11 November 2013
How the Georgian language first appeared in print
After the fall of Byzantium, Georgia was broken into several kingdoms and was encircled by hostile Muslim powers and weakened by constant invasions and internal conflicts. Consequently, in the 16th-17th centuries Georgia was no longer a cultural meeting ground for east and west, but became a country squeezed between the difficult conditions of rivalry between Turkey and Persia for domination over Transcaucasia. The King of East Georgia, Teimuraz I, sent Niceforo Irbach to Italy and Spain as the Georgian envoy to seek allies and to ask for assistance in holding off the Turks and Persians. The ambassadorial mission did not have much political success, but it did bring about a significant cultural event – the printing of the first Georgian book.
During his stay at the Vatican, Niceforo Irbach collaborated with Catholic scholars and missionaries to produce a Georgian-Italian vocabulary, as well as a brief collection of prayers in colloquial Georgian.
The first Georgian books were published by the Propaganda Fide Press of the Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith which was established in Rome in 1622 for the purpose of spreading Catholicism in non-Catholic countries.
Georgia adopted Christianity in the very early centuries and the resulting Georgian Orthodox Church, founded in the fourth century AD, has been in communion with the Eastern Christian Churches but has never been subject to the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.
A general idea of the political situation in Italy at that time and the status and purpose of the Vatican agencies happened to be of direct relevance to the activities of the Georgian king’s envoy during his stay in Rome. The newly-established Catholic missions required manuals of the foreign language and devotional texts for their operations.
In 1629 the Congregation managed to cast Georgian type in moulds and to issue a ‘Georgian alphabet with prayers’ that was followed by the publication of the ‘Georgian-Italian Dictionary’. Achille Venerio, a member of the ‘Propaganda Fide’, sent the printed dictionary with its Georgian alphabet to Pope Urban VIII along with a ‘Dedication’ in which he described Georgian letters as ‘very refined and beautiful.’
Title-page of Stefano Paolini and Niceforo Irbach’s Dittionario giorgiano e italiano (Rome, 1629) 622.e.34.(2.)
The missionaries were taught Georgian by Niceforo Irbach, who was responsible for the Georgian version of these present works. They accordingly provided a relatively easy first attempt at translation between the two languages.
Alphabetum ibericum, sive georgianum: cum Oratione [Iberian or Georgian alphabet with prayers] is one of the first of two books printed in Georgian using moveable type. The book includes a table with the Georgian alphabet and the sounds signified by its letters and their Latin equivalents. The text begins with the thirty-six letters of the Iberian or Georgian alphabet, presented in four columns - formation, name (in both alphabets) and force. Some letters have additional italic comments at the side, referring to and giving the same phoneme in other languages including Arabic, Hebrew and Greek, entailing the use of type in 5 completely different alphabets on a single page. The second subsection explains the numerous ligatures when Georgian letters are combined. The third section exemplifies the use of Georgian by setting out the text of The Lord’s Prayer, Hail Mary, Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds, Corporal Works of Mercy, the Seven Sacraments, and the Ten Commandments, concluding with the Canticle of the Virgin Mary. The text is given in Georgian and titles are in both languages, Latin and Georgian.
A page of the alphabet with Roman transliteration from Alphabetum ibericum, sive georgianum (Rome, 1629) 621.b.4. (12.)
Dittionario giorgiano e italiano, compiled by Niceforo Irbach and the printer Stepano Paolini, contains 3,084 entries written in Georgian letters. The text is printed in three columns: Georgian words in the left column, Italian transliterations (including stress) in the middle column, and an explanation of the meaning of each word in Italian in the right column. The Georgian alphabet and the Latin equivalents of each of its letters appear on pages 1–2.
The first page of the Dittionario giorgiano e italiano
Anna Chelidze, Curator Georgian Studies
08 November 2013
D'Annunzio - Defiant Archangel and Pike
Last week the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction was awarded to The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio: poet, seducer and preacher of war by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (London, 2013; YC.2013.a.15393).
