, at the end of the day, a post-metaphysical thought. And that is not without consequences for the relation of the human with the world and with philosophy. (shrink)

Art teaches us not only what to see but what to be.Artists refashion stories with paintbrush and chisel. Their narrations reach back through time to the mysteries of cave painting at Altamira and Lascaux, over seventeen thousand years ago. We no longer know what stories the pictures on those walls were meant to illustrate, but we can try to imagine, even now.1Images speak a different language from words. They tell stories differently. Yet, for many generations, since art history was legitimized (...) as a discipline in American academia, early in the twentieth century2 illustration has been treated with a measure of condescension. Bernard Berenson, among others, intimates, in his Italian Painters of the Renaissance.. (shrink)

This article aims to present the philosophical perspective upon the birth of the idea of the individual and the consequences of the discovery of the self-image on the techniques of image reproduction from the Renaissance to the present day. The process of projecting the self-image into the public space acquires a special importance with the elaboration of the portrait technique in the Italian painting of the 15th century. Through Leonardo da Vinci's paintings, this technique of reproducing self-image reaches a (...) certain perfection. Following the evolution of this kind of projections and reproductions of the self-image, it is found that there is an obvious tendency by which the individual tends to free himself from certain patterns, or rather canons, which a certain epoch imposes. This process manifested in the visual arts corresponds to a new philosophical perception of man opened by the works of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. The assertion of a new type of dignity, correlated with the idea of the microcosm, of the Renaissance man will lead to an affirmation of his own personality and especially to an increase of the will to power reflected more and more in the works of art. With the resurgence of the Italian renaissance, artists and philosophers experienced a decline, but found a favorable space for their development at the court of Elizabeth I, Queen of England. The art of portraiture, but also the philosophy of renaissance survives and is even more flourishing at the court of this queen. But the most important moment of this renaissance is marked by Dutch art after its liberation from Spanish rule. From this moment on, the emancipation of the individual will occur on an unimaginable scale until then. (shrink)

Serlio achieved fame as an architect and the author of seven books on architecture, but his activities as a painter are hardly known. The recently discovered autograph manuscript reveals his thinking about this 'most noble art': collectively its pages form the introduction to an unfinished treatise on painting. As with his architectural discourse, Serlio's approach to writing about painting is entirely practical. In no sense a humanist reflection on the subject of art, the work was planned as an illustrated manual (...) and pedagogical tool for the novice painter. The discussion opens with a first section on disegno where the rudiments of drawing are outlined. Very quickly Serlio turns to foreshortening and perspectives on the human figure, emphasising the infinite nuances possible as the body to be represented moves. Such concerns disclose the influence of his mentor Baldassare Peruzzi and association with other members of Raphael's studio. As presented in this manuscript, the manual may have graphically resembled Dürer's Vier Bücher in its printed form, but the rules of disegno respect the Italian workshop tradition as we know it from Carlo Urbino's Le regole del disegno and the Leonardesque heritage. Serlio's projected volume of painting instruction may be regarded as a first literary experiment—a precursor to his later illustrated books on architecture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 38.2 (2004) 120-124 [Access article in PDF] Pictures & Tears. a History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings, by James Elkins. London: Routledge, 2001, xiii + 272pp., $26. In "Tears, Idle Tears" from The Princess, Alfred, Lord Tennyson wonders at the tears forming in his eyes as he gazes out across the fields one fall day. The idyllic countryside, far from (...) providing solace, triggers within him a debilitating sadness, an all-encompassing melancholia, manifested by the tears originating from a deep despair; the autumn fields remind Tennyson's narrative persona of all the days that have passed by him.If Tennyson's eyes had fallen not on autumn fields but on a painting of them then the opening lines to "Tears, Idle Tears" might have served as the perfect epigraphic frame to James Elkins's important study of the tears we do and do not shed when looking at art.One of several recent books by the increasingly influential professor at Chicago's School of the Art Institute, Pictures & Tears probes that aspect of our consciousness that has the capacity [End Page 120] to move us to tears when looking at paintings.Shedding tears in front of paintings? Within contemporary culture it seems rather unlikely for someone to respond to a painting by fighting off, or giving in, to tears. Reactions to paintings in previous periods and societies were wholly different from ours, Elkins argues. Paintings not only incited the passions but were blamed for the onset of numerous, serious medical conditions. Though rare today, cases continue to be reported. The Italian psychiatrist Graziella Magherini even coined a term for it in 1989, "Stendhal syndrome," referring to the novelist whose viewing of art in Florence was accompanied by the onset of a form of nervous exhaustion.While the subtitle of Elkins's book suggests a history of crying in front of pictures, leading us to the nearly tearless present, and thus, presumably, to answers about why we no longer cry in front of paintings, A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings is somewhat misleading. In the truest sense Pictures & Tears is neither a history of crying in front of pictures nor individual histories of those who have. The book does not follow a linear historical narrative of the tears that pictures have evoked over the centuries. Rather, Elkins's chapters constitute a tableau, the accumulation of fragments, with alternating chapters exploring, first, a particular work of art and the tears it has evoked and, second, ruminations on why that might be the case.At the heart of Elkins's argument is a concern over why we no longer seem willing, or indeed able, to have emotional responses to paintings. Besides the occasional grand response to works of art, particularly those vested withsignificant religious meaning, few admit to intimate connections with paintings. Elkins wants to know why.To answer these questions, Elkins turned to colleagues as well as to people he had never met. His research for the book included letters to fellow scholars and peers, and open calls in newspapers and journals, requesting stories from anyone moved to tears on encountering a painting. He received more than four hundred responses, many of which are included in a substantial appendix. The responses themselves make for an intriguing read and from them Elkins builds a two-pronged argument: we now live in an age that is marked by "stoic intellectualism" (p. 163), yet we still have the capacity to feel an intimate connection to paintings. Art in recent years has demanded greater intellectual engagement, lessintimate involvement. There may be exhibitions that fuel fear, distrust, anger, or rage but these are alienating to the works themselves, although these feelings can certainly be as intense as the more intimate connection that Elkins equates with falling in love.What is it about viewing paintings, as opposed to film or theater, he asks, which prevents full emotional expression? Is it the accoutrements used to view gallery paintings — the exhibition catalogs... (shrink)

