Ageing and dying are a continuum

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The sentimental novel as Trostschrift: Johann Martin Miller’s Siegwart. Eine Klostergeschichte (1776)

Late eighteenth-century consolatory texts for bereavement employed traditional consolatory arguments, but also set new emphasis on sympathy, on a recognition of the individuality of the sufferer and on the benefits of an entertaining or ‘playful’ approach. This essay suggests that the sentimental novel took on some of the functions of the Trostschrift in this period. As well as offering the reader providential accounts of bereavement and of the prospect of reunion beyond the grave, Miller’s popular novel Siegwart (1776) establishes the sense of a virtual sympathetic community and offers the reader the cathartic opportunity to indulge grief, then distracts him/her from it with the aesthetic pleasures of the text. The negative reception of the sentimental novel by enlightened consolatory authors is ascribed to their distrust of the apparent ‘instability’ of fiction—its lack of ‘real’ referents

Altichiero in the Fifteenth Century

Altichiero was the dominant north Italian painter of the later Trecento. In Padua, in the 1370s and early 1380s, he worked for patrons close to Petrarch and his circle and perhaps in direct contact with the poet himself. By the time of the second edition of Vasari’s Vite (1568) the memory of Altichiero’s work had suffered significant occlusion, and Vasari’s account of him is little more than an appendix to his life of Carpaccio. Only since the later nineteenth century, and particularly in the last fifty or so years, has Altichiero’s reputation been restored. It is the purpose of this paper to examine aspects of that reputation throughout the century or so after the painter’s death (by April 1393)