The winning work, published on the 150th anniversary of D’Annunzio’s birth, was described by Martin Rees, the chair of the judges, as “A biography of an extraordinary man, a repellent man (the judges said), playwright, poet, novelist, war hero, womaniser, nationalist politician, and the man who in many ways invented Fascism. Everything that Mussolini learnt about parades and black-shirts and the extent to which politics is a branch of theatre he got from Gabriele D’Annunzio whose career peaked in 1919 when he led a hundred Italian army deserters into the Croatian town Fiume and tried to seize it for Italy.”
The ensuing flurry in the press predictably highlighted the scandalous and sensationalist elements in D’Annunzio. There was, however, general agreement that though he may have been repellent, profligate and promiscuous, D’Annunzio was never dull and he is, consequently, a splendid subject for a biography.
D'Annunzio (ca. 1896) and his distinctive signature. From G. di Propezio, Gabriele d'Annunzio (Rome, 1896). 11876.pp.3
This is, in fact, the second biography of the poet to have been published in Great Britain in the last 15 years. John Woodhouse’s Gabriele D’Annunzio: Defiant Archangel (Oxford, 1998; YC.1999.a.3656), adopted a largely chronological narrative approach, from D’Annunzio’s early life in the Abruzzi, his first steps as a society journalist in Rome, his years in France, his activities during the First World War , the invasion and annexation of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) in 1919 when he was associated with the elite Arditi storm troops of the Italian Army, to the final years in the Vittoriale, the hillside estate on Lake Garda where the writer lived from 1922 until his death in 1938, which is now his house-museum and mausoleum.
The Vittoriale (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Woodhouse’s work was the first fully documented biography of D’Annunzio, making use of thousands of newly-catalogued documents (especially those conserved in the Vittoriale) and it attempted to provide an objective and balanced appraisal of the man.
Hughes-Hallett, on the other hand, eschews chronology, adopting a thematic rather than a chronological structure, and a kaleidoscopic narrative technique more common in fiction-writing than in biography. In her own words: “I have raced through decades and slowed right down, on occasion, to record in great detail a week, a night, a conversation. To borrow terms from music … I have alternated legato narrative with staccato glimpses of the man and fragments of his thought” (p. 16). Unlike the detailed notes and excellent bibliography in Woodhouse, the present work has only a select bibliography and does not include precise page references.
Like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the indefatigable promoter of Futurism, D’Annunzio was theatrical, preposterous, charismatic, a great self-publicist and propagandist, a skilful manipulator of the media to ensure reaching a mass audience. Both men also shared a passion for motor cars and aeroplanes: one of D’Annunzio’s, most impressive wartime exploits was “the flight over Vienna”, a 700-mile round trip he undertook on 9 August 1918 to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna.
The image of both men has also been tainted by their early association with Fascism, though their relations with Mussolini were often ambiguous. It should also be remembered that, although D’Annunzio had a strong influence on Mussolini’s ideology, he never became directly involved in fascist government politics.
Unlike Marinetti, however, D’Annunzio was a notorious womaniser, who often incorporated details of his love affairs into his works, completely disregarding the feelings of the women involved. His mistresses included the great actress Eleonora Duse, the ballerina Ida Rubinstein, and the eccentric heiress Luisa Casati.
Small wonder, therefore, that D’Annunzio’s writings have been overshadowed and compromised, especially outside Italy, by his flamboyant and sensationalist elements in his life. Additionally, his literary reputation suffered by early translations of his works into English that often appeared in bowdlerized versions. A typical example is that of D’Annunzio’s first novel Il Piacere, (Milan, 1889; 12471.h.20). This masterly evocation of Rome and Roman high society in the 1880s, much influenced by Huysman’s A rebours, has only been available in English as The Child of Pleasure (London, 1898; 12471.k.25), a heavily sanitized version which also omitted many of the original aesthetic reflections that play such an important role in the original. The forthcoming new translation of the novel will hopefully give a fairer idea of the original, one of the great novels of the Decadent movement. It is also hoped that the interest aroused by award of the Johnson Prize to the new biography will prompt further translations of D’Annunzio.