An important artistic topic of Italian Renaissance painting was the rendering of the human figure. As leading actors in a painted narrative, figures had to convince beholders of the reality of the matter depicted with appropriated attitudes and gestures. This article is about two ways of drawing or rather constructing the human figure artists developed to achieve this goal. The first was only an adaptation to an old method: because of the rather simple and coarse elements used, constructions often (...) resulted in faulty pictures and were for that matter often criticized. As this article will show, the second method involved a new and very successful drawing skill, which not just required a different kind of knowledge of visual forms but of procedures of moving the hand, too. (shrink)

This essay develops a critical interpretation of Gadamer’s account of Renaissance painting. My point of departure is a brief reference in Truth and Method to Leon Battista Alberti, the Italian Renaissance humanist who developed an influential mathematical theory of perspective in painting. Through an explication of Gadamer’s critique of Alberti and of perspective generally, I argue that what is ultimately at stake in Gadamer’s confrontation with Alberti is Gadamer’s opposition to relativism and subjectivism and his downgrading of the importance (...) of the artistic medium for evaluating the truth-claim of an artwork. Against the theory of perspective, Gadamer contends that artworks make substantive claims to truth to which we interpretatively respond. By emphasizing this theme, our discussion resonates with contemporary “hermeneutical realism.”. (shrink)

An important artistic topic of Italian Renaissance painting was the rendering of the human figure. As leading actors in a painted narrative, figures had to convince beholders of the reality of the matter depicted with appropriated attitudes and gestures. This article is about two ways of drawing or rather constructing the human figure artists developed to achieve this goal. The first was only an adaptation to an old method: because of the rather simple and coarse elements used, constructions often (...) resulted in faulty pictures and were for that matter often criticized. As this article will show, the second method involved a new and very successful drawing skill, which not just required a different kind of knowledge of visual forms but of procedures of moving the hand, too. (shrink)

The object of the study is the image of an emaciated horse in Chinese culture. It represents a real artistic phenomenon, serving as a reflection of the self-perception of authors who are faced with a sense of alienation and injustice, isolation from society, and the inability to get help. The subject is the image of thin horses in the painting by the Italian Catholic artist Giuseppe Castiglione, who arrived in China for missionary work. His stay in China coincided with (...) a period of strong rejection of Catholicism in the country. The article pays special attention to the use of the image of a skinny horse as a metaphor, a veiled way to convey the subjective perception of the situation at the Qing court. The emaciated animal is considered by the author both as a visual phenomenon enriching the variety of characters in the paintings, and as a reflection of philosophical reasoning about the relationship between man and society. Formal-stylistic and structural-semantic types of analysis became the leading research methods. With their help, the author studied the compositional structure, coloristic features and semantic aspects of the fragments of the painting analyzed in the article by Giuseppe Castiglione. The scientific novelty of the research is due to the small number of thematic publications in Russian art history. One can find scientific works on Chinese culture devoted either to the image of horses in general, or taking into account exclusively the work of Giuseppe Castiglione. Combining the analysis of the image of an exhausted horse as such and the analysis of the painting "A Hundred Horses", the author closed the gap in a highly specialized art criticism problem, arguing the theses put forward with biographical data about the artist and historical references. New information deepens knowledge about the cultural characteristics of the Chinese people and can serve as an aid for further research by art historians. The author comes to several conclusions. First, he discovers the specific philosophical significance of the image of an emaciated horse. Secondly, it notes its stability in various creative figures. Thirdly, he reveals the peculiarities of the fate of Giuseppe Castiglione using the example of "Hundreds of Horses". (shrink)

Anthony Grafton, like Jacob Burckhardt before him, begins his appreciation of Leon Battista Alberti by reviewing how the fifteenth‐century Italian author created a many‐faceted identity through willful self‐fashioning. Grafton, however, offers the reader a much richer Bildungsroman than the older portrait and exposes many forces undercutting the monolithic character of Burckhardt's Renaissance, the same forces that may provide a key to the contrary and doubt‐ridden persona frequenting Alberti's writings. Alberti's ambitions and the leitmotifs of his life from his youthful (...) aspirations to their later glorious fulfillment are laid out in stunning detail.Moving well beyond the unrelenting brightness of Burckhardt's presentation, Grafton also attempts to fuse what have become for scholars the dramatic polarities of Alberti's enigmatic personality. An ambitious scholar and writer on academic subjects, on the visual and practical arts, Alberti was a lover of nature and a sensitive commentator on aesthetic, familial, and cultural ideals. He was also given to irony, despair, and bitter isolation. Grafton makes a strong case for Alberti's dependence on an unwavering determination that compelled him to assume many guises and foster numerous strategies to achieve his literary, social, and economic goals. As his friend Cristoforo Landino once noted, Alberti was like a chameleon. In Grafton's hands, however, Alberti remains dazzlingly inventive and radically humanist, and he endures as appropriately leonine and the hero of his own tale.With a predictable outpouring of references, Grafton evokes Alberti's social, political, and intellectual world and, reprising his earlier writings, develops several themes. These include Alberti's literary erudition and the high price he paid to achieve it; how Alberti applied the lessons of ancient sources to the problems of his own world, and in so doing subverted those lessons to create something new; how the humanist author developed special vocabularies for writing about such novel subjects as the visual arts, instruments of measure, and other current technologies; and, perhaps most surprisingly for a man given to bitterly mocking his contemporaries, how Alberti became involved in the creative energy of early modern life with apparent enthusiasm and accomplished the astonishing feat for a humanist of becoming a practicing architect.Grafton finds Alberti's confidence in a material culture driven by technology, theoretical knowledge, and careful observation expressed forcefully in the dedicatory letter of his essay On Painting addressed to the builder Filippo Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi deserved to be praised not for slavishly drinking from the fountain of the ancients, but for the brilliance of his intelligence and the successful application of his knowledge. Further, by requesting that the architect emend his essay, Alberti, the scholar, is shown to have treated Brunelleschi, the builder, as an equal and thereby to have elevated all technical knowledge. Alberti cleverly places himself within the circle of the ingenious engineers who were masters of practical knowledge based on underlying principles and therefore at the forefront of an intellectual parade led by its most renowned practitioner. One wonders, perhaps, what Brunelleschi at the height of his fame might have desired to learn from the audacious savant.As Alberti masters how to make his way in Florence and among the elegant courts of his day, he is seen to revisit the themes of his youthful writings with ever‐deepening insight. Grafton's reflections on Alberti and Florence, though generally convincing, have been greatly enriched by Luca Boschetto's recent book devoted to that subject . In addition, some of Grafton's notions about the influence of On Painting as centered in courtly art seem to reach beyond the evidence and the explicit directives found in Alberti's writings.The reader interested in Alberti's involvement in science and technology will still want to consult Joan Gadol's Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance , and the lack of a general bibliography will be an irritation to those who like to follow an author's research trail, the trekker in this case having to stumble through a thicket of footnotes. Nonetheless, Grafton has created a richly drawn portrait of Alberti. Scholar and student alike will garner much that is important about this immensely gifted and mercurial man whose writings continue to influence our understanding of the beginnings of early modernity. (shrink)

