Italian Bookshelf

ITALIAN BOOKSHELF Edited by Dino S. Cervigni and Anne Tordi with the collaboration of Norma Bouchard, Paolo Cherchi, Gustavo Costa, Albert N. Mancini, Massimo Maggiari, and John P. Welle GENERAL & MISCELLANEOUS STUDIES Marco Arnaudo, Il trionfo di Vertunno. Illusioni ottiche e cultura letteraria nell’età della Controriforma. Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 2008. Pp. 301. The subject of Marco Arnaudo‘s book Il Trionfo di Vertunno. Illusioni ottiche e cultura letteraria nell’età della Controriforma is the relationship between literary texts and visual images in a particular historical period designated as the Age of the Counter Reformation, roughly between 1550 and 1700. The volume is organized in six chapters, a substantial introduction, an exhaustive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, and nineteen pages of illustrations. The first chapter deals with some visual devices that have influenced many authors of the period and a broad segment of the reading public. Arnaudo describes a number of genres of such types of images, and examines them with appropriate examples and illustrations in distinct sections: perspective and anamorphosis (i.e., a distorted optical image), arcimbolderies, magic mirrors, multi-faceted portraits, anthropomorphic landscapes, and other similar devices. For Arnaudo all transmission and reception of knowledge requires a close analysis of all its verbal and visual aspects. Significantly, the author has chosen as symbol of his work Vertumnus, a native Roman deity who presided over change and mutability, instead of the canonical Proteus. The term of ―trionfo‖ (triumph) of the title alludes to the parade of different optical illusions that form the ever-changing triumphal procession in honor of Vertunno. Arnaudo‘s definition of optical illusion in a more general sense is that of an image whose subject changes with the changing of the conditions of the observer or reader of the work (e.g., a landscape is transformed into a human being). He is especially interested in the receptions of images that can be transformed. Moreover, the term of optical ―illusions‖ is used always and only to designate techniques which create visual effects exciting amazement or ―meraviglia‖ (wonder), not the representation of reality. According to him, this approach to the problem of the influence of visual culture based on its reception offers the possibility to include images that modern readers would not recognize as equivalent to anamorphic images but that could have been understood as such by men of letters and readers of the time. Annali d’Italianistica 28 (2010), Capital City: Rome, 1870-2010 448 Annali d’Italianistica 28 (2010) The last fifty years have seen especially in Italy a surge of scholarship on the period between the High Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The period has been called, not without cause, the ―Age of Wonder.‖ The Italian philosopher Francesco Patrizi in 1587 stated: ―The marvelous follows us always.‖ This statement could be the epigraph for the period, because ―Wonder,‖ that includes both inquiry and astonishment, was a concept central into redefinitions of the mind, the body, the arts, literature, science, and the known world. The Western worldview was undergoing radical revisions necessitated by the discoveries in the heavens and on the earth, and by the Reformation, which had scattered the unity of Christian Europe. Writers and artists of the time were both inspired and hindered by the awesome legacy of the immediate past as they struggled to find modes of expression that were their own, yet not disrespectful of traditions. By the end of the sixteenth century, they were responding to the restraints of Renaissance neoclassicism both imitating and rebelling against it, claiming for themselves a greater measure of freedom in the choice of subject matter and genres, challenging Renaissance formal and moral imperatives based on Aristotelian aesthetics, especially the notions of ―decorum‖ and morality of art. The high number of examples in literary works collected in this volume aims at showing a widespread reception of optical illusions that would be hard to imagine considering the changes in taste in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The presence of changeable images in the works of poets, novelists, philosophers, emblem-writers, treatise writers, and preachers points to the penetration of the phenomenon among a vast and diverse public capable of understanding the allusions. To be noted is also the fact that often optical illusions were evoked in discussions of important and serious subjects such as science, God, nature, the position of man in it, and poetics. The introductory overview of general trends is followed by five case studies on the uses of these transformational practices in works of five major representatives of the period. In the second chapter, Arnaudo argues that the philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was inspired by and used effectively optical illusions in order to present a philosophy in which changing images derived from Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1530-93), the court painter to the Habsburg emperors who carried to the extreme the late Renaissance penchant for the bizarre and fantastic, described an infinite universe in perennial change and provided the readers with a tool with which they could discover the truth. Bruno‘s views of the infinity of the universe could also have come from his readings of the fifteenth- century Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who associated visual images with the external workings of the cosmos. But Bruno, who had already used geometric diagrams to present an infinite universe in the dialogues of The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast (1585), goes further in his conception of the cosmos, insisting on comparing his own book to a painting that is difficult to decipher. In the third chapter the author focuses on the works of Giovan Battista Marino (1565-1625), hailed as the most influential poet of the century in all of Italian Bookshelf 449 Europe. Paying attention to details and inventiveness in subject matter and style of the Neapolitan poet, Arnaudo shows how anamorphic images inspired by Arcimboldo offered him new means to produce more prodigious effects of wonder and to promote, even institutionalize, a figurative taste soon to be known as Marinism that was becoming fashionable in the early Seicento, The last three chapters take us through a detailed account of the uses of spatial and visual illusions as well as anamorphic and changing images in the works of three contemporary representative members of the Society of Jesus. Arnaudo‘s main argument is that these devices provided them with ample opportunities to create a new, more open kind of spiritual and religious response. He demonstrates how natural anamorphic images played an essential role in the cultural program of universal ecumenism of the German Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680), one of the most influential seventeenth-century writers on natural philosophy. Kircher was also a scientist for whom the telescope becomes an anamorphic tube whose primary function was not to enlarge an object but to transform it in order to excite wonder and admiration in the viewer and celebrate the perfection of God‘s creation. For Emanuele Tesauro (1592-1675), the foremost theorist of the literary Baroque, anamorphosis and optical illusions are capable of ―opening,‖ that is, of expressing a view of life as unstable, uncertain, in which all knowledge is partial because of the relationship between an object and a viewer or speaker, whose conditions changes continuously; and yet, in his own words ―omnis in unum,‖ they could be used to ―close‖ the circle by stressing their ability to compress and reduce a great number of different objects. In Il cannocchiale aristotelico (1655) Tesauro examines various forms of acutezze (acuities) ―some of which delight the ear, some the affections by their imagery, and others the intellect by their ingegno (wit). Wit is embodied in the metaphor, the ―mother‖ of all creative expressions, because it can draw together a number of referents in a number of combinations. According to Tesauro, wit, which can encompass both perspicuity and versatility, is able to bring distant realities closer finding in them common elements. The world is God‘s book that is written in conceits. In chapter six, Arnaudo introduces another prominent Seicento figure: Daniello Bartoli (1608-1685), the official historian of the Jesuit order and one of the best rhetorician of the century. Dissenting from both Kircher and Tesauro, Bartoli asserts that the heavens were not created in secrecy; they do not hide mirrors or enigma to decipher. All is already before us, evident and transparent for God‘s creatures to admire and understand. Together, these case studies provide a fuller understanding of the dynamics of verbal and pictorial language interplay, and can serve as methodological templates for looking at, and reading of, many other similarly complex inventions of the period. By way of summary, this is an ambitious and wide-ranging book that brings a fresh perspective to early modern Italian studies. It provides an exemplary model of groundbreaking work on the relations between visual and literary 450 Annali d’Italianistica 28 (2010) artifacts during an era known for its reforming energies, when both fields were in a critical moment of historical formation. The work seems to me original in conception, precise in goals, and methodologically consistent. It is tightly focused, thoroughly

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