And for those wondering about the title of Hughes-Hallet’s biography, it is a reference to Romain Rolland’s description of D’Annunzio as a pike – a predatory fish lurking, afloat and still, waiting for ideas on which to pounce, swallow them, and express them better himself, making them his own: a testimony to the wide variety of D’Annunzio’s enormous output.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek Studies
References:
Annamaria Andreoli (ed.) D’Annunzio: l’uomo, l’eroe, il poeta (Rome, 2001) LB.31.b.24190.
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, Notturno. Translated and annotated by Stephen Sartarelli. (New Haven, 2011) YC.2012.a.19881
The cover of D'Annunzio's first published work, Canto Novo (Rome, 1882). 1568/7016
14 October 2013
Verdi and Wagner: two composers, two bicentenaries, four portraits
The bicentenaries of the births of Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) and Richard Wagner (1813-1883) are being magnificently commemorated in various countries, though not without the occasional controversy. Last December, La Scala’s decision to open its season not with a Verdi opera but with Wagner’s Lohengrin was seen as ‘a blow for national pride in a moment of crisis’; this summer’s Proms were also widely criticised for programming seven Wagner operas (including a complete Ring Cycle) and none by Verdi, who was represented only by a concert of choral music and half a concert of tenor arias. It has to be said, though, that during this anniversary year the BBC is broadcasting the complete works of both composers and that Verdi is more in evidence this autumn in the weeks around the exact anniversary of his birth on 10 October. Finally, the inauguration of La Scala’s new season with La traviata will hopefully restore national pride (even though it will have a German Violetta)!
The anniversary has also engendered innumerable discussions about the relative merits of these two towering figures, embodiments of the cultures of their respective nations. Verdi’s status as the symbol of the Risorgimento, has recently been been questioned. Even more unexpected is the revelation that at times during the Third Reich Verdi’s operas were more performed in Germany than Wagner’s.
I would like commemorate this bicentenary year with a brief, and uncontroversial, look at portraits of the two composers in old age, painted in the 1880s and 1890s, Verdi by Giovanni Boldini, and Wagner by Pierre-Auguste Renoir.
Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) was an immensely successful society portrait painter. He was one of the ‘Italians in Paris’ who worked in the orbit of Degas and his two portraits of Verdi were painted in the spring of 1886, during the composer’s brief visit to Paris to hear the baritone Victor Maurel, who went on to create the roles of Iago and Falstaff, in the composer’s last two operas. The first portrait was the larger, more official and sober oil painting which Verdi later presented to the Rest Home for Musicians, which he himself had founded.
Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi seated. 1886. Milan, Oil on canvas.
Boldini, who was dissatisfied with that first portrait, invited Verdi to a second sitting in which the pastel portrait in a top hat and a scarf knotted at his neck, was finished in just three hours.
Giovanni Boldini (1842-1931) Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi in a Top Hat. 1886. Rome, Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna. Pastel on board.
It is a more delicate, informal and lively work, and Boldini liked it so much that he kept it in his studio, refusing to sell it to eager buyers (including the Prince of Wales). He lent it, however, to various important exhibitions and its fame spread, especially after Verdi’s publisher Giulio Ricordi commissioned an etching after it. In 1918 Boldini finally presented it to the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna in Rome. It is now one of the most reproduced portraits of Verdi.
Renoir’s portrait of Wagner (now in the Musée d’Orsay) was painted just one year before the composer’s death
Pierre-Auguste Renoir Portrait of Richard Wagner. 15 January 1882 Paris, Musée d’Orsay.
The artist, whose circle of friends included numerous Wagner enthusiasts at a time of considerable anti-German feeling in France after the Franco-Prussian War, was in Naples when he received a commission from a French music lover, the magistrate Antoine Lascoux, to paint a portrait of the composer. After several misadventures on his journey to Palermo, amusingly recounted in a letter to a friend, he was finally received by Wagner, who was staying at the Grand Hotel et des Palmes.