Dolce's Dialogo della pittura first appeared in Venice in 1557 and consists of a three-part dialogue between two Venetians, Aretino and Fabrini, on the particular merits of works of art and artists, including Michaelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello.

The Italian Dominican Ptolemy of Lucca figures among the most significant political theoreticians of the Middle Ages. In his De regimine principum, a continuation of Thomas Aquinas’ De regno, Ptolemy paints a highly original picture of civil happiness. Taking the Roman Republic as his model, Ptolemy praises the “political” government that is presented as a sufficient condition for felicitas civilis, and this through the virtue of its citizens, the balance of its forces, and the harmonious and active collaboration of (...) the various groups that constitute the community. (shrink)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the history (...) and state of the Church and its role in society, is presented here. _The Church and the Kingdom_ is at once a pointed attack on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church and a theoretical excursus on the concepts of messianic time and economy. Presenting an exegesis of certain key passages in the New Testament, Agamben examines the philology and philosophy at the root of the Church and of its earthly reign. With its examinations of the foundational texts of the Church, which are also the foundational texts of our modern idea of economy, _The Church and the Kingdom_ reveals significant connections and parallel ideologies which are imperative to understanding the current global situation. This edition of Agamben’s text is accompanied by photographs by artist Alice Attie. Made from folded and twisted reproductions of paintings culled from Christian iconography, these works of art evoke the restless challenge that well-characterizes Agamben’s four decades of philosophy and critique. This book will be welcomed by Agamben’s many readers across the disciplines. (shrink)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was invited to speak in Paris' Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the Bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the history (...) and state of the Church and its role in society, is presented here. The Church and the Kingdom is at once a pointed attack on the institutional structure of the Catholic Church and a theoretical excursus on the concepts of messianic time and economy. Presenting an exegesis of certain key passages in the New Testament, Agamben examines the philology and philosophy at the root of the Church and of its earthly reign. With its examinations of the foundational texts of the Church, which are also the foundational texts of our modern idea of economy, The Church and the Kingdom reveals significant connections and parallel ideologies which are imperative to understanding the current global situation. This edition of Agamben's text is accompanied by photographs by artist Alice Attie. Made from folded and twisted reproductions of paintings culled from Christian iconography, these works of art evoke the restless challenge that well-characterizes Agamben's four decades of philosophy and critique. This book will be welcomed by Agamben's many readers across the disciplines. (shrink)

Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism as well. Agamben’s intuition and meditation are fascinating, and not least when he turns his critical eye to the mysteries and contradictions of early religion. _The Unspeakable Girl: The Myth and Mystery of Kore_ is a book of three richly detailed treatments (...) of the myth of Kore. Kore, also called Persephone, and referred to poetically by the Greeks as “the unspeakable girl,” was the daughter of Demeter and Zeus who was abducted by Hades and made queen of the netherworld. Kore and her story gave rise to a mysterious cult at Eleusis, the site of the well where Demeter mourned her lost daughter. This book opens with an innovative and insightful essay that focuses on the mysterious indeterminacy of the figure of Kore/Persephone—at once a woman and a girl, a virgin and a mother—as well as the attendant divisions of speech and silence, the sacred and the profane, the animal and the human, and the mortal and the divine. Here, tracing these dichotomies, Agamben is in top form, able to articulate paradoxes that in another writer’s hands might be ineffable. In the second and third parts of the book the reader is treated to a series of beautiful paintings by acclaimed artist Monica Ferrando, as well as her translation of crucial Greek and Latin source materials. As a whole, _The Unspeakable Girl_ will not only be welcomed by Agamben’s many readers across the disciplines, but also by enthusiasts of classical mythology in general. (shrink)

Simone Martini’s panel painting of St Ladislas of Hungary, founder of the Árpád dynasty and a prototypical crusading knight, attests to the transnational character of Filippo Sangineto’s patronage in Santa Maria della Consolazione, Altomonte (Calabria). The attribution to Sangineto, count of Altomonte and seneschal of Provence, has long been debated, but he is agreed to have been a formidable patron with an ambitious plan for Altomonte. Like many Italian royals, aristocrats, cardinals, and merchants, Filippo commissioned artworks to Sienese artists (...) in Avignon. This study’s approach also sheds light on the iconography as the choice of Ladislas can be connected to the Crusade of Smyrna (1343-1345). The article proposes a reconstruction of Santa Maria della Consolazione, with two small, matching polyptychs set against the screen, one by Bernardo Daddi (two wings survive in Altomonte) and the other by Simone, composed of the painting of Ladislas and the Phillips Collection’s Christ on the Cross. (shrink)

