Intersezioni | 2022 | N. 1

This essay aims to investigate the relationship between medical knowledge and humanist culture in the early modern age, with special reference to the epistemological effects of Vesalius’s work on the literary imagination. To this end, the survey defines as its field of enquiry a set of Italian literary anatomies. Although not yet studied in Italy as a historicised category, this corpus proves to be representative of an editorial phenomenon and a revealing chapter in the cultural history of this era, marked by the emergence of a «civilization of anatomy». A historiographic revision of the significance of this genre’s spread is also considered, in order to show that the pivotal science of anatomy was assimilated not only because of an aesthetic trend (the baroque vanitas), but also as a distinct and recognizable cognitive style of the era.

Leonardo’s influence on Goethe, first highlighted in 1899 by the young Aby Warburg, but not yet sufficiently analysed by critics, is fundamental to understand the author’s scientific breakthrough and the relationship between the theory of the gaze and the pictorial practice. After his stay in Sicily, Goethe immerses himself in Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, where he finds the fundamentals for his aesthetic idea of the movement of forms and the shady nature of colours. In the Theory of Colours he gives life to a kind of phenomenology of perception, which, anticipating some modern philosophers, interprets the world and its forms as the result of a cross-relationship between the individual who perceives external nature and the external nature that is perceived by the individual.

The objective of this essay is to highlight the literary setting of Machiavelli’s The Prince. The essay is focused particularly on chapters III and XXV of The Prince, but it also considers the construction of characters and the representation of desire in
Machiavelli’s Mandragola. Thanks to the use of Panofsky’s category of «perspective», the essay demonstrates how Machiavelli’s political discourse is founded on a literary treatment of social and historical circumstances. The close reading of excerpts from
The Prince and the Discourses is specifically dedicated to the representation of people («popolo»), as a key in order to work on the concept of variation («variazione») and on the mimetic effort made by Machiavelli to represent it.

This study analyses the Shakespearean tragicomedy Measure for Measure through Hanns Sachs’ psychoanalytical reading. First, by bringing the author closer to the figure of the dreamer, artistic creation is compared to a daydream, a shared reverie,
according to what Sachs called mutual daydream. Then, some key concepts of the play will be analysed in the terms postulated by Sachs, that will allow the understanding of Shakespeare’s aim to restore an order. Therefore, the ending would confirm the intrinsic need of human nature to find the right balance between one’s own internal conflicts and the demands of external reality, while at the same time trying to reaffirm one’s internal law, which necessarily longs for a measure to put an end to the disorder typical of a tragedy.

The article aims to demonstrate that Umberto Eco’s author name is a reference point for successful Italian novels on a global scale. Starting from the debate about Eco’s name associated to an apocryphal text such as Q (Luther Blissett, 1999) in international reviews, the essay attempts to reconstruct an Eco model, in order to test its consistency: first of all, questioning whether this model really refers to the historical novel, as the reviews suggest; and, more generally, whether the reference to
the author is really due to the literary genre. This reference seems to have relevance linked on the one hand to The Name of the Rose as an example of the «Italian way to postmodernism», and on the other as the first Italian novel to be highly successful
on a transnational editorial market.

The aim of this paper is to present some aspects of the essayistic production of Elias Canetti, starting from his interest for myth, religion and Presocratic philosophies and stressing his original holistic approach to the reality (evident both in the novel Auto-da-Fé and in the socio-anthropological essay Crowd and Power). Inquiring into the historical context of his youth – primarily the personal path in the philosophical scene of post-war Vienna (with reference to Kraus, Musil, Broch but also to Heinrich Gomperz, the Austrian philosopher near to the circle of Schlick and upholder of ‘Pathempirismus’), the paper focuses on Canetti’s aversion a) to any belief accepted as authoritative by philosophical schools, particularly systematic theories and dialectical thought, b) to the obsessive philosophical attraction for the death (and for the power).

The article aims at analysing the concept of thauma, especially with reference to the canonical interpretation of this term, translated as «astonishment». Despite the success of such an interpretation, it is impossible to ignore the presence of a further hermeneutic solution, which deviates from the traditional one: Emanuele Severino’s translation of term thauma as «pain» or «terror». What historical-theoretical legitimacy can be attributed to the most recent interpretative tendency? After presenting the canonical interpretation, I will tackle the problems that are intrinsic to the «severinian» conception. Finally, although seemingly incompatible at first sight, I will try to identify a meeting point between the two perspectives.