ITER Immagini e testi per l’Europa del Rinascimento | 2024 | N. 2

The article features a dialogue between Daniel Javitch and Corrado Confalonieri about the recent past, present, and future of Ariosto criticism. The conversation centers on Javitch’s studies on Ariosto, who has authored some of the most significant essays on Orlando furioso and particularly on its reception in the sixteenth century. The discussion covers the theoretical premises, objectives, and the still unexplored or occasionally revisable directions of these works, especially in light of comparisons with research by other scholars. In addition to the methodological approach that traces back to the text based on how it has been read and canonized over time, special attention is given to issues of intertextuality and imitation, the relationship between reality and literary fiction, the theory of literary genres, and the dialogue between academic traditions of different countries.

The article offers an analysis of the recent national edition of Machiavelli’s epistolary, with a specific focus on the Ghiribizzi to Soderini and the ideological and literary framing of this document.

It is both an exciting and a perilous time to study the history of humanists and humanism. Twentieth-century trends in the field have in many cases given way to new approaches while past lacunae have partially been filled. For example, nineteenth-century assumptions about languages and nationalism have started giving way to studies open to transnational stories and multilingualism. Important philological and literary work often is accompanied by deep dives into social and political contexts. Old and new texts are explored for insights into older topics like republicanism and newer topics like environmentalism and race. The I Tatti Renaissance Library is nearing publication of its 100th volume and is joined by numerous other series aimed at increasingly accessibility to editions and translations of both Italian and Latin Renaissance texts. The result is a more encompassing and increasingly accessible field with better access to sources than ever before. Yet, simultaneously, the history of humanists and humanism as part of the Italian Renaissance has continued to lose overall significance in the United States. Throughout the twentieth century the Italian Renaissance was a key chapter in the history of the United States as viewed through the story of Western Civilization. But as the story of the West has been and continues to be justifiably challenged, specialists and students in the United States have struggled to explain what makes older Italian or even European stories still significant enough to justify new work and positions rather than focusing on less studied and more inclusive topics with more seemingly immediate application to the contexts and challenges of the current world.

Textiles have always been the foundational materials of fashion studies. The ductile, tensile nature of fabric has lent the field many of its prevailing conceptual frameworks, including mobility (and adaptation), identity (and embodiment), and reusability (and, alternatively, sustainability or ephemerality). More than twenty years of materiality studies have helpfully extended our appreciation of alternative materials, including metals, leather, furs, and feathers. But more remains for us to conceptualize from a methodological standpoint. To appreciate materiality requires us to critically situate the stuff of fashion in historical processes of becoming: to account for the entelechies of matter through time and space. Although such inquiries can take many directions, we focus here on the battlefield to illustrate the way metaphors of uniformity have historically intersected with materialities to realize visions of nationalism.

From the perspective of Early Modern Italian music studies, this essay considers the implications of recent trends in musicological scholarship, namely sound studies, global music histories, and a decentering of white music histories. These trends are considered alongside the older radical traditions of feminist and queer scholarship in music. Despite the fervently reformist politics of earlier generations of feminist and queer musicologists and despite the fertile territory that Italian Renaissance and Baroque music provided for such studies, the cumulative effect of nearly 40 years of such work has been limited in scope. The central repertoire and the narrative arc of Western music history remain largely unchanged. In contrast, the politics of decolonization and anti-White-supremacism put pressure on the very concept of a musical masterpiece and the value of high-art aesthetics, including notated musical traditions.

We are now in what many are calling a «psychedelic renaissance». Governments are relaxing restrictions on studying the mental health benefits of psychoactive substances in controlled doses; many people are joining a «psychonautic» lineage, that is, exploring inner worlds through ingesting bits of the planet’s natural entheogens. Ecstasies, prophecies, dreams, and other forms of altered states of consciousness – whether induced or not by hallucinogens – reveal just how far the human mind can travel. Italy’s Renaissance was rich with examples of such journeys and states, and there is much to be gained by bringing its works into conversation with current medical research. What is more, the Italian Renaissance also offers an important model for anticipating the benefits and pitfalls that revivals of past or decontextualized thinking and practice can bring to the present.

This article examines the Folger Shakespeare (FS), an online resource provided by the Folger Shakespeare Library (FSL) that offers digital access to the complete works of Shakespeare. The resource allows users multiple access points, including a pleasant online reading experience, an introduction to the textual history, downloads, and API access. The article highlights the potential of the digital resource for scholarly and computational research.

The short article proposes a reflection on the forms of representation of the other starting from the recent publication of Il chiaro e lo scuro. Gli Africani nell’Europa del Rinascimento tra realtà e rappresentazione. The volume, edited by Gianfranco Salvatore, studies the presence of the African image, language and culture in Renaissance Europe, and it delves particularly on the particularly significant case of the sixteenth-century Naples.

The article offers an analysis of the recent publication by Alessio Decaria (2023) with a specific focus on the new critical perspectives on Luigi Pulci. The comparison between the two Laurentian poets, Pulci and Poliziano, allows a better understanding of the genesis and the chronology of their two poems (the Morgante and the Stanze per la giostra), as well as their troubled composition, considering that both works were deeply affected by the Pazzi conspiracy in 1478. Precisely because they embody two different intellectual perspectives in the Florentine world, Pulci and Poliziano have always been studied separately, preventing readers from grasping the rich intersections between their works that Decaria’s methodological approach, which combines philological and historical inquiry, brings to light.

With the occasion of the exhibition Otro Renacimiento. Artistas españoles en Nápoles a comienzos del Cinquecento (Another Renaissance. Spanish Artists in Naples at the beginning of the Cinquecento), curated by Andrea Zezza and Ricardo Naldi, first at the Prado Musuem in Madrid (18 ottobre 2022 – 9 gennaio 2023), and then at the Capodimonte Museum in Naples (13 march-25th june 2023), the article discusses the relationship between art and power in Naples in the first quarter of the XVIth century, during the Aragonese and Spanish ruling of the city, emphasizing the relevance of Pietro Summonte’s letter to Michiel, Sull’arte napoletana (On Neapolitan Art, 1524).

The paper proposes a reflection on the exemplary value assumed by the suburban villa that Agostino Chigi commissioned to Baldassarre Peruzzi in the early 16th century as a place of representation and delight. The villa in fact, known in its time as Palazzo del Giardino, was immediately looked upon as one of the pinnacles of the Roman and Tuscan Renaissance. It was in its salons and avenues that the Renaissance itself seemed to take full form and descend from books and a word so revered into spaces and volumes, translating the elegantiae of lexicon and rhetoric into the precious of images and the admirable of collections. In the beautiful – in the magnificent – of architectures, of waters, of gardens, of figurative cycles, of small and large collections.

The essay dwells on one of the most iconic sites of Renaissance in Southern Italy: Giovanni Pontano’s Villa Antiniana, the privileged seat of the meetings of the Accademia Pontaniana, which later became one of the archetypal places of European cultural memory by virtue of its many and varied poetic transfigurations.