Foscolo, Dante and the Papacy

Of the many interpretations of cantos and characters in Dante\u27s Divine Comedy, few rival the wordplay in Gabriele Rossetti\u27s commentary (1826-27). None that I know rivals its imaginative recreation of fourteenth-century literary and political history. According to Rossetti, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and a nest of Cathari were members of an underground network. Dissident poets, politicians, and church reformers therein camouflaged their attacks against the papacy to prevent detection and reprisal

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's salutation of Beatrice pictures as Victorian comics

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'Daughter of th' Italian heaven!' : Madame de Staël's Corinne in England

Madame de Staël's life and political interests are an important background to her writing. Her interest in the dynamics of the artistic, cultural and political life of Germany, France, England and Italy is reflected in her novel 'Corinne' (1807), where female destiny is shaped by cultural and national values.peer-reviewe

Angels and Demons: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market as a Social Critique of the Victorian Ideal of the “Angel in the House” and the Pre-Raphaelites’ Response to that Ideal

Christina Rossetti’s poem Goblin Market presents a subversive critique on the socially constructed dichotomy of Angel versus Demon as depicted in Pre-Raphaelite artwork, Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poetry, and Coventry Patmore’s poem Angel in the House. An analysis of Goblin Market in relation to Patmore’s poem and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings The Annunciation, Ophelia, Lady Lilith, Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses, and Sibylla Palmifera and Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s poems “Soul’s Beauty” and “Body’s Beauty” illustrate the ways in which Rossetti presents a counter-image that breaks down this socially constructed dichotomy. This is additionally supported by an exploration into how Goblin Market draws attention to the real-life mutability that existed in Victorian women, such as the capability of being simultaneously powerful, sexual, and moral. After first establishing the concept of the idealized woman, and its pervasiveness, by analyzing Victorian conduct manuals and Patmore’s poem Angel in the House, the essay will analyze writings by Dante Gabriele Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelite artwork for their representations of the cultural ideal of the Angel as well as the doubling that simultaneously creates the Demon Woman. The Pre-Raphaelites, like all Victorians, were subject to Patmore’s ideology; they internalized it and consequently created art that is largely influenced by that ideology. Their artwork presents a neurotic, yet logical, response to the “Angel in the House.” Following an analysis of the cultural extent of these feminine ideals, an exploration of Christina Rossetti’s writing uncovers to what degree she absorbed this ideology. Being brought up in this culture, Rossetti learned about the ideal woman and arguably conformed to that ideal. Yet, by appearing to operate from within the boundaries of the proper female role, Rossetti was able to use her writing to challenge the confining role prescribed for women. As a woman inside the ideology who followed the norms established by society, Rossetti was able to use her writing to subvert the very norms she appeared to accept and follow. By behaving as an “Angel in the House,” society took Rossetti’s writing seriously, which allowed her to critique the ideology she appeared to embrace

Beata Beatrix : La Vita Nuova e i quadri di Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Il contributo intende proporre un primo percorso attraverso la rilettura della Vita Nuova in ambito preraffaellita, esaminando la raffinata edizione della Vita Nuova illustrata dai quadri di Dante Gabriel Rossetti pubblicata per Roux e Viarengo all'inizio del '900. L'edizione, postuma, non nasce da un preciso progetto illustrativo autoriale, pur accarezzato dal poeta-pittore fin da giovanissimo, ma mette insieme a posteriori le riproduzioni di alcune opere rossettiane a illustrazione del libello dantesco, non senza arbitrarietà. Emerge tuttavia un costante impegno dell'artista su questi soggetti che, accanto al lavoro di traduzione sulla stessa Vita Nuova e sui "poeti primitivi italiani", e insieme con la sua produzione poetica e letteraria (almeno The Blessed Damozel e Hand and Soul), dimostra una profonda riappropriazione del testo, caratterizzata al contempo da una certa fedeltà letterale non in contraddizione con una rivisitazione profonda in tutt'altro contesto storico-artistico.The aim of the paper is to propose a first path through the rereading of the Vita Nuova within the Pre-Raphaelite culture, examining the refined edition of the Vita Nuova illustrata dai quadri di Dante Gabriel Rossetti, published by Roux and Viarengo in early '900. This posthumous edition is not the result of a specific illustrative authorial project, although the poet-painter had aimed for this since his early age; it is rather an a posteriori and partly arbitrary collection, which puts together the reproductions of some Rossetti's illustrations from Dante's pamphlet. The artist never stopped working on these subjects, translating at the same time Dante's Vita Nuova and other Early Italian Poets, while working on his own poetic and literary production (The Blessed Damozel and Hand and Soul, at least): this demonstrates a deep repossession of the text, which is characterized by a certain literal accuracy, but also by a deep revision, according to a completely different historical and artistic context

William Morris and Gabriele D'Annunzio: Kindred Spirits?