The portrait was painted in just 35 minutes, on 15 January 1882, two days after Wagner had completed the orchestral score of Parsifal. The session, also documented in Cosima Wagner’s diary, was by all accounts a jovial occasion, though Renoir was very nervous and was shocked by Wagner’s comments about painting and his anti-Semitic remarks. Wagner was amused by Renoir’s nervousness and grimacing while painting, and commented that the portrait made him look like ‘a protestant pastor’ (in Renoir’s account) or ‘the embryo of an angel, an oyster swallowed by an epicure’ (in Cosima’s).
A copy of the 1882 portrait was commissioned by another French Wagner enthusiast, Paul-Alfred Chéramy. This version (now in the Bibliothèque-Musée de l'Opéra National de Paris) is smaller and sketchier than the original.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir Portrait of Richard Wagner. 1893. Paris, Musée del’Opéra.
Renoir visited Bayreuth in 1896 but was bored by the length of the operas. Moreover, he detested the new development of performances taking place in a darkened auditorium that deprived him the pleasure of observing the activities of other spectators.
This celebration of these two great composers will, however, have to end on a sad note – the recent death of Patrice Chéreau. Chéreau’s 1976 centenary production of the Ring cycle in Bayreuth is now, like Giorgio Strehler’s productions of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Macbeth, the stuff of operatic legend.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek studies
References:
Barbara Ehrlich White, Renoir, his life, art, and letters. (New York, 2010) LC.31.b.8596
Jean Renoir, Renoir, my father (London, 1962) 7852.s.52.
Boldini / a cura di Francesca Dini, Fernando Mazzocca, Carlo Sisi. (Venice, 2005) YF.2006.b.182
Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher, ediert und kommentiert von Martin Gregor-Dellin und Dietrich Mack (Munich, 1976-1977) X:439/4604
09 October 2013
The British Library & British Museum Singers celebrate Verdi’s Birthday
Join the British Library and British Museum Singers for this performance on 10 October to mark the 200th anniversary of Giuseppe Verdi’s birth on 10 October 1813.
When: 13.00-13.40, Thursday 10 October 2013
Where: Entrance Hall, British Library, St Pancras
Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi by Giovanni Boldini, 1886, from Wikimedia Commons
This free event will be conducted by Peter Hellyer and accompanied by Giles Ridley.
The programme will include these choruses and arias from Verdi operas:
Chorus of Hebrew slaves (Nabucco)
Brindisi (La traviata) - solos: Andrew Bale, Hidemi Hatada
Chorus of Scottish refugees (Macbeth)
Matadors’ chorus (La traviata)
Soldiers’ chorus (Il trovatore)
Rataplan (La forza del destino)- solo Kirsten Johnson
Triumphal scene (Aida)
Please come and join in the repeat of Va, pensiero (Chorus of Hebrew slaves) from Nabucco at the end of the concert.
The British Library & British Museum Singers perform four concerts a year in the British Library, the British Museum or St Pancras Church. Wherever possible it links its programmes to current exhibitions and features items held by the British Library or the British Museum. This year it has given concerts celebrating the anniversaries of Benjamin Britten (Britten and Purcell) and Verdi (Verdi and Monteverdi). On 10 October in the British Library Entrance Hall we will be repeating some of Verdi’s best-known choruses on the actual day of his birth. Our next concert entitled “A French Connection” will mark the 50th anniversary of Francis Poulenc’s death and will include his Gloria and songs set to words by Apollinaire. This concert will take place on Thursday 21 November in St Pancras Church at 1.15.
The operas of Verdi were all the rage in Russia in the 1860s. La forza del destino which features in our celebration was in fact first performed in the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre of St. Petersburg, Russia on 22nd November 1862. After further revisions it was performed in Rome, Madrid, New York and London and elsewhere. It was the version after further revisions, with additions by Antonio Ghislanzoni which premiered in La Scala in 1869 that became the standard performance version. One of the notable celebrations of Verdi’s anniversary in Russia this year has been at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.
Peter Hellyer, Musical Director British Library & British Museum Singers and Curator Russian Studies
06 September 2013
Macchiaioli: the Italian Impressionists?
