Volume 42, Number 2, 2021 Strange Encounters in the Italian Baroque Guest-edited by Marco Piana

EN:

Daniello Bartoli (1608–85) was commissioned to write the “official” history of the Society of Jesus a century after its foundation. Later called by Leopardi “the Dante of baroque prose,” Bartoli offered a powerful representation of the overseas policies of his order, as well as an appealing overview of the remote lands its members visited for the first time. The main character and hero of Bartoli’s treatise Asia (1653) is Francis Xavier (1506–52), the “Apostle of the Indies.” This paper focuses on Xavier’s “strange encounters” with the “Indian otherness,” recounted by Bartoli as a confrontation with the “spiritual otherness.” Our essay examines several episodes of supernatural events in which Bartoli indulged in a dramatic narrative. With his colorful language, did Bartoli want to encourage vocations to the order, fellow Jesuits to travel to Asia, to gain financial and political support, or all of them? These episodes will be analyzed from a historical point of view (how Bartoli used his sources) and in a pedagogic perspective (which message he wanted to spread and to which readership).

IT:

Il presente articolo si focalizza sul tema della rappresentazione degli inglesi nell’epica del Cinque e Seicento, con l’obiettivo di offrire un preliminare inquadramento dei concetti chiamati in causa nei principali poemi in ottave, (dal Furioso, alla Liberata e i suoi epigoni), e una loro spiegazione in controluce all’evolversi storico dei rapporti tra mondo cattolico e riformato. Ciò che emerge con immediata evidenza è che con lo scisma di Enrico VIII si chiude una prima fase, in cui i rapporti di forza tra mondo cattolico e riformato si mantengono su un equilibrio paritario e di conseguenza domina un’idea classica-erudita dell’alterità nordica (contraddistinta da una forza primigenia e ferina, ma positiva), e se ne apre una seconda, nella quale l’affermazione della potenza inglese produce un incremento degli stereotipi negativi, che si raccolgono nella filiera tematica della lussuria, demonica ispiratrice e motivo-guida di tutte le rappresentazioni degli inglesi.

EN:

Carlo Sigismondo Capece, a member of the classicizing Arcadian Academy in Rome, was among the most influential librettists of ‘Arcadian’ opera in the 1710s and 1720s. He also wrote dozens of pulcinellate, or ‘Pulcinella plays.’ My article centers on these Pulcinella comedies. Capece’s Pulcinella, as part of a Plautine lineage of food-obsessed parasites, consistently fumbles foreign words and recasts them in culinary terms. I argue that Capece deploys the Neapolitan zanni as a marker of linguistic difference, pointing to the misunderstandings and language barriers that, in Arcadian terms, defined the city and its vulgar populace. By exploring the role of a commedia dell’arte character in academic circles in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, I tease out the connectivity between popular and elite traditions during the Baroque period, and locate strangeness in the language between them.

EN:

One of the most striking reactions to the Renaissance codification of literary Italian was the development of dialects as “alternative” literary languages with their own distinct canons. During the seventeenth century, Naples, the undisputed centre of this experimentation, produced a remarkable corpus of original masterpieces by Giambattista Basile, Giulio Cesare Cortese, and others; translations into Neapolitan of Italian and Latin classics, old and new; and linguistic treatises and paratextual materials in praise of Neapolitan. What did this activity mean? How and why did these authors assert their alterity by constructing an ideal poetic community through their Neapolitan works? How did the questioning of the idea of a monolithic literary language relate to a wider interrogation of the traditional system of genres and of the concept itself of literary property? This essay explores these questions by onsidering the role of the supporting materials of paratexts and translations in the construction and legitimization of the Neapolitan corpus.

EN:

This essay offers a comparative analysis of two early modern literary representations of the encounters between a pair of ageing sisters and a king, a barber, and a group of fairies. The representations occur in the literary fairy tale “La vecchia scortecata” (“The Old Woman Who Was Skinned”), which appears in the Neapolitan text by Giambattista Basile, Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales, 1634–36), and in “La Fola dla Vecchia Scurtgà” (“The Tale of the Old Skinned Woman”), featured in Lo cunto de li cunti’s translation in Bolognese, La chiaqlira dla banzola (The Chatterer on the Bench, 1742) by Maddalena and Teresa Manfredi and Angela and Teresa Zanotti. The multilingual literary encounters not only bring forth anxieties related to decay and the ageing of things contemporaneous to the writing of both works but they also display how ageing women have been conceived as an ambiguous aberration—an abject, in Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization—within the fictional universe of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary fairy tales. It is thus postulated that ageing in women is an intolerable characterization within the fairy-tale ecosystem while an unavoidable one. The essay finally shows how the two women’s co-existence is destabilizing in nature and problematizes heteronormative conventions regarding the institution of family and reproductive norms.

