This topic explores the relationship between two of the main authors of late-medieval Italian literature—Dante and Boccaccio—and the visual arts, both in their own time and across the centuries. It begins with an assessment of the exceptionally complex and paradigmatic dialogue established by Boccaccio’s Decameron with the frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa. The focus then shifts to Dante’s Commedia and its relationship with visual culture, explored in two directions. On the one hand, visual artefacts will be examined as potential sources and points of reference for Dante’s representations of the otherworld. On the other hand, attention will be given to the rich iconographic tradition that the poem immediately inspired—ranging from anonymous book illustrators to major artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Luca Signorelli, Robert Rauschenberg, Mimmo Paladino. Persistent attention will be paid to the transcodification of themes and concepts across different modes of expression.

Topic 2: Colonial and Postcolonial Italy between Text and Film: Flaiano

Published in 1947, Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill) is often regarded as both the last colonial and the first postcolonial Italian novel. For a long time, it remained almost unique in Italian literature, as novels set in the former colonies were rare. The book was adapted, after many unsuccessful attempts, into a film at the end of the 1980s, when Italy was starting to become a country where migrants arrived from Africa and the Balkans. The movie by Giuliano Montaldo, with Nicholas Cage, speaks to a completely different postcolonial Italy.  This topic uses the text and film of this key colonial-postcolonial text to examine themes and problems in Italy’s relation to its colonial legacies.   Key readings and viewing: 

• Ennio Flaiano, Tempo di uccidere (1947). In English: Time to Kill, translated by Stuart Hood, Quartet, 1992 .
• Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill, Giuliano Montaldo, 1989, 110’, film).
• Lucia Re, “Italy's First Postcolonial Novel and the End of (Neo)Realism,” The Italianist, 37(3), 2017, pp. 416-435.

Topic 3: Leonardo da Vinci: Vision and Creation

Leonardo da Vinci is often held up as the prototypical Renaissance genius: a painter who also designed flying machines and fortification projects, planned canal diversions and court pageants, conducted dissections and hydraulic experiments.  Pursuing a seemingly endless range of projects in art and engineering, Leonardo also famously completed very few of his intended works.  At the same time, no other artist of the period left behind such a stunning corpus of notes and drawings, with 5000 manuscript pages still extant.  This module will examine the intersecting threads of Leonardo’s thoughts and practice, focusing particularly on issues of empiricism, invention, imagination, anatomy, nature, and beauty.    

Topic 4: Art and the Counter-Reformation

One of the key battlegrounds between the Catholic Church and Protestant reformers was the cult of images, famously resulting in violent waves of iconoclasm in Wittenberg, Zurich, and other northern European cities beginning in the 1520s.  While in Italy no such dramatic incidents occurred, anxieties about art and its role within the Christian context mounted.  In the decades following the final decrees of the Council of Trent (1563), this topic became a popular literary subject, with Michelangelo’s Last Judgment forming a frequent focal point of debate.  This module will examine Italian texts alongside contemporary works of art in order analyse what impact, if any, public attitudes about reform actually had the production, patronage, and reception of the visual arts in the late sixteenth century.

Topic 5: Pasolini Between Text, Image and Art

Pier Paolo Pasolini was one of the most significant writers and filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century in Italy. His eclectic interests also included extensive engagement with and theorization of the image - from Renaissance and Mannerist art and art history, to modernist painting, to the semiology of film. This topic will examine a series of works by Pasolini where text and image, or rather a complex triangle between text, art and moving image intersect and interact in ways that include, but also go radically beyond the paradigm of adaptation, centred on a philosophy of transposition and analogy between diverse sign systems. The key film works at the centre of the topic will be the short film La ricotta (1963), Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964) and the 1968 book and film Teorema.

Topics previously covered:

• Illustrating Dante

• Bruno Munari

• Representing the Author in the Renaissance: Verbal and Visual Portraits and Self-Portraits