The Macchiaioli (literally, patch- or spot-makers), was a group of Italian artists based in Tuscany during the second half of the 19th century, formed more than a decade before the French Impressionists. Their work was influenced by Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, the painters of the Barbizon School, and other 19th-century plein-air painters whose work they saw on their visits to Paris, especially in the Exposition universelle of 1855. The output of the Macchiaioli includes enormous Risorgimento battle scenes and other military subjects, landscapes, and peasant and bourgeois subjects; they are, however, best-known and loved for the small, sketch-like paintings from which their nickname is derived (the ‘macchia’ being a sketch-like composition using blocks of colour). Giovanni Fattori’s La Rotonda dei Bagni Palmieri, is emblematic of this type of painting.
Giovanni Fattori’s La Rotonda dei Bagni Palmieri, 1866. Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Florence.
The affinities between the Impressionists and the Macchiaioli have often been pointed out, most recently in an exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris with the potentially crowd-pulling title Les Macchiaioli, des Impressionistes Italiens? (The exhibition will be shown at the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid with the title Macchiaioli. Realismo impresionista en Italia, 12 September 2013 - 5 January 2014).
The stylistic similarities between the two groups can be seen by comparing Silvestro Lega’s The Pergola (1860) with two early Impressionist works: Frédéric Bazille’s Réunion de famille (1867) and Claude Monet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1865-66).
Silvestro Lega Il pergolato (The Pergola), 1860. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
Frédéric Bazille Réunion de famille, 1867. Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Macchiaioli finished paintings are, however, often closer in style to Academic or Realist painting, with echoes of Tuscan Trecento and Quattrocento art. The often-made parallel between Silvestro Lega’s La visita (The visit) and a predella painting by Fra Angelico showing the Visitation exemplifies the latter influence.
Silvestro Lega La visita (The visit) 1868. Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Rome
Fra Angelico The Visitation, ca 1440. Museo della Collegiata, San Giovanni Valdarno (Arezzo)
The richest collection of Macchiaioli paintings is that of the Galleria d’arte moderna, at the Palazzo Pitti, in Florence. Their works can also be found in the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna in Rome and in numerous other Italian museums and galleries, especially in Tuscany. They are scarcely represented in museums outside Italy. In Great Britain the only macchiaiolo painting in a British public collection is a sketch for ‘Straw Weavers at Settignano’. by Telemaco Signorini, donated to The National Gallery in 2008. The British Museum has some prints by Fattori, and Telemaco Signorini, most of them recent acquisitions [See Martin Hopkinson, Italian prints, 1875-1975 (London, 2007) ; British Library shelfmark YC.2009.b.1080.]
This neglect of the Macchiaioli, and more generally of 19th-century Italian art, is due to the francocentric view of 19th-century art that dominated museum acquisition policies until the late 20th century when the richness and variety of other national schools (for example German, Scandinavian, and Russian) were revealed through a series of important exhibitions, and museums began trying, albeit a bit late in the day, to fill gaps in their collections. Winter Landscape, the only painting by Caspar David Friedrich in the UK, was acquired by the National Gallery as recently as 1987.
The literature on the Macchiaioli is extensive. In Italy, a proliferation of exhibition catalogues, whether of the movement as a whole or of individual artists, reached a climax in 2008, the centenary of Fattori’s death. There are also two important monographs in English, by Norma Broude (1987; LB.31.b.840) and by A. Boime (1993, YA.1994.b.6559 ). The first and only exhibition in Great Britain was in 1982, in Manchester and Edinburgh. Perhaps exhibition organisers in London should take their lead from Paris and Madrid?
Chris Michaelides, Curator Italian and Modern Greek Studies
Some recent publications:
Monographs in English
N. Broude. The Macchiaioli: Italian Painters of the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London, 1987) LB.31.b.840
A. Boime. The Art of the Macchia and the Risorgimento: Representing Culture and Nationalism in Nineteenth-century Italy (Chicago, IL, 1993) YA.1994.b.6559 and YC.1994.b.5757.