Hegel was ambivalent about Dutch genre painting’s uncanny ability to find beauty in daily life. The philosopher regarded the Dutch painterly aesthetic as Romanticism avant la lettre, and classifies it as such in his Lectures on Aesthetics, under the section entitled “Die romantischen Künste [The Romantic arts].”1 Dutch art, in Hegel’s reading, is marred by many shortcomings. The most prominent among these are the “subjective stubbornness [subjective Beschlossenheit]” that prevents this art from attaining to the “free and ideal forms of (...) expression” that marked the productions of Italian artists such as Raphael. In contradistinction to their Italian counterparts, Dutch artists in Hegel’s view are apt to. (shrink)

Starting from two paintings by Salvador Dalì (The Enigma of William Tell and Autumnal Cannibalism), the article explores Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung’s idea of erotic cannibalism. The fear of being eaten is an archetype of the collective unconscious, as fairy tales clearly reveal. Following Jacques Derrida’s reflections, the author suggests that the fear of being eaten is not limited to anthropophagic cultures, because there is a sort of symbolic cannibalism which has to do with the capacity for annihilation. (...) The petrifying gaze of Medusa, described by Jean Paul Sartre, is a good example of this symbolic cannibalism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, compared to the petrifying gaze, we find the recognizing look of a mother toward her child. For the child, the mother embodies the good subject, which is reassuring and nonthreatening (the fairy who stands in contrast to the devouring ogre in fairy tales). Sara Ruddick explicitly refers to this motherhood model in her book Maternal Thinking, where she lays out the methodology for the ethics of care. The maternal, or recognizing gaze, as the opposite of Medusa’s gaze portrayed by Sartre, is well described in a compelling text by the Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello. At the same time, it plays an important role in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s The Phenomenology of the Spirit. Finally, the article returns to Salvador Dalì, showing how in his life, the artist experienced the Other’s gaze in both forms: the objectifying one, represented by the artist’s father (portrayed in The Enigma of William Tell), and the recognizing one, embodied by his partner Gala (portrayed in Autumnal Cannibalism). (shrink)

Form and Painting. The work process of vase painters in South Italy. A case study at the vases of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg Mostly ancient Greek vases are subjects of studies of iconographic issues, of association with other archaeological material and of their context. During the researches of the south Italian redfigure vases of the late-classical period for the CVA Hamburg 2 there were recognized some technical details, that had not taken notice of or that were (...) insufficiently differentiated in former researches. This case study exposes in detail the single, one by one succeeding steps of the production of a vase by the potter and the painter. (shrink)

La tesis mariológica de la conceptio per aurem, según la cual la Virgen María habría concebido a Jesucristo por el oído en el momento de escuchar del ángel el mensaje celestial anunciándole que, sin perder su virginidad, sería madre del Hijo de Dios encarnado, ha merecido hasta ahora muy pocos estudios académicos rigurosamente fundados en fuentes primarias. De hecho, en la literatura especializada son muy escasas las referencias a tal teoría y, cuando algún estudioso la evoca, casi siempre se contenta (...) con aludir a ella, sin aportar pruebas documentales. Sin embargo, tal como lo revelan las nueve pinturas italianas aquí analizadas, esa teoría fue ilustrada mediante sutiles metáforas visuales en muchas obras pictóricas medievales, las cuales se inspiraron en una sólida tradición literaria. Además una pléyade de Padres de la Iglesia y teólogos medievales testimonia, mediante afirmaciones explícitas, que semejante teoría gozó de notable aceptación entre los maestros del pensamiento cristiano. Basándose en numerosos textos patrísticos y teológicos, este artículo intenta dos objetivos esenciales: exponer, ante todo, las distintas formulaciones teóricas propuestas por esos pensadores; y además, tratar de poner en luz los significados dogmáticos que subyacen bajo esa sorprendente tesis. (shrink)

There is systematic epistemic asymmetry between different centers of art production: we know far more about some (e.g. fifteenth-century Italian paintings) than about others (e.g. fifteenth-century Inca textiles). As long as we are focusing on the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention, this epistemic asymmetry remains, given that we have vastly more information about the social context of the artworks or the artist’s intention when it comes to ‘Western’ art—again, because of the historically contingent differences in (...) record-keeping and the survival rate of such records. If we want to overcome the epistemic asymmetry between ‘Western’ and ‘Non-Western’ art, we need to look elsewhere. I will argue, using Franz Boas’s work, that we should look for formal features. In order to avoid the epistemic asymmetry that follows from the historically contingent fact that we have more information about some cultures than about others, we need to start our analysis with formal categories. (shrink)