In this essay, my aim is to show how, despite a different national background, William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890) and Gabriele D'Annunzio's The Pleasure (1889) reveal a common semantic denominator exemplified by an aesthetic cult of Pre-Raphaelite taste. Not only does interior design prove to be an inexhaustible source of pleasure for both of them, but this motif of idealized compensation in the form of decoration had a special social and cultural significance. Not surprisingly, the Red House (1859) manifested itself as the unfolding of Morris's character in deeds and statements, while "the little red house" (1915) by The Grand Canal in Venice epitomized D'Annunnzio's power of self-expression. Apart from the nostalgic longing for a lost sense of pleasure governing the nineteenth century, these two monumental works show many signs of internal contact, not to say about the relationship of dialogic sort between the Morrisean "Romantic Medusa" in The Earthly Paradise (1868) and D'Annunzio's femme fatale of Il Poema Paradisiaco (1893), female typologies located in a similar pleasure garden. What is more, Morris's and D'Annunzio's literary imaginations are inseparably tied up with Nietzsche's philosophic formula, a vision of totalizing life, measured primarily by the return to an imaginary beautiful homeland, which sheds light on a complex comparison, allowing a variety of textual representations to be investigated as the outstanding examples of Morris's and D'Annunzio's idealisms

Costabili Palace and the architecture all’antica in Ferrara at the end of the XV century

Costabili Palace, also known as Ludovico “il Moro” (Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan) Palace, is located in Ferrara on the ancient Ghiara road, occupying the corner that it forms with via Porta d'Amore, in the south-eastern area of the city. Attributed to the architect Biagio Rossetti (1447-1516) it represents, by size and formal wealth, begun but never completed, the most ambitious palace of the Renaissance in Ferrara. Commissioned by Count Antonio Costabili (1450-1527) at the end of the Fifteenth century, the construction was interrupted in 1503. Of four sides of its court only two were built in their rich and cultured architectural language, and only half of the main façade was sketched. Through the unpublished archival research carried out, crossed with the direct study of the building by surveying the relevant stylistic elements, helped by a proportional analysis and the reading of the stratigraphic masonry units, this doctoral research retraces the history of the construction. This work has clarified the role of the artists involved and their relationship with the strong personality of the client Antonio Costabili, ambassador in Milan of the Duke of Ferrara (Ercole I d’Este) from the year 1496 until the year 1499, one of the most representative intellectuals of his time thanks to a solid humanistic and artistic education. From a systematic study of an unfinished building site the precise design of the Costabili Palace will emerge as expression of a clear linguistic and lexical intention, called “all’antica”, inspired to the Roman classical architecture. The proposed research is wondering about the real contribution that the architectural culture in Ferrara at the end of the Fifteenth century, highly represented by the Costabili Palace, offers to the broader context of the Renaissance courts

From Big Bang to Galactic Civilizations

Each scientific study emerges in its own particular time and marks a new step in the development of human thought.1 Big History materialized to satisfy the human need for a unified vision of our existence. It came together in the waning decades of the twentieth century, in part, as a reaction to the specialization of scholarship and education that had taken hold around the world. While this specialization had great results, it created barriers that stood in contrast to a growing unity among our global communities. These barriers were increasingly awkward to bridge, and, thus, Big History emerged as a successful new framework

A State-of-the-art Integrated Transportation Simulation Platform

Nowadays, universities and companies have a huge need for simulation and modelling methodologies. In the particular case of traffic and transportation, making physical modifications to the real traffic networks could be highly expensive, dependent on political decisions and could be highly disruptive to the environment. However, while studying a specific domain or problem, analysing a problem through simulation may not be trivial and may need several simulation tools, hence raising interoperability issues. To overcome these problems, we propose an agent-directed transportation simulation platform, through the cloud, by means of services. We intend to use the IEEE standard HLA (High Level Architecture) for simulators interoperability and agents for controlling and coordination. Our motivations are to allow multiresolution analysis of complex domains, to allow experts to collaborate on the analysis of a common problem and to allow co-simulation and synergy of different application domains. This paper will start by presenting some preliminary background concepts to help better understand the scope of this work. After that, the results of a literature review is shown. Finally, the general architecture of a transportation simulation platform is proposed

"Quashed Quotatoes". Per qualche citazione irregolare (prima parte)

Il saggio presenta qualche esempio di citazione irregolare cioè non immediatamente riconoscibile, comprensibile o interpretabile: citazioni ambigue nel rapporto fra autore citante e autore citato, citazioni oblique e sfumate, deformate o parodiche. Nella prima parte, qui pubblicata, si esamina la presenza di George Meredith in un saggio di Max Beerbohm e quella di alcuni poeti ottocenteschi in un romanzo di Ivy Compton-Burnett.This essay presents some examples of irregular quotations, namely quotations that are neither immediately recognizable and clear, nor interpretable. On the contrary, citations appear rather ambiguous – especially in regard to the relationship between quoting and quoted authors –; indirect and blurred; distorted or parodic. The first part, here published, examines the presence of George Meredith in an essay by Max Beerbohm, and the presence of some nineteenth-century poets in a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett