La parola e l’immagine (Word and Image) is a two-volume tribute to the scholarly contributions of Gianni Venturi, whose bibliography includes more than one hundred entries, written between 1964 and 2010, ranging from studies on Cesare Pavese that began his career, and then expanding to include studies of Antonio Canova, gardens and landscape in literature and art from the Renaissance onward, and attention to Renaissance Ferrara. The relationship between vision and language, images and words, and exegesis and figuration — a major feature of Venturi’s scholarly work — provides overall unity for the two-volume collection of essays.
The first volume is of especial interest to scholars of the Italian Renaissance because it includes sections on Dante, Petrarch, Ferrara, the sixteenth century, the Baroque, and the eighteenth century, this last section going as far as Turner, Ossian, and Leopardi. The first volume of essays would be of interest to art historians, literary scholars, and historians of the Italian medieval and Renaissance periods, and Renaissance scholars in general.
The first section, “Immagini nel medioevo: Dante e il visibile parlare,” includes an essay on Iacopone da Todi and seven on Dante alone or in relationship to others such as Chiara di Montefalco or Alain de Lille. As a group, the essays consider the hermeneutical elements in visual representation to demonstrate the overlap between theology, art, and poetry; how art provides a means for confronting the density of Dante’s language; and the significance of medieval religious in educating the illiterate.
The second section, focusing on Petrarch, includes Carla Molinari’s “Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta LXXVII–LXXVIII”; Giuliana Ericani, “Per Bernardino Zaganelli ‘Ferrarese’. Una Tavola Bassanese e una Proposta per il Maestro di Palazzo Pretorio” (“By Bernard Zaganelli, from Ferrara: A Painting from Bassano and a Proposal for the Master of Palazzo Pretorio”).
The third section turns to Ferrara and perhaps offers the most interesting collection of essays for Italian Renaissance scholars, for it includes essays on Ariosto and Tasso. Claudio Cazzola’s “Clarior Hoc Pulcro Regnans in Corpore Virtus: Sulle Tracce di Virgilio (e Di Dosso)” begins the section with an essay on the paintings that were originally intended for the ceiling of the Camerino del Duca Alfonso I d’Este. Derived from Virgil’s Aeneid, the paintings provide visual commentary on the poem, accompanied by moral and civic instruction. Giovanna Rizzarelli’s “‘E Quivi s’incomincia una Battaglia / Di ch’altra mai non fu più fiera in vista’: I duelli nel ‘Furioso’ e la loro rappresentazione nelle prime edizioni illustrate” (“‘And here begins a battle, of which more fierce has never been seen’: The Duels in the Furioso and Their Representation in the First Illustrated Editions”), as the title reveals, treats the illustrations of battle scenes in the first editions of Orlando furioso. Well-illustrated, the argument concludes that the images in these three editions evolve from static beginnings to detailed and meticulous readings of the poem. Vincenzo Farinella’s “Una Nota sul Rapporto Di Ludovico Ariosto con le Arti Figurative” (“A Note on the Rapport between Ludovico Ariosto and Figurative Art”) is a rich demonstration of the intersection between Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and art, in itself, as the author demonstrates, a recent academic interest (shown in the number of conventions and exhibitions, including one at the Louvre in recent years). After an analysis of Mantegna’s “Minerva caccia I Vizi dal giardino delle Virtù” (“Minerva Chases the Vices from the Garden of Virtue”) and Giovanni Antonio da Brescia’s essay, “Virtus combusta/Virtus deserta” (“Virtue Burned/Virtue Abandoned”), the author concludes provocatively that examining the art with the literature highlights the ironic revisiting of ancient culture against the moral delusion of the present which shows the triumph of ignorance rather than the triumph of virtue. The section continues with essays by Cristiana Lardo, “Immagini metriche nel ‘Furioso’” (“Metrical Images in the Furioso”); Marco Chiarini, “Tasso, Tassi e un Episodio della ‘Gerusalemme Liberata” (“Tasso, Tassi, and an Episode from Jerusalem Liberated”), which examines the rapport between Tasso, the seventeenth-century Ferrarese painter, Tassi, and a celebrated musical of the duel between Clorinda and Tancredi; and Giovanni Careri, “Specchi d’Amore e di Guerra nel Giardino di Armida: Un conflitto di Somiglianze” (“Mirrors of Love and War in the Garden of Armida: A Confict of Similarities”).
The section on the sixteenth century, “Il Trionfo dell’ Immagine” (“The Triumph of the Image”) continues to build the argument of the relationship between image and letters, including discussions of Lucrezia Borgia and Ferrara, Castiglione, Barthélemy Aneau, the bronze doors of the duomo in Pisa, Gaspara Stampa, Benvenuto Cellini, Bronzino, and others. The last sections, on the Baroque image and the eighteenth century, include essays on the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Góngora and El Greco, Canova, the Gardens of Luxembourg, Turner, Ossian, and Leopardi.
Gathering together the work of diverse scholars inspired by a single teacher takes the reader beyond a single period or author. The thread successfully that ties this series of essays together is the meditation on the relationship between reading images and reading texts, how images read text and inversely how texts read images. For Renaissance scholars, it provides a stimulating exercise in rethinking disciplinary boundaries that can provide a deeper understanding of the period under study.