The relationship between stress and unethical behaviour amongst non-tenured research staff in academia is a relatively unexplored phenomenon. The research reported herein was therefore carried out with the aim of exploring the relationship between stress, the socio-organisational factors which contribute to it, job satisfaction, perceptions of job instability, and the occurrence of unethical behaviour in research. 793 Italian researchers participated in the research—all of whom were working on fixed-term contracts—after being individually requested to complete an online questionnaire. The data (...) indicate that unethical behaviours occur with alarming frequency. The stress level reported is quite high, as is the level of perceived job insecurity, both of which impact upon levels of job satisfaction. Perceived stress levels also seem to play a role in the commission of unethical behaviours, but this relationship is irrelevant when one considers the role of social and organisational factors that are known to induce it. Indeed, it seems that there are various socio-organisational determinants of stress that have an obvious direct negative influence on the commission of unethical behaviours more than the stress level per se. This research paints a worrying picture in relation to the psycho-physical state of non-tenured researchers as a result of the working conditions in which they find themselves in Italian universities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Portrait of a Miniature Giant PAUL BAROLSKY There was a time when the art of the sixteenth -century Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino was reviled for its aesthetic excesses. Writing in his classic “The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy,” the great nineteenth -century scholar Jacob Burckhardt wrote that “as an historical painter,” Bronzino must “be placed among the Mannerists,” a judgement equivalent to placing him (...) in an art historical hell. But, Burckhardt added, “as a portrait painter, he is inferior to none of his contemporaries, not even the Venetians.” Given the fact that among the Venetians, Titian is one of the great portrait painters, this is astonishingly high praise. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for art historians, appreciating Mannerism, to celebrate the elegance and preciosity of Bronzino’s exquisite portraits. Of all Bronzino’s portraits, that of the dwarf Morgante is one of the most beguiling. It is distinctive in so many ways. This picture is the subject of a remarkable book by the Israeli art historian Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster : The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, which is an exceptional piece of scholarship. Different aspects of his book have influenced various scholars who have written about the picture and who have fruitfully exploited its various details. What needs to be appreciated, however, is the way in which this book brings out the extraordinary synthetic character of Bronzino’s strange painting and the diarion 28.3 winter 2021 Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster: The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, Maschietto Editore, 2016. 158 the portrait of a miniature giant versity of ways in which it belongs to the courtly culture in which it was painted. The beauty of Hendler’s seemingly all-encompassing book is that it tells a fascinating and highly entertaining story with admirable brevity in just over seventy pages. Hendler, who packs a great deal of deeply absorbing information and insight into his slim and learned volume, is sensitive to the sentiment of Peter Whiffle’s well-known dictum: “You cannot begin not to tell until you know more than you are willing to impart.” Hendler’s exquisitely concise story concerns a favorite dwarf of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, one Braccio di Bartolo in Poggio di Fornione, who flourished at the ducal court in the middle years of the sixteenth-century. Bronzino painted the dwarf for the Duke in 1552. His sometime rival, Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect, and biographer, described the picture as “beautiful and marvelous” in his Lives of the artists. The painting is double-sided, featuring a frontal view of the naked dwarf on the recto of the canvas (fig. 1) and a rear view of the dwarf, similarly exposed on the verso (fig. 2), where the dwarf’s backside dominates the composition. (We might well observe here that Bronzino specialized lasciviously in painting the culo (witness the coy Cupid in his famous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time). It is therefore not surprising that the anatomical backside rendered over and over again in Italian Renaissance art, with all its connotations, sexual and otherwise, has recently been the subject of a considerable body of scholarship. Hendler, himself writing on various writers of the period, offers little hints into the psycho-sexual dimension of Bronzino’s picture. Its depiction of so many birds leads inevitably to a consideration of the word “bird” in its sexual dimension. Enough said. If Morgante’s posterior is manifest on the verso, the recto of the painting has its own special interest. A butterfly flies by the dwarf directly and conveniently in front of his genitals—a coy if not teasing gesture of decorum. The portrait once hung in the Palazzo Vecchio, which had become a ducal residence. In recent years it has moved around quite a bit, settling in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, once a ducal residence. Vasari’s description of the picture is not without a certain iro- Paul Barolsky 159 ny, since the beautiful form of the painting as painting stands in opposition to the less than beautiful dwarf. The writer Anton Francesco Grazzini captured this paradox in his poem on the occasion of the death... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Aspiration to the Condition of TouchChristopher Perricone"The Dance," written by William Carlos Williams in 1944 is one of my favorite poems: I return to it regularly. Williams gives us a feel for that life of the kermess (a carnival) in his poem through Breughel's picture, as it were three times removed from the event itself. Of course, unlike Plato, I would argue that the vitality of the kermess (...) is not lost in the poem; it is actually enhanced by a subtle sleight of hand. The poem isn't primarily about Breughel's picture. It is about dance, about the dancers who go round, their squeal, the crude music, its rollicking measures, the dancers kicking and rolling and swinging, their hips, bellies, and butts. Reading and re-reading this poem, I "see" those ordinary folk of Breughel's great picture. I "hear" their music. I "move" to their dance. The poem seems a condensation, a summary of the fine arts. Perhaps the poem is about poetry's power to reinvigorate imaginatively what we hear and see. Perhaps I think of festivities at which I have danced, how such festivities are essential to the human experience. Perhaps, William Carlos Williams in 1944, World War II coming to a close, was anticipating similar good times. As always, it's best to let the poem speak for itself:In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the [End Page 229] Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.The visual, musical, and literary arts do much to educate our senses, especially our senses of sight and hearing. The well-formed visual and auditory sensations we gain from the arts are, as it were, the melody of those experiences. They are the images we store away, the tunes we whistle. However, here, I want to draw attention to an overlooked, although not entirely disregarded, sense, i.e., touch. I want to argue that touch is the bass line to the melody of sight and hearing in the arts, i.e., that touch keeps the work of art coherent and grounded.This is an old idea. Bernhard Berenson had the idea when he was examining the painters of the Italian renaissance. Berenson argued that great painting stimulates touch, which inspires, our "tactile imagination," which produces our "tactile values." Here lay, according to Berenson the genius of Giotto. Tactile imagination and values enchance the "material significance" of a work; they act as a "test of reality." Berenson was on to something not only about painting but about the arts in general. However, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he lacked the scientific evidence about touch and its role in human relationships to develop his idea of tactile values to any great extent.1Although Berenson had keen intuitions, he didn't know about the biological/psychological nuts and bolts of touch. Thus, he never knew about the detailed nature and extent of our physical contact with other physical things in the world. He didn't know about Merkel's discs, Ruffini and Pacinian corpuscles. He didn't know about hierarchical and parallel levels of brain processing. Berenson didn't know that more brain space in the somatosensory cortex is given to the hand than to any other part of the body, that your fingers especially have a high density of touch receptors compared to other body areas. Today, all this information is standard textbook fare.2 Many neuroscientific details need to be worked. However, a general picture based on hard evidence has begun to emerge.This information adds significant substance to Berenson's ideas. Berenson's "third dimension" is essentially a sense of temperature, pressure, vibration, and texture. And chances are the tactile imagination is inspired most by what is touched by... (shrink)

Glazed pottery from Nauplion and Argos (AD 12th-13th centuries): preliminary observations The regions of Argos and Nauplion were indissolubly connected in the Byzantine period and afterwards. This study attempts to examine, through the study of the glazed wares, whether the close ties between the two cities during the 12th and 13th centuries are also reflected in the pottery. Many categories of glazed wares (pottery with incised decoration, "Measles Ware", "Zeuxippus Ware", slip-painted ware, Brown and Green painted Ware, Glaze Painted Ware, (...) "Proto-Maiolica", Italian polychrome ware of the RMR type, "Archaic Maiolica") are presented, comparing the evidence of Argos and Akronauplia. These comparisons lead to comments indicating that whereas, during the 12th century, the two sites had contacts with other regions of the Peloponnese and the eastern Mediterranean, due to historical changes during the 13th century there developped the importation of pottery from various regions of Italy. (shrink)

