25 May 2016
All the World’s a Stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas
No writer’s work has been translated, performed and transformed by as many cultures across the world as Shakespeare's. As part of the programme of events accompanying the current British Library exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts, the British Library is holding a seminar ‘All the World’s a stage: Shakespeare in Europe and the Americas’ on Friday 10 June from 10.15-17.15 in the Conference Centre.
A troupe of travelling players in 17th-century Germany. From the Album Amicorum of Franz Hartmann, MS Egerton 1222.
This study day brings together leading specialists to explore Shakespeare’s global cultural presence from Europe to the Americas via the Indian Ocean. Themes include Shakespeare's source material; postcolonial adaptations; performance on stage and film; and the cultural politics of European Shakespeare.
The programme for the study day is:
10.15-10.45 Registration; Tea/Coffee
10.45-10.55 Welcome: Janet Zmroczek (Head of European and Americas Collections, British Library)
10.55-11.40 Keynote: Presentation and Interview (Chair: Aleksandra Sakowska, Worcester)
Jerzy Limon (Gdańsk), ‘“The actors are come hither” - 400 years of English theatrical presence in Gdańsk’
The Gdánsk Shakespeare Theatre
11.40-11.45: Break
11.45-12.35 Panel 1: European Sources and Settings (Chair: Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Stuart Gillespie (Glasgow), ‘Shakespeare’s European Sources: Epics, Essays, Romances, Novellas'
Graham Holderness (Hertfordshire), ‘Shakespeare and Venice’
Giovanni Battista Giraldi, De gli Hecatommithi (Mondovì, 1565), G.9875-6, a collection of stories including sources of Othello and Measure for Measure, from our Discovering Literature Shakespeare site
12.35-13.00 Julian Harrison (British Library) ‘“Our Shakespeare” exhibition at the Library of Birmingham’ (Chair: Janet Zmroczek, British Library)
13.00-14.00: Lunch. A sandwich lunch will be provided.
14.00-14.50 Panel 2: Translating The Tempest: Postcolonial Adaptations (Chair: Charles Forsdick, Liverpool/AHRC)
Philip Crispin (Hull), ‘Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête’
Michael Walling (Border Crossings), ‘Storm-tossed in the Indian Ocean - from Indian Tempest to Mauritian Toufann’
14.50 – 15.40 Panel 3: Shakespeare in Performance (Chair: Ben Schofield, King’s College London)
Paul Prescott (Warwick), ‘Bard in the USA: the Shakespeare Festival Phenomenon in North America’
Mark Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast), ‘Shakespeare on Film: Europe and Latin America’
15.40-16.00 Tea/Coffee
16.00-17.15 Roundtable: The Cultural Politics of European Shakespeare (Chair: Erica Sheen, York)
Short presentations followed by a roundtable discussion with Keith Gregor (Murcia), ‘Shakespeare in post-Francoist Spain’; Nicole Fayard (Leicester), ‘Je suis Shakespeare: The Making of Shared Identities on the French Stage’; Emily Oliver (King’s College London), ‘Shakespeare Performance and German Reunification’; Aleksandra Sakowska (Worcester), ‘Shakespearean Journeys to and from Poland’
17.15- 18.00 Wine reception sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies
The study day has been organised by the European and Americas Collections department of the British Library in partnership with the AHRC ‘Translating Cultures’ Theme, The Polish Cultural Institute, and the Eccles Centre for Americas Studies at the British Library.
You can book by following the link to our What’s On pages or by contacting the British Library Box Office ( +44 (0)1937 546546; [email protected]). Full price is £25 (concessions available: see ‘What’s On’ for full details).
20 May 2016
Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages, Monday 6 June
The annual Seminar on Textual Bibliography for Modern Foreign Languages will take place on Moday 6 June in the Eliot Room of the British Library Conference Centre. As ever, we have a varied programme covering a range of countries, themes and periods. The full programme for the day is:
11.00 Registration and Coffee
11.30 CARLO DUMONTET (London) Some thoughts on format identification, or Cataloguers vs Formats.
12.15 Lunch (Own arrangements)
1.30 CARMEN PERAITA (Villanova), War of Readers: Territorial Licensing and Printing of the First Editions of Quevedo’s Política de Dios (1626)
2.15 ALESSANDRA PANZANELLI (London) Illustrations in Early Printed Books From Perugia: Imitation, Re-Use and Original Production.
