Harvard canto-by-canto commentary of Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata
Julianne VanWagenen
CANTO X

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Bruno Pischedda
CONFESSIONI DI UN BRADIPO 
Come e perché è nato Scrittori polemisti

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by Amedeo Quondam
Donzelli, 347 pp., € 28.00

CECELIA OLIVERIO 

“Would you care to bestow the grace of your dancing upon the gathered company?” asks the perfect courtier to his advisee. “Why, most absolutely not, my dear friend,” a slightly less than gracious Prince of Salina responds: “I’m afraid the mere sight of all this decadence has left me truly tired and emptied of energy.” “We shall therefore await the opportune moment,” is the courtier’s reply. “Certainly,” concedes the prince: “Though, I do eagerly anticipate your next words on sprezzatura. That...

by John Varriano
University of California Press, 282 pp., $19.50

PETER LIEBERMAN

In 1505 the Florentine painter Andrea del Sarto, at a banquet held by the artistic and gastronomic confraternity known as ‘the Company of the Cauldron,’ presented a scale model of the Florence Baptistery to his fellow diners. Architectural models were becoming common at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but what made del Sarto’s achievement so spectacular was that his miniature Baptistery was entirely edible—made from cheese, marzipan, sausage, and various fowl...

JULIANNE VANWAGENEN

“Prometto di non scrivere nessuna storia letteraria, nessun capitolo di storia letteraria, prima di avere letto per intero tutte le opere prese in considerazione e di ignorare tutte le precedenti storie letterarie a meno di essere certo che chi le ha scritte ha letto veramente tutte le opere che ha preso in considerazione”. Con queste parole Remo Ceserani concludeva un suo...

PETER LIEBERMAN

by Douglas Biow
Stanford University Press, 246 pp., $19.95

DAN TURELLO

The ideals of grace and ease were ones that came to find great success and cultural currency during the Renaissance, in great measure thanks to the writing of Baldassarre Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, in which he describes the virtues of sprezzatura, the art of concealing the efforts behind one’s striving, so as to make it appear facile. The Galateo, by Giovanni della Casa, with its notion of proper manners and correct conduct specific to all occasions, is also a product of this time....

by Antonio Prete
Bollati Boringhieri, 131 pp., € 16.00

JULIANNE VAN WAGENEN

Antonio Prete, professor of comparative literature at the University of Siena, begins his book: “To translate is to transmute one language into another language. One text into another text. One voice into another voice.”There is, in this alchemy, something that resembles the experience of love, or at least that same tension.” This motif of tension and love continues throughout the book. A great translation has to exist in the space between the language of origin and the ‘guest’ language...

by Antonella Russo
Einaudi, 428 pp., ill., € 35.00

CECELIA OLIVERIO 

Though the mere reference to the term “cultural history” is sometimes enough to push even the most tolerant of history buffs toward an apoplectic anxiety, fear not Antonella Russo’s ever so meticulously curated history of photography. For a bricolage of findings on post-World War II Italian photography or an ode to methodological eclecticism this book is most certainly not. Cultural insofar as the rich and nuanced picture of Italian photography that is achieved by Russo is...