By analysing the policies and ideas of German social democracy, the British Labour Party and the Italian Communist Party, this article explores their attitude towards science and their imagination of the future in the 1950s. Deeply different, social democrats and communists shared a positivist attitude in favour of scientific progress and high modernity. This painted their attitude towards the space race, peaceful nuclear power and automation. Science was conceived as a neutral power to be supported, but it required political (...) guidance to harness it and turned it into social progress. Thus, their disagreement was over the political implications for capitalist societies experiencing growing prosperity. Science was also a powerful rhetorical argument to castigate the conservatives for failing the nation and allowing it to decline and fall behind its competitors. The article combines comparison and transnational history, innovating the latter by introducing the concepts of horizontal, vertical and antagonistic transnationalism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Dante, Hyperspheres, and the Curvature of the Medieval CosmosWilliam EggintonIn the course of his lectures on medieval literature at Oxford University in the 1950s C. S. Lewis would ask students to walk alone at night, gaze at the star-filled sky, and try to imagine how it might look to a walker in the Middle Ages. It would not likely have occurred to him that some forty years later (...) several astrophysicists would ask that their readers perform the same activity, at least figuratively—not, however, with the intention of experiencing medieval conceptions of the cosmos but rather in order to begin to imagine the shape of our own. One of the astrophysicists in question is Stanford Professor Emeritus Robert Osserman, whose 1995 book The Poetry of the Universe is an attempt to acquaint lay readers with what the most recent research suggests is the shape of the universe by leading them through a brief history of the mathematical and technological developments that made such boundary-breaking thought possible. Paradoxically, when it comes to trying to imagine that all-encompassing form which is derived from a four-dimensional mathematical model called a hypersphere, he turns not to ultra-modern computer-generated images nor to dry but technically accurate exegeses of mathematical formulae but rather to the verses of a fourteenth-century Italian poet, Dante Alighieri. His claim is that in the third canticle of the Divine Comedy, which details his ascent through the heavens, Dante describes the cosmos with astonishing precision as a hypersphere, exactly as modern physics has determined it to be.If the cosmology of the present makes use of Dante heuristically, however, it never asks the most obvious question: Why? Why does one need to go back to the fourteenth century for a poetic description of how the universe appears to modern science? Osserman assumes it to be a mere coincidence, and why should he not? What possible access would a thinker—a poet even—of the European Middle Ages have to the highest achievements of almost six centuries of subsequent thought? In answering this question, I am not proposing to naively interpret the past in our own image, claiming Dante to be a mathematical genius [End Page 195] before his time. I am, however, suggesting that there is an excellent explanation for why one must look to the fourteenth century for models of expression adequate to the challenges posed by nineteenth and twentieth-century advances in mathematics: namely, that in the course of the Scientific Revolution, wherein were laid the epistemological foundations for the discoveries of modern science, certain possibilities of thought and imagination were discarded, forgotten, and certain abilities were, if only temporarily, lost. The Middle Ages has long been painted as a period whose culture was hostile to free thought and new knowledge; perhaps it is now time to recognize that it was also a time in which phenomena could sustain mutually exclusive and contradictory explanations, when the battle between faith and science had not yet been conclusively won by either side, and when the efforts to bridge the stories they told could produce conceptual edifices whose mere possibility would be unthinkable only 200 years later. This essay is about one such conceptual edifice and how openness to its perspective allowed a poet to put into words what could not be imagined by his descendants, and what eludes us even today.The Shape of the Modern UniverseImagine that you are a completely flat creature, living happily in your two-dimensional world.1 As observers we are outside this world, and we can see you milling about with your flat friends, blissfully unaware of the uncharted regions one dimension away on either side of you. Now imagine that this plane is not flat—in the sense of rectilineal—as you might have created it in your mind, but rather is curved; in fact it is a sphere. Assuming that this sphere is large enough, there is no reason that you, an inhabitant of this surface, should be aware of its curvature. Even we, the three-dimensional observers, if close enough to the surface, would not recognize its curvature. One could conjecture, however... (shrink)

Argument“How should a modern artist react to the atomic age?” Time magazine posed this question in 1952 to open a review of an exhibition of paintings inspired by the “explosion of the atomic bomb” and by the “discovery of nuclear energy.” The energetic paintings of the Italian Spatial Movement were, according to Time, “almost as explosive as the bomb itself.” “Explosiveness” was a defining feature of much 1950s art, whose main impulse, gestural abstraction, has previously been understood as the (...) urgent expression of the artist's subjectivity. This paper argues that explosiveness in art can also be seen as an “expression” of the realities of the nuclear era. Postwar artists were ambivalent about the explosive forces, both liberating and devastating, that lay within the atom. Toward the end of the 1950s, no longer content merely to represent atomic disintegration, some artists went so far as to propose the outright self-destruction of the work of art as the only fitting means of expression in the atomic age.One must – and this is not an exaggeration – keep in mind that we are living in the atomic age, where everything material and physical could disappear from one day to another, to be replaced by nothing but the ultimate abstraction imaginable.– Yves Klein 1958. (shrink)

Doors play a complex role in architecture. The very word, at least in Italian and French, illuminates the marking of the deliberate interruption of the act of foundation during the ceremony of the wall's enceinte tracing. The word porta indicates the action of portare. During the tracing of the furrow into the ground, the blade is lifted out of the ground in order to mark the place of the future entrance to the city. Another significant role is the marking (...) of the “exit” from this world and it is loaded with intense significance in funereal architecture. But if we look at the semantic “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” it will be easy to discover the other, complementary, and necessary role of the porta. The reading of Aristophanes' Lysistrata shows the explicit “hidden” metaphor of the door, which has been very well christened as the “Origin of the World” in the famous Courbet painting. (shrink)