3.00 Tea
3.30 DAVID PAISEY (London) Peasants, Fragments of the Reformation in Germany and England, and Peter Schoeffer the Younger, Printer in Mainz, Worms and Strasbourg 1512-1538
4.30 KATYA ROGATCHEVSKAIA (London) ‘A Beautiful Tremendous Russian Book and Other Things Too’: An Overview of Rare Russian Books from the Diaghilev-Lifar Collection in the BL
The Seminar will end at 5.15 pm.
The Seminar is free and open to all, but please notify us if you are planning to attend.
Barry Taylor ([email protected]; tel 020 7412 7576)
Susan Reed ([email protected]; tel 020 7412 7572)
20 April 2016
Here, there and every Eyre: Charlotte Brontë goes global
Although the British Library is rightly proud of its unique collection of manuscripts relating to Charlotte Brontë, including the four letters which inspired Chrissie Gittins’s poetry collection Professor Héger’s Daughter, its European collections also contain a number of volumes which reflect the worldwide reputation which this modest and retiring author achieved after her premature death in 1837.
Manuscript of one of Charlotte Brontë’s letters to Constantin Héger, dated 18 November 1845 (BL Add.MS 38732)
Throughout her life Charlotte Brontë travelled farther in her imagination than in reality. After two brief periods in Brussels at the boarding-school run by Constantin Héger and his wife, she did not leave England again until her visit to Ireland in 1854, where she encountered not only the family of her new husband Arthur Bell Nicholls but the country from which her father originated. Her first sojourn in Belgium was cut short by the death of her aunt, which compelled Charlotte and her sister Emily to return to Haworth; the second was marked by growing homesickness and a strong but unreciprocated attachment to Héger. Back in Yorkshire, she addressed to him a series of increasingly anguished letters which make it clear that she felt intellectually as well as emotionally starved and stifled there despite her ability to range far beyond her immediate surroundings through the creative power of her mind.
A hand-drawn map of the imaginary country of Angria from Branwell and Charlotte Brontë’s notebooks (Manuscript of The History of the Young Men from their First Settlement to the Present Time; BL MS Ashley 2468)
As a young girl Charlotte and her brother Branwell had invented the country of Angria, and for years wrote detailed chronicles of its inhabitants and history. In 1846 she and her sisters Emily and Anne paid for the publication of a joint collection of their poems. This sold only two copies, but undeterred by that and the fact that her first novel The Professor did not find a publisher, Charlotte completed a second novel, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography. Published on 16 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. under the pseudonym Currer Bell, it achieved immediate commercial success and acclaim. To a certain extent this was a succès de scandale, as some critics found the novel crude and even anti-Christian. This did nothing to halt its sales, though, or to deter translators or adapters from spreading interest in the author’s work abroad.
Among early versions of Charlotte Brontë’s writings in other languages, the British Library possesses a Danish translation of Shirley (1851; RB.23.a.16151), a German one of The Professor (1858; RB.23.a.2077) and a Hungarian Jane Eyre (1873; 12603.ff.17). Besides direct translations, the latter’s dramatic quality had also inspired interpretations (with varying degrees of fidelity) for the stage. A German translation of the novel, Jane Eyre: die Waise von Lowood, had already gone into a second edition in 1864 (12637.a.7.), and in 1892 the ‘orphan of Lowood’ appeared on the German stage in a play with a similar title (11746.df.11.) by Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer, ‘freely based’ on the original. Even earlier, in 1874, she had made her Italian theatrical debut in L’orfanella di Lowood, a drama in a prologue and three acts by R. Michély, ‘adapted from the German’, which received its première in Naples at the Teatro dei Fiorentini on 27 April 1871, ‘replicato sempre a richiesta e con entusiasmo’.
Title-page of L’orfanella di Lowood (Naples, 1874). 11715.ee.6
We may wonder whether the author would have recognized her creation in ‘Giovanna Eyre’, whom we first meet as a girl of 16, humiliated and slighted by her odious cousin John and her aunt, ‘la signora Sarah Reed’, who is determined to send her to the orphanage of Lowood despite the protests of her own brother, ‘Henry Wytfield, capitano’, whose debts prevent him from taking charge of his niece. In the first act, eight years later, the scene changes to ‘Fhornfield’ [sic], the estate of ‘Lord Rowland Rochester’, where a glittering company is assembled, including not only Rochester, his eight-year-old ward Adele, Lady Clawdon, ‘Baronetto Francis Steensworth’, ‘la signora Giuditta Harleigh’ (a relative of Rochester), Lord Arturo and Mrs. Reed, but also the latter’s daughter , now the widowed Lady Giorgina Clarens. The housekeeper Grazia Poole is also in evidence, implicated in a series of strange events which culminate in an attempt on Rochester’s life.