Thematic exhibitions on the Macchiaioli
The Macchiaioli: Masters of Realism in Tuscany [exhibition in the Manchester Art Gallery and Edinburgh City Art Centre]. (Rome, 1982). X.425/5604.
The Macchiaioli: painters of Italian life, 1850-1900. [exhibition at the Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles, and at Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge]. (Los Angeles, 1986.) 86/19336
I Macchiaioli: sentimento del vero [exhibition in Turin, Palazzo Bricherasio]. (Milan:2007) LF.31.a.1406.
I Macchiaioli e la fotografia [exhibition in Florence, Museo nazionale Alinari della fotografia]. (Florence, 2008). LF.31.b.7167.
I Macchiaioli prima dell’ Impressionismo [exhibition in Padua, Palazzo Zabarella]. (Venice, 2004) YF.2005.b.2673.
Monographic exhibitions:
Vincenzo Cabianca e la civiltà dei Macchiaioli [exhibition at Orvieto,Palazzo Coelli and Florence, Villa Bardini]. Florence, c2007). LF.31.b.4991
Giovanni Fattori tra epopea e vero / a cura di Andrea Baboni. (Milan, 2008) YF.2008.b.3206
Fugazzo, Stefano. Giovanni Fattori: il vero tra forma, linguaggio e sentimento. (Florence, 2008). YF.2009.a.2970
I luoghi di Giovanni Fattori nell'Accademia di belle arti di Firenze : passato e presente / a cura di Giuliana Videtta e Anna Gallo Martucci. ([Florence], 2008). LF.31.b.5838
Fattori e il naturalismo in Toscana / a cura di Francesca Dini (Florence, 2008) LF.31.b.5428
Silvestro Lega : i Macchiaioli e il Quattrocento [exhibition at Forlì, Musei San Domenico]. Milan, 2007). LF.31.b.3088
Telemaco Signorini e la pittura in Europa [exhibition in Padua, Palazzo Zabarella]. (Venice, 2009). LF.31.b.6495
02 September 2013
Boccaccio at 700
This year sees the 700th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Boccaccio in Tuscany in 1313 (the exact place and date are not known). His father was a prominent Tuscan merchant and Boccaccio’s familiarity with the mercantile world – its personalities, practices and network of trade routes – is immediately apparent in the work for which he is most celebrated, the collection of stories known as the Decameron.
Set in 1348, the Decameron consists of 100 stories told over ten days by ten friends (three men and seven women) who have fled from Florence to a villa in the Tuscan countryside to escape the ravages of the Black Death, graphically described at the opening of the book. With this work, written in Italian, Boccaccio earned the right to be considered the father of Italian prose; in Italy he is regarded as one of the ‘three crowns’ of the literary tradition, alongside Dante, who died when Boccaccio was eight and whose work he studied and revered all his life, and Petrarch, who was nine years older than Boccaccio and became a valued mentor and friend.
Boccaccio portrayed on an Italian anniversary stamp
While Italy is naturally the centre of the anniversary celebrations, the occasion is also being marked by conferences and exhibitions elsewhere, as is only appropriate for a writer whose work even during his lifetime gained a European audience and has been an enduring influence on writers (as well as painters, composers and filmmakers) in many other countries ever since. Boccaccio’s work, especially the great narrative cornucopia of the Decameron with its multifarious tales, ranging from the bawdy to the tragic, set within a complex narrative framework, is an integral part of many native literary traditions. In England, writers from Chaucer to Fay Weldon have known and drawn on his work.
A major international conference was held at the University of Manchester in July, which brought together traditional and modern critical approaches to Boccaccio in order to ‘locate’ him and his continuing relevance in the 21st century; among the themes discussed were the place given to women in Boccaccio’s writings, the influence of his own reading, the variety of rewritings and adaptations of his work, and the importance of storytelling as as activity. One of the most significant recent developments in Boccaccio studies has been an interest in the way his works were produced and circulated in manuscript and in print and how copies were read and collected. It was therefore fitting that the conference was accompanied by a wide-ranging exhibition (open until 20 December) at the John Rylands Library, which drew on its rich collections in many languages – and added to them with a series of books designed by contemporary artists who’d been asked to take their inspiration from one of Boccaccio’s works.
