How do we tell a story?  This is one of the fundamental questions posed by literature.  Beginning in the 13th century, this concern was taken up with increasing urgency in the visual arts as well.  Complex pictorial cycles—in fresco and relief sculpture—appeared across the Italian peninsula at the same time that authors of devotional texts, such the Meditations on the Life of Christ, deployed new strategies for eliciting the engaged response of readers.  To what extent did these phenomena intersect?  How might techniques for affective stimulation have been shared across media?  And how did concepts of temporality and sequence—so crucial to the unfolding of narrative—function in the visual and literary arts?

Topic 2: Italian Photo-texts after 1945  [N.B. This topic is cross-listed with paper IT6]

This topic explores theories and practices of the photo-text in post-war Italy. The debated notion of photo-text – a combination of textual material and photographic images – has been the subject of several studies in recent years, which have shed light onto the complex and multi-faceted relationship between literature and photography in Italy as part of the international context. Over the course of this module, the artistic status of the photo-text and the different kinds of interactions between photographs and literary texts will be discussed, with reference in particular to two representative cases: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s rewriting of the first cantos of Dante’s Commedia, La divina mimesis (1975); and Lalla Romano’s partly autobiographical Nuovo romanzo di figure (1997).

Topic 3: Dante and the Visual Arts  [N.B. This topic is cross-listed with paper IT7]

This topic explores the relationship between Dante and the visual arts across the centuries.  Beginning in the Trecento, we will examine Dante’s use of bodily communication in the Commedia alongside contemporary modes of representation that increasingly emphasized gestural expressivity.  Moving forward we will consider what it means to illustrate the Commedia, looking at images by artists including Sandro Botticelli, Gustave Doré, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.  Finally, we will investigate the complex relationship between Dante and the most famed Dantista of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti.       

Topic 4: Pasolini Between Text, Image and Art  [N.B. This topic is cross-listed with paper IT6]

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.

Topic 5: Leonardo da Vinci: Vision and Creation

This topic will consider the following issues through consideration of text and image in Leonardo's notebooks:

• Leonardo's anatomies, dissection work, and depictions of the body 

• Leonardo's theories on painting, notions of the artist and artistic creation 

• Kinesis: the principle of animation, Leonardo's studies of motion, and the ways in which animation may be rendered visible through the static image or comprehensible through text 

• Definitions, visualisations, and configurations of gender in Leonardo’s work.

Topics previously covered:

• Illustrating Dante

• Bruno Munari

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