Giovanna saves him, but responds to his overtures with such coolness that he exclaims ‘Creatura insopportabile!’ as she makes her escape. The Ingrams are nowhere to be seen; instead Giovanna mistakenly believes her cousin Giorgina to be the object of Rochester’s attentions, providing still more opportunities for noble expressions of forgiveness and self-sacrifice. And while there is indeed a madwoman locked in the tower, she is not Rochester’s wife but Lady Enrichetta Rochester, the fiancée who had betrayed him by marrying his elder brother Arturo, the heir, while he was away in London. Trying to kill her, Rochester was thrown into chains and transported to the Indies, while, tiring of Arturo, the evil Enrichetta eloped with a Pole. Rochester caught up with them in Paris, where he slew the seducer before Enrichetta’s eyes, a shock which drove her mad. She and Adele, the offspring of her liaison with the Pole, were entrusted to Rochester by his brother as the latter died of remorse, and the action ends with the revelation that Giorgina cares not for Rochester but only for his riches, as Giovanna throws herself, crying ‘Io t’amo…son tua!’, into the arms of Rochester, who responds ‘Mia, mia per sempre!’ and presents ‘lady Giovanna Eyre’ to the assembled company as ‘my betrothed…my wife, my treasure, your cousin, Lady Clarens, the worthiest and most virtuous of women who from now on will be the pride of my family and of yours!’
Perhaps Charlotte Brontë might have been somewhat startled at such outspoken transports of passion on the part of her heroine, but whatever she might have thought of the twists of a plot more tortuous than any she herself had conceived, she might well have rejoiced to see her creation travelling far beyond her native land, and much farther than she herself had ever done.
Susan Halstead, Content Specialist (Humanities and Social Sciences), Research Engagement
01 March 2016
Portraits of Ariosto, or not?
One of the greatest portraits in the National Gallery in London, Titian’s familiarly called Man with the Blue Sleeve (ca 1509), was for some three centuries thought to represent Ludovico Ariosto. Reproduced in editions of Orlando furioso, Ariosto’s most famous work, it became, for generations of readers, the best-known image of the poet. This painting is not, however, likely to feature in any books published this year, the 500th anniversary of the first edition of Ariosto’s epic poem as, after years of uncertainty about the Ariosto connection, the sitter was identified in 2012 as a member of the Barbarigo, an aristocratic Venetian family.
Titian, Portrait of Gerolamo (?) Barbarigo ca 1510 (National Gallery, London) and as reproduced on an editon of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. (Turin, 1966)
Another painting in the National Gallery, Palma Vecchio’s Portrait of a Poet (ca 1516), has also, at various times, been proposed as a portrait of Ariosto. When it was acquired by the gallery in 1860 it was also thought to be a portrait of Ariosto by Titian. A few years later, however, it was recognised as a work by Palma Vecchio and later attributions tended to alternate between the two artists, though other artists have also been proposed. As there is no written evidence that Ariosto ever sat for Palma Vecchio, the identification of the sitter as Ariosto was dropped each time the work was attributed to him, only to reappear when reattributed to Titian, as it was known from contemporary or near-contemporary sources that he had painted a portrait of Ariosto.
Palma Vecchio, Portrait of a Poet. ca 1516. The National Gallery, London.
The Palma Vecchio painting is thought to represent a poet because the arm of the sitter is resting on a book and his head is framed by laurel branches, the traditional attribute of the poet and an allusion to Petrarch’s Laura. Though there is no consensus among scholars, it is usually said to have been painted around 1516, the date of the first publication of Orlando furioso. Hence the temptation to identify the sitter as Ariosto even though the poet was by then in his mid-forties whereas the portrait is obviously that of a much younger man. There has also been a suggestion that the painting may not necessarily be a portrait and, worse, that the laurel may be a symbol of charity or faith, rather than poetry.
As Titian’s portrait of Ariosto mentioned by contemporary sources, has never been identified with any certainty, other portraits by the artist have at times been proposed. They include a portrait in the Indianapolis Museum of Art, one attributed to Titian, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a portrait discovered in 1933 in Casa Oriani, Ferrara and attributed, in quick succession, to Dosso Dossi (by Giuseppe Agnelli) and to Titian (by Georg Gronau).
