Intersezioni | 2018 | N. 3

Pontormo’s journal, written between 1554 and 1556 while working at the choir of the Florentine Basilica of San Lorenzo, bears witness to an intellectual vision steeped in the foundations of modern science and the spirit of the Reformation,as well as to the artist’s esthetical and political choices. Pontormo’s entries reflect the specific design of achieving the optimal physical condition that might enable the completion of a work of exceptional importance. The necessity of adopting a lifestyle and a dietary regimen predicated upon medical prescriptions is inextricably
associated with the realization of a radically innovative cycle of frescoes which, in turn, harmonized with the most advanced literary and philosophical expressions of the time.

This essay describes the tolerance characterising city life at the time, the generosity and the artistic proficiency of cardinal Grimani, and the unorthodox religious views of Giorgio Veneto. It then moves on to an overview of art criticism on Bosch’s work and continues exploring the relationship between Pacioli – theorist of «divine proportions» – and his friend Leonardo da Vinci. Finally, the focus moves on Dürer’s Melencolia I and the influence of the great engraver’s on German art.

This paper aims to investigate the connection between voice, word and thing by establishing an affinity between Plato’s Cratylus, Vico’s Scienza nuova and Nietzsche’s essay The Dionysian Vision of the World. In Plato, the name indicates the essence of the thing itself: its «sound», its «shape» and its «colour». In Vico, the first vocal and gestural signs repeat the sound and the «passion» of the acted-things.
Finally, according to Nietzsche, in language the strength of sound and the rhythm of its resonance symbolically allude to the essence of the thing. Therefore, all three philosophers point out the mythical and auditory-gestural root of the language – encountered (but not caught) by the language when it sinks into itself.

Modernist poetics in La coscienza di Zeno is the gradual result of Svevo’s reflections in the course of his existential experience during the silent twenty years between Senilità and the First World War. In the process of such a mental trial, Jewish
cultural identity plays a significant role. Conflict between modernity and Law of the Fathers makes Jewish culture particularly sensitive to the elaboration of trauma required to everybody by «modern times», technology, progress itself. Svevo refers to some cryptical traits of Jewish thought in order to find an answer to uneasiness and dangers of the new century, and, in doing so, he places himself entirely within the stream of the literature produced by secularised Jewish writers.

In this essay I compare Massimo Bontempelli’s “Noi. Gli Aria” (1934) with Stefan Zweig’s “Brazil, Land of the Future” (1941), underlining similarities and differences between the vision and the description of Brazilian landscape, people and politics in these two travel books. While Bontempelli is more concerned with the description of the terrific beauty of the bay of Rio de Janeiro and with the analysis of the carioca’s
typical melancholy, Zweig idealize Brazil as a model of an intercultural society which can become an example of the upcoming societies.

Gianfranco Contini, «philology poet» (G. Nencioni), enriches his prose with statements that are similar to aphorisms. What is their value? Can a nominalist communicate by using aphorisms? Is it possible to create a collection? This article, which is based on an actual case, gives an answer to these questions and suggests ideas for further considerations.

This paper presents the results of a comparative study which investigated the narrative structures shaping the topic migration» and its imagery into a literary discourse in four recent works of German and Italian literature. Suggesting a definition of «migration literature» based on the explicit narrativized topic and on the author’s legitimation strategies, rather than on their biography, this study shows how the four works employ comparable formal strategies. These strategies go beyond linguistic differences to construct a counter-narrative of the official discourse on migration. Thereby, the paper encourages a re-evaluation of the ategories typically employed to investigate these works, while proposing a textual, transnational understanding, founded on their comparable conception as counter-narratives.

This paper aims to show the skillful interweaving of reality and fiction put in place by Machiavelli in “The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca” (1520) in order to convey in plastic form the model of politician he had elaborated in his theoretical works: “The Prince” (1513/1514), the “Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy” (1515-1519) and “The Art of War” (1519/1520). After placing “The Life of Castruccio”
in the context of Machiavellian production (§ 2) and having briefly reconstructed his argumentative strategy (§ 3), the final paragraph (§ 4) will focus on its central theme: the unequal and inescapable conflict between Virtue and Fortune.

For a large part of the twentieth century, synaesthetic linguistic metaphors were considered conceptual figures, literary tropes, rhetorical devices. In any case, they were not deemed useful tools for understanding the traits that make up our sensoriality. A substantially different picture emerges both from the latest developments in cognitive linguistics and semantics, and from contemporary neurophysiological research: within this framework, interest in the topics of sensory intermodality and in synaesthetic metaphors has been growing. This essay intends to show how what was drawn up in the different fields of German philosophical and psychological culture in the first decades of the twentieth century contains important indications on these topics and, in particular, on the role to acknowledge to phenomenological experience and natural language in order to understand our sensoriality and investigate its underlying physiological processes.