Italian Studies 521

Italian Studies 521 SEICENTO By Maurice Slawinski, Lecturer in Italian Studies, University of Lancaster 1. General poetics, criticism, literary history. Archivio tematico delle similitu- dini, i, ed. O. Besomi, J. Hauser, and G. Sopranzi, Hildesheim, Olms, 1994,x+476 pp., a companion volume to the ‘Archivio tematico della lirica italiana’ inaugurated with the volume dedicated to Marino’s Lira (cf. YWMLS, 54: 500), indexes by subject the imagery of all the major Italian verse romances and poemi grandi, from the Morgante to La Secchia and Adone (including the Gerusalemme Conquistata as well as the Liberata, which though not strictly belonging to the Seicento will be of particular interest to students of the period). L’anima in barocco, ed. Carlo Ossola et al., T, Scriptorium, xxxviii + 278 pp., is an anthology of devotional texts, divided by topic, and including a substantial number of near-forgotten authors (Felice Passero, Gasparo Murtola) and some well known in their time but since forgotten altogether (Pietro Battista, Giovanni Bona, Giuseppe Girolamo Semenzi), accompanied by the editors’ sparse commentary; the anthology, it would appear from the preface, originates in University seminars, but its exact purpose and prospective readership escape me. Marc Fumaroli, L’E´ cole du silence: le sentiment des images au XVIIe sie`cle, Paris, Flammarion, 1994, 512 pp., focuses on the visual arts, but is also peppered with references to Italian baroque poetics (the Index lists Allacci, the Andreini, Boccalini, Bracciolini, Capaccio, Cesarini, Ciampoli, Eritreo, Marino, Mascardi, Murtola, Pallavicino, Stigliani, Strada, Testi) which provide much of the ‘rhetorical’ backbone of the argument, a slightly worrying fact given that what he says about these (and a number of late Cinquecento literary figures) appears to be second-hand and in many cases inaccurate. Marco Corradini, Genova e il Barocco. Studi su Angelo Grillo, Ansaldo Ceba`, Anton Giulio Brignole Sale, Mi, Vita e Pensiero, 1994, viii + 320 pp., contains separate essays on the cultural and literary signifi- cance of Grillo’s extensive epistolario (which included exchanges with virtually all the major literary figures of the day) and Ceba`’s biblical epic La Reina Ester (1615), as well as a previously published one on Brignole Sale (cf. YWMLS, 53: 504); they are prefaced by a good introductory chapter foregrounding the Seicento revival of Genoese letters in the city’s peculiar socio-economic situation, but though the volume contains a great deal that is interesting and useful, the focus 522 Italian Studies of the essays is narrower than the title suggests: they are really over- long articles which would have benefited from vigorous editing. Perhaps what Genoese literature needs is a broad-based exploration along the lines of Michele Rak, Napoli gentile. La letteratura in ‘lingua napoletana’ nella cultura barocca (1596–1632), Bo, Il Mulino, 1994, 448 pp. This is an extensive survey, part literary, part social history, of one of the most extraordinary expressions of Seicento literary ‘regionalism’: the development of a ‘dialect’ tradition at Naples which was far from marginal (Rak is at pains to stress that in both its authors and its readers it encompassed almost the entire spectrum of Neapolitan society and that it was appreciated beyond the city and Regno), but always in a relation of dependence on/subversion of the Italian canon rather than autonomous (which could be taken as symptomatic of the condition of Naples, and the South generally, throughout this period: large, important, and distinct enough to be almost a world to itself, a modern nation state, but never achieving the separate identity to which it repeatedly lay claim, whether because of its political subordination to Spain or its increasingly fragile economy). N. H. Lase, ‘Una retorica comune alla base del concetto di metafora in Baltasar Graciań e in Emanuele Tesauro’, Testo, 27, 1994 :56–66, very plausibly suggests that the reason for close similarities between the two major theorists of the baroque conceit is not to be found in the influence of one on the other, but in their sharing a common matrix in Jesuit rhetoric, particularly the work of Cipriano Sua´rez. The theory is not entirely novel, however, and rather begs the question of how far they depart from the Jesuit model of eloquence and how close their respective approaches to figurative language actually are. J.-M. Gardair, ‘Theórie et art du symbole dans Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico de Emanuele Tesauro’, Omaggio Folena, 1229–39, rapidly surveys Tesauro’s theories, pointing (correctly in my view) to the danger of viewing his treatise as a summa of baroque aesthetics (a monolith the definition of which, despite the assertions of some recent criticism, remains nebulous in the extreme) and suggesting ‘une lecture en quelque sorte plus technique’ concerned with Tesauro’s use of Aristotle and St Ignatius, whence he supposedly borrows ‘le principe et les re`gles de la discipline intellectuelle qui fonde sa me´thode’. G. Rizzo, ‘Polemiche tardo-barocche a Napoli: G. Battista, G. Cicinelli e F. Meninni’, CLett, 23: 143–52, concerns a querelle of the 1670s between two late exponents of concettismo and the young Duke of Grottaglie (Cicinelli), whose Censura del poetar moderno (1672) may be an early document of the change to Arcadianism. The article is too brief and general for one to be able to say to what extent.

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