Titian, Portrait of Ariosto. Present whereabouts unknown. [Image from Fototeca della Fondazione Federico Zeri, Università di Bologna]
Gronau elegantly demolishes the attribution to Dossi and in his description of the portrait he amusingly says: ‘The painter, with true insight, chose this not very usual “lost” profile, for only in such position could he do full justice to the very characteristic and beautiful curve of the nose…If he had moved the head ever so slightly towards the front, the line of the nose would have been indistinct’. This portrait was lost in the Second World War, but there are two copies of it in the Biblioteca Ariostea di Ferrara, one by Carlo Bononi (1569-1632), the other an anonymous 17th-century work. More importantly, another copy was painted by Cristofano dell’Altissimo (ca 1552-1568), a Florentine artist who copied numerous portraits of famous men for Cosimo I de’Medici, now all in the Galleria degli Uffizi. Giorgio Vasari used this portrait in a fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio where Ariosto is seen in conversation with Pietro Aretino (also based on a portrait by Titian).
Left, Cristofano dell’Altissimo (1525-1605), Ludovico Ariosto, before 1568 (Image from Wikimedia Commons); Right, Detail from Giorgio Vasari, ‘The entry of Leo X into Florence’, Palazzo Vecchio, reproduced in Palazzo Vecchio: officina di opere e di ingegni, a cura di Carlo Francini. (Milan, 2007) LF.31.b.3647
The features of the poet – high forehead, hair receding at the top, aquiline nose, thin lips, lively eyes, and straggling beard – correspond to those of the woodcut after a lost drawing by Titian (engraved by Francesco Marcolini), published in the 1532 edition of Orlando furioso, the last revised by the poet
Portrait of Ludovico Ariosto, after Titian. Woodcut, with a decorative border by Francesco de Nanto, from Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso (Ferrara, 1532) C.20.c.11
This woodcut, the most reliable likeness of Ariosto, has been described as the archetypal portrait of him and was copied in a variety of media and in later editions of his works. Two examples will suffice – the bronze medal produced by Pastorino de’ Pastorini (1508-1592), one of the most prolific medallists of the Italian Renaissance and the frontispiece in the monumental 1730 edition of the poem.
Above: Bust of Ludovico Ariosto. Cast bronze medal (obverse) designed by Pastorino de’Pastorini, ca 1555 (The British Museum) Below: Frontispiece portrait of Ariosto by C. Orsolini from vol.1 of Orlando furioso (Venice, 1730) 835.m.11
Traditions, however, die hard and the identification of Ariosto with Titian’s ‘Man with the Blue Sleeve’ is still strong in popular imagination as can be seen from a recent edition of Italo Calvino’s retelling of Orlando furioso in which the introductory double-spread illustration by Grazia Nidasio wittily combines the portrait of ‘Ariosto’, his blue sleeve resting on manuscripts of his work while he is adding corrections to the proofs of his text, with that of a mischievous-looking Calvino, and various knights on horseback riding over the Palazzo Estense in Ferrara.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance Collections
References/Further reading:
Giuseppe Agnelli, ‘Ritratti dell’Ariosto’, Rassegna d’arte, 1922. P.P.1931.plg
Giuseppe Agnelli, ‘Il ritratto dell’Ariosto di Dosso Dossi’, Emporium, lxxvii (1933), 275-282
Georg Gronau, ‘Titian’s Ariosto’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol.63, no. 368 (Nov. 1933), 194-203. PP.1931.pcs
Harold E. Wethey, The Paintings of Titian: complete ed. Vol.2. The Portraits. (London, 1971). fL71/4158
Cecil Gould, National Gallery Catalogues: the Sixteenth-Century Italian Schools. (London, 1987). YK. 1994.b.9553
Philip Rylands, Palma Vecchio. (Cambridge, 1992). q92/05892
Paul Joannides, Titian: the assumption of genius (New Haven; London, 2001) LB.31.b.23190
David Alan Brown [et al.], Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian painting. (New Haven, Conn.; London, 2006). LC.31.b.2948
Orlando furioso di Ludovico Ariosto, raccontato da Italo Calvino, illustrato da Grazia Nidasio. (Milan, 2009) YF.2012.a.5411
A. Mazzotta, ‘A ‘gentiluomo da Ca’ Barbarigo’ by Titian in the National Gallery, London’, The Burlington Magazine, CLIV, 2012, 12-19. PP.1931.pcs
Giovanni C.F. Villa (ed.), Palma il Vecchio : lo sguardo della bellezza. (Milan, 2015). YF.2015.b.1072
Gianni Venturi, ‘Ludovico Ariosto: portrait d’un poète dans les arts et dans les arts visuels’, in L’Arioste et les arts, 61-72. (Paris, 2012). YF.2012.b.2238.
27 January 2016
Crossing European Borders with Diego Marani’s ‘The Interpreter’
As in previous years, the British Library will host 2016’s European Literature Night on 11 May. As a taster, we look at a newly-