“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...
It is a conversation all too familiar for anyone involved in the humanities. It happens most frequently in situations of involuntary socialization—parties, receptions, dinners—but it can happen anywhere you find yourself in the company of strangers. Sooner or later, the question comes up. “So, what do you do?” You respond. You’re a student, perhaps a graduate student or a young teacher. “What do you study?” Philosophy maybe...
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...
by Franco Mormando University of Chicago Press, 456 pp., € 35.00
JULIANNE VANWAGENEN
In a Gian Lorenzo Bernini stream-of-consciousness word-association game one might come up with Rome, marble fountain, St. Peter’s, baroque, post-Reformation Catholicism. Is there anything to add to that list? Perhaps adultery, politicking, rape, sodomy, narcissism, astrological prophecies? Franco Mormando, professor of Romance Languages at Boston College, argues in his new biography Bernini: His Life and His Rome, thatto define Bernini without the...
by Raymond Jonas Harvard University Press, 413 pp., $29.95
JOHN WELSH - Empire defeated
Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army marched a remarkable 135 miles from Chancellorsville, Virginia to the battle of Gettysburg. Napoleon’s Russian Campaign, an arduous three-month march from Vilnus to Moscow, stretched nearly 500 miles. Both campaigns ended in a catastrophic defeat that dramatically altered the course of human history. Lee’s defeat at Gettysburg turned the American Civil War against the South and changed the future shape...
by Jeffrey Schnapp and Adam Michaels Princeton Architectural Press, 216 pp., $19.95
JULIANNE VANWAGENEN
What do The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Electric Information Age Book have in common? They both have Tom Wolfe, the Grateful Dead, Allen Ginsburg, revolution, counter-culture. Both center around 1967-68, and they are both a textual reproduction, retelling, documentary, of a cultural creation of the electric age. Tom Wolfe’s novelistic telling of the Merry Pranksters’ mimics, in form, the...
by Benedetta Palmieri Feltrinelli, 140 pp., € 14.00
ELENA CAMPANI
Abituati a vedere artisti e scrittori trattare il tema della morte in maniere piuttosto estreme, dal pulp allo spiritualismo olistico passando per gli psicodrammi stucchevoli, questo libro ci colpisce perché lo affronta con un equilibrio e un decoro tanto rari quanto vagamente surreali, con lo spirito di chi, anche solo per un attimo, esorcizza la fine della vita e ne fa un evento in fondo naturale, in poche parole con la disposizione d’...
di Bruno Pischedda Bollati Boringhieri, 338 pp., € 18.50
DALILA COLUCCI- La scommessa dell'impegno
“Lo scrittore è ‘in situazione’ nella sua epoca: ogni parola ha i suoi echi. Ogni silenzio anche”: è una suggestione di natura sartriana quella che si avverte nell’accostarsi per la prima volta a Scrittori polemisti, ultimo libro di Bruno Pischedda, docente di letteratura italiana contemporanea presso l’Università di Milano. Questo importante volume evoca infatti, fin dal titolo, un’ampia riflessione sul ruolo...
by Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco Il Mulino, 146 pp., 13.50 €
JULIANNE VANWAGENEN - Culture as investment
In the book’s premise, authors Christian Caliandro and Pier Luigi Sacco clearly state their goals for the work: (1) distinguish between cultural production in Italy that safeguards Italy’s artistic and historic assets and cultural production that makes contemporary cultural strides, (2) reassess the widespread conception of Italy’s artistic/historical patrimony as a tesoro (...
a cura di Sergio Luzzatto e Gabriele Pedullà (vol. II a cura di Erminia Irace) Einaudi, 946 pp., ill., 85.00 €
MARCO ARESU - Tra geografia e storia
“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...
by Mark Peterson Harvard University Press, 338 pp., $28.95
PETER LIEBERMAN
Very often it takes the work of an outsider, with a fresh pair of eyes, to make an original contribution to any academic field—especially a field such as Italian Studies, whose tentacles reach into any imaginable branch of the humanities or sciences. Mark Peterson: a physicist, mathematician, and astronomer, is precisely that much needed outsider to the traditional dominion of italianisti. Peterson’s recent Galileo’s Muse offers a...
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....