The British Library (where only last year an autograph manuscript of a text which Boccaccio copied out for his own library was discovered) will also be celebrating the anniversary on Monday 30 September with ‘Boccaccio & Company: an introduction to the Decameron’, an all-day event for those who want to find out more about this great collection of stories and the reasons why it has kept generations of readers entertained and moved - as well as titillated and scandalised.
The day has been organised with the generous collaboration of the British-Italian Society and in partnership with London University’s Institute of Modern Languages Research. Short talks from eight specialists will provide an overview of the book’s historical and cultural background, the stories it includes and their narrative framework, its reputation for licentiousness, and the influence it has had on other literatures and the arts in general since it first appeared. To book go to our website.
The day will end with a John Coffin Trust Lecture and Reading, free and open to all, given by Marina Warner on ‘Voices Without Borders: Travelling Tales & Literary Heritage’ at Senate House, University of London from 17.00 to 19.00. There will also be the opportunity to visit a small display of books and manuscripts relating to Boccaccio in the Library’s Ritblat Gallery which will be on from 27 September – 1 December
Stephen Parkin, Curator Italian Studies
The ten storytellers in the Garden, from Giovanni Boccaccio, Decamerone (Venice, 1498) BL shelfmark C.4.i.7.
14 August 2013
Two Italian seventeenth-century female engravers : a recent discovery
As many of you may be aware, the British Library has been successful in attracting £1.1 million in funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the Italian Academies Project administered and organised jointly with Royal Holloway, University of London, and in the second phase of the Project, with the added collaboration of a third partner, the University of Reading.
The Project entails the cataloguing and digitisation of the British Library’s rich and extensive holdings of Italian books produced by the Italian Learned Academies in cities including Padua, Bologna, Siena, Naples, Venice, Rome, Mantua and in the principal cities in Sicily where academies were present - Palermo, Messina and Catania, from the period 1525 to 1700.
As is to be expected from a Project of this nature, a myriad of very disparate subjects and fascinating material, especially illustrations often consisting of original engravings or etchings, can be identified when making this material available to a wider audience through digitisation. Two exciting recent discoveries made by one of the team, Dr Lorenza Gianfrancesco, which are true discoveries, since art historians appear to have been little aware of their existence, is the work of two female engravers working in Venice, Naples and Rome in the seventeenth century.
That female engravers were engaged in this craft, a difficult art and skill to acquire, is in itself, an intriguing discovery since the process of engraving is not one that is normally associated with the fairer sex at this relatively early period. Not surprisingly, very little is known about these two engravers apart from their names – Isabella Piccini (1644-1734) and Teresa del Po (1646-1713).
Engraving by Teresa del Po from Progymnasmata Physica (Naples, 1688). British Library 1135.g.15
Teresa was born in Naples and Isabella in Venice. The latter learned her craft from her father Iacopo Piccini (1619?-1686) who was an important and established Venetian engraver in his own right. Teresa del Po, however, is more enigmatic. We do not know, as yet, with whom she learned the art of engraving. As was often the custom at the time, a second or third daughter entered a convent at a relatively young age, and Isabella was no exception, joining a religious order of nuns in Venice. She continued to receive several commissions from authors and clearly from Learned Academies in Naples while a nun in the convent.
Engraving by Isabella Piccini from Poesie Liriche Di Baldassarre Pisani (Venice, 1676). British Library 11429.df.1.
Both Teresa and Isabella were extremely talented and had learned their craft fully. They received commissions to provide engravings to accompany the works of contemporary Italian poetry, architecture and the arts in general and, surprisingly, scientific works too. Both produced works which were highly original, showed great command of the engraver’s art and produced work which can best be described as exquisite or sublime which the reader can judge from the examples illustrating this post.
Denis Reidy, Lead Curator Italian Studies
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