This paper is available for the academic year 2024-25.
Visual and textual art in Italy have always fed one another in productive and challenging ways, and this course offers an opportunity to study visual culture as embedded in textual traditions across a broad range of periods and mediums in Italy. Topics taught each year will vary but each topic will emphasise theoretical approaches to the study of visual culture and the interaction between word and image. You will be encouraged to develop your own particular research interests for your written work in consultation with your supervisor.
Four to five main topics will be taught in any one year, and may change from year to year.
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
Further details for IT9 and a Reading List can be found on the Moodle site here.
The course will be taught through a combination of lectures, seminars and supervisions. Students will be strongly encouraged to attend all lectures in order to gain a broad insight into the broad range of the paper.
For the It.9 Moodle site, please see here.
The examination will consist of TWO parts:
1) Lent term Coursework Essay: Answer ONE question from a list that will be released at the end of Lent term. You should write no more than 1,800 words.
2) Easter Exam: A 3-hour timed online examination. Answer TWO questions. For each answer write no more than 1,500 words. Or Answer one question selected from those which are marked with an asterisk (*). Your answer should be no more than 3,000 words.
Past papers and the specimen paper are available on Moodle.
Dr Jessica Maratsos |