A famous portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein depicts the scholar with his hands resting on a volume identified as his ‘Herculean Labours’. Erasmus associated this adage with the effort expended and ingratitude encountered by the philologist, and made it central to his self-presentation. In this article, its origins are traced to Erasmus’s encounter with Aldus Manutius, the venetian printer-humanist who published his Adagia in 1508. The impact of Aldus on Erasmus is shown to be significant, affecting his entire ideology (...) of humanism, including its relationship to print and its religious purpose. This article challenges distinctions between the Italian and the Northern Renaissance that are unhelpful for understanding Erasmus’s development. In light of its findings, it also proposes a new interpretation of Holbein’s painting. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Place of Touch in the ArtsChristopher Perricone (bio)IntroductionIn Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick- sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging their (...) butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.1"The Dance" written by William Carlos Williams in 1944 is one of my favorites. Williams gives us a feel for that life of the kermess (a carnival) in his poem through Breughel's picture, as it were three times removed from the event itself. Of course, unlike Plato, I would argue that the vitality of the kermess is not lost in the poem; it is actually enhanced by a subtle sleight of hand. The poem is not primarily about Breughel's picture. It is about dance, about the dancers who go round, their squeal, the crude music, its rollicking measures, the dancers kicking and rolling and swinging, their hips, bellies, and butts. Reading this poem, I "see" those ordinary folk of Breughel's great picture. I "hear" their music. I "move" to their dance. The poem seems a condensation, a summary of the fine arts. Perhaps the poem is about poetry's power to reinvigorate imaginatively what we hear and see. Perhaps I think of festivities at which I have danced, how such festivities are essential to the human experience. Perhaps William Carlos Williams in 1944, World War II coming to a close, was anticipating similar good times.Tactile ValuesThe fine arts do much to educate our senses. One need only recall the many essays and books written on art, on how to look and hear, how various [End Page 90] critics draw our attention to the power of imagery and song. The well-formed visual and auditory sensations we gain from the arts are, as it were, the melody of those experiences. They are the pictures we store away, the tunes we whistle. However, here I want to draw attention to an overlooked sense—touch. I want to argue that touch is the bass line to the melody of sight and hearing in the arts, that is, that touch keeps the artwork coherent and grounded.This is an old idea. Bernhard Berenson had the idea when he was examining the painters of the Italian Renaissance. In a sense this article is a resurrection of Berenson's idea of "tactile values." Berenson was on to something both about painting and about the arts in general. However, he lacked the scientific evidence about touch and its role in human relationships needed to develop his idea of tactile values to any great extent.The idea of tactile values is first mentioned at the beginning of the essay "The Florentine Painters." Berenson is discussing the art of Giotto. However, prior to plunging into his subject, he says that we need to know what is essential to figure painting before we can appreciate its real value. What is essential are the "tactile values" we give to our retinal impressions, "a test of reality."2 Painting stimulates touch in order for it to stimulate our "tactile imagination."3 Giotto was a genius in stimulating the tactile imagination. Like other medieval masters, Giotto was a fine story teller and had great compositional skills. However, unlike Giotto, other medieval masters "never painted a figure which has artistic existence."4 Giotto's predecessors crafted "highly elaborate, very intelligible symbols, capable, indeed, of communicating something, but losing all higher value the moment the message is delivered."5 If such medieval symbols communicated anything at all, it was only some residue of what one might touch; whatever reality those symbols might have possessed was virtually eviscerated by the artists' emphasis on form and cognitive content. Giotto's predecessors were driven merely by ideas and, one might add, not altogether consistent and coherent ones. On the contrary, Giotto's work seemed to... (shrink)