EN:

Between 1610 and 1652, the professional actor and playwright Giovan Battista Andreini (1576–1654) published six works on the figure of Mary Magdalene. This essay proposes a reading of this corpus of works as a singular attempt by a professional actor to recast his own image by actively engaging with Counter- Reformation thought. At the same time, it deconstructs Andreini’s patent compliance with Tridentine ideals and reveals that a subtle criticism, expediently hidden by the author, lies at the core of these works. In this corpus, Andreini points out the paradox inherent to the oxymoronic perception of professional performers in early modern Italy, especially actresses, who were considered diabolic by some, divine by others. He therefore censures the relativity in assessing their morality.

EN:

In his Galeria delle Donne Celebri, a collection of twelve short stories about famous female figures, Francesco Pona “depicts” four lascivious women and four chaste women from classical antiquity, and four saints from the early and medieval Christian era. Pona, a writer and medical doctor, rationally studied the Other, that is, women; his narrator in Galeria analyzes the characters’ bodies and behaviours, but almost never their psychology. In this essay, I examine the “portraits” of saints in Pona’s Galeria (Magdalene, Barbara, Monica, and Elisabeth of Hungary) and the observation of otherness by a collector who studied both the natural and miraculous aspects of female sanctity. As interest in the ancient and medieval saints was typical of the period following the Council of Trent, I investigate Pona’s short stories within the framework of the decree on saints and relics issued in 1563. I also consider the misogynistic controversy that took place in Italy between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as Pona’s treatise Della Eccellenza et Perfettione ammirabile della Donna.

IT:

In questo articolo analizzeremo la cultura, la lingua e le caratteristiche etniche di Albumazar, protagonista della commedia l’Astrologo (1606) di Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1615). Questo personaggio rientra nello stereotipo del mago ciarlatano e truffatore, la cui rappresentazione conosce una grande fortuna nel teatro rinascimentale e barocco. Mettendo in scena gli imbrogli di Albumazar, Della Porta non sembra soltanto difendersi dalle accuse e dai sospetti del Sant’Uffizio, ma potrebbe anche mostrare la veridicità delle sue posizioni scientifiche, perché il protagonista dell’Astrologo sembra opporsi alle tesi sostenute dallo scrittore campano in altre opere. In tal senso, Della Porta potrebbe legittimare le proprie teorie alchemiche e fisiognomiche grazie agli errori e alle truffe del protagonista della pièce.

EN:

This essay examines Galileo’s peculiar comparison of small lunar craters in 1610 in his first treatise of telescopic observations, the Sidereus Nuncius, to the eyes in a peacock’s feathers and to a particular sort of glassware, and it argues that these allusions reveal more about a certain kind of sound than about the visual appearance of the moon. Galileo’s odd analogies find subsequent development in a thought experiment relating sight, sound, and sensation in his Two New Sciences of 1638.

IT:

Nessuno prima del poligrafo Tomaso Garzoni da Bagnacavallo aveva immaginato di trasformare un’opera letteraria in un edificio per i folli. Per una civiltà che coltiva la suprema dignità della natura umana, la prospettiva delle linee e la geometria architettonica, l’oscurità della mente diviene la più terribile minaccia. Secondo Ariosto, Astolfo non avrebbe potuto rintracciare sulla Luna la pazzia, che “sta qua giù, né se ne parte mai” (Orlando furioso 34.81.8). Quasi su invito del suo autore, Garzoni cerca di contenere la diffusione della follia e, come in un giorno di “festa di tutti i matti,” apre al mondo “le porte” della sua “fabrica” per accogliere gli “onorati spettatori.” L’ospidale de’ pazzi incurabili, apparso nel 1586 presso tre tipografie, ripercorre la storia umana senza cercare una linea evolutiva, ma individuando le falle della ragione e il diffondersi dell’insania. In questo percorso irregolare, simile ad un segmento tratteggiato, fatto di vuoto e pieno, assenza e presenza, la pazzia rivela la sua natura poliedrica e si presenta nella molteplicità delle manifestazioni particolari, mostrando il lato tenebroso del cammino degli uomini. L’ospidale si colloca al tramonto di un secolo e di una civiltà letteraria e all’alba di una nuova concezione dell’arte e del mondo.