Carlo Levi was a painter, writer, and antifascist Italian from a Jewish family, and his political activism forced him into exile for most of the Second World War. While in exile, he wrote _Christ Stopped at Eboli_, a memoir, and _Fear of Freedom_, a philosophical meditation on humanity's flight from moral and spiritual autonomy and our resulting loss of self and creativity. Brooding on what surely appeared to be the decline, if not the fall of Europe, Levi locates the (...) human abdication of responsibility in organized religion and its ability to turn the sacred into the sacrificial. In doing so, he references the entire intellectual and cultural estate of Western civilization, from the Bible and Greek mythology to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. This edition features newly published pieces of Levi's artwork and the first English translation of his essay "Fear of Painting," which was appended to a later publication of the work. It also includes an introduction that discusses Levi's life and enduring legacy. Written as war clouds were gathering over Europe, _Fear of Freedom_ not only addresses a specific moment in history and a universal, timeless condition, but it is also a powerful indictment of our contemporary moral and political failures. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 286—310. This mad play of writing —Stéphane Mallarmé Somewhere in between mathematics and theory, light and dark, physicality and projection, oscillates the poetry of Alessandro De Francesco. The texts hold no periods or commas, not even a capital letter for reference. Each piece stands as an individual construction, and yet the poetry flows in and out of the frame. Images resurface from one poem to the next, haunting the reader with reincarnations of an object lost in the (...) grass or a representation of a pear in a Dutch still life, embedded in cycles of cinematic close ups and multiple dimensions. As a whole, De Francesco’s oeuvre suggests, to use the title of one of his works, a redefinition —linguistic, epistemological, personal. The poem The End (un’agenda) (The End (an agenda)) opens with a quote by literary theorist Maurice Blanchot, which may be translated as follows: Speaking is not seeing. Speaking frees thought from this optical imperative that in the Western tradition, for thousands of years, has subjugated out approach to things, and induced us to think under the guaranty of light or under the threat of its absence.[1] In writing, De Francesco seeks to redefine our approach to things. His poems, like Blanchot’s writings, speak to both illuminate and to obscure. The reader hangs in an absence of reality within language that necessitates an attempt at interpretation, yet renders such a search ultimately futile. De Francesco draws the anonymous images that appear in this poem from the city of Paris, his current home. The fragmented narrative depicts an inner doubt of realness, calling for a confirmation of a physical existence beyond verbalization and cogitation. Cyclical references to film throw into question the reliability of the reality he creates. The light, sometimes red and safe, other times absent and murky, cannot necessarily be trusted as a guaranteed means of illumination. Blanchot’s distinction between language and visualization, and the relationship of each to reality, though linked specifically to The End (un’agenda) , can be a lens through which to read any of the three works that follow. assente obliqua (absent oblique) is composed of descriptions of six still life paintings, ranging from Dutch masterpieces of the seventeenth century to 1960s minimalism. The actual images of the paintings are absent, and the text is the sole source and object of a virtual reality created around the artwork. “Absent oblique” refers to the light source placed outside of the frame, which both informs and distracts viewing of the scene. Although mere description can be unreliable and unsatisfying in its necessary limitation, the representational act of description is shown as more than just a human want. It is a need, a means by which to grapple with an unsure reality. As the illustrations progress, they descend into abstraction and chaos. The precariously placed plate triggers the movement: the bottle bursts and the objects collapse into the movement of a tracking film camera. corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale (foreign body in ascending motion) is prose poetry in action. Its objective tone of description is skewed by the subjectivity of the narrative as horrific images are relayed in fragmented but matter-of-fact manner. A “foreign body” is both a mass of cancerous cells, and a corporeal description, and the poem takes the reader on a journey back and forth between the two, destination unclear. Beyond a questioning of the real, corpo estraneo in moto ascensionale is an examination of the possible. De Francesco’s poetry becomes a camera obscura through which to observe the constant flux of light and dark that blurs our reality. His work is colored by the idea of apo koinou , a Greek term meaning “from the common” that involves a construction of two clauses with a shared word or phrase. Through such melting of meaning, De Francesco creates a fluid ambiguity that is nonetheless grounded in bodily concepts. In assente obliqua , the reader is confronted with a description of a still life that rapidly transforms into a more chilling scene: the membrane of the mushroom in the basket emerges behind the white cloth a body could hide itself that asks for help In the realm of pure description, there is a mushroom that peeks out from behind a white cloth in a basket. Behind the white cloth, too, there could be a body, hiding, asking for help. Such an elision elicits disorienting mistrust in temporality, but also expands the planar possibilities of syntactical meaning. A white cloth is not merely a construct in still life painting, but veil that both shields and reveals potential mysteries. It is a proposed alternative to a traditional Western binary of subjectivity and objectivity. The apo koinou construction is rare in modern English, having slipped out of use after its resurgence in Old English poetry. De Francesco reintroduces this blur of object and subject relations into a modern light. He draws inspiration from a device used by Gruppo 63 founder and avant-garde poet Antonio Porta tended toward repetition of phrases in third person perspective. In Italian, it is perfectly grammatically correct to omit the subject, including only a verb conjugation. Gender, even humanity unknown, the subject dissolves into the action, thus giving to the poetry the power to change the reader’s perception of who or what is actually acting. To further push the relative boundaries of experience, De Francesco expands his written poetry into what he calls “reading environments.” In these sound experiments, De Francesco’s voice reading his poetry is manipulated by real time digital voice processing. The written is transformed to the spoken, and then injected with currents of electric sound. “At each activation of word in the darkness,” (from The End (un’agenda) ) language is permutated into a nonphysical yet all-encompassing being. In these projects, realized all over Europe, De Francesco continues his examination of the word’s potency beyond the page and into an “n-dimensional space,” where the lines between nature and affect are intertwined. To publish excerpts of De Francesco’s oeuvre is to show screen shots of full-length film, to read pull quotes from a philosophy treatise. In these poems, there are questions, not to be answered, but to be questioned again. The words will oscillate in and out of the square construction found in his poems, out of the borders of the page, out of the rectangle of the laptop screen. NOTES (1) Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation . Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 27. EDITORS' NOTE The .pdf above contains about twenty pages of translation and the original Italian poetry. Below we provide only a brief account. The End (an agenda) Parler, ce n’est pas voir. Parler libère la pensée de cette exigence optique qui, dans la tradition occidentale, soumet depuis des millénaires notre approche des choses et nous invite à penser sous la garantie de la lumière ou sous la menace de l’absence de lumière. —Maurice Blanchot in this n-dimensional space i could spy on myself from the cracks while going back and forth from the summer to the wardrobe from the night to the parking lot but something filters in through the half-closed shutters becomes an event enunciation we stay without explanation like parallel curves on the back of a solid growing older she enters the garden always repeats certain phrases the elevator to be redone the neighbor’s music the steps the pavement furls like the leaves of a fern when touched she is framed from behind while she moves rocking she covers distances slowly a bag overflows from the wardrobe something stirs inside but then the suitcase comes open not even by my hand it’s the objects that are starting to filter out the little red haired monster watches idling the appointments written on one of your agendas two years old still seem urgent each letter holds itself upright on the page with flourishes and arabesques each angle has its own geography i’m trying to describe the path the fingers trace on the carpet the zipper takes the opposite route we are suspended on the stairs above the water in the center is the summer seen from above the darkness of the city passes from one headlight to the next the surfaces of our arms cohere and are shiny underneath the blinking of a sign each pore is an open expanse the body dreams the hair gives form to the possible some daring swimmers were throwing themselves into the seine they swam upstream up to the first quay look there could exist behind the screen a room where even when the lamp is out and the curtains drawn even when the suitcase wasn’t closed everything seemed red everything calm construction of a four-dimensional tetrahedron by R. Courant – H. Robbins, What is Mathematics? Oxford University Press, 1941  . (shrink)

When reading Susan Vreeland's novel The Passion of Artemisia, we find ourselves in seventeenth century Renaissance Italy and the social life of Artemisia d'Orazio Gentileschi, a woman painter who was raped, tortured by the Inquisition and due to her fine and original paintings, was the first woman painter to become a member of the famous Accademia del Disegno. In sum, she struggled for her personal and artistic liberation long before anyone in Europe had heard about feminism. Moreover, Artemisia is a (...) timely reminder of how sometimes in the past for Europeans, and more specifically for Italians, Art in general and Painting in particular, was an integral part of a form of life not only for artists but for ordinary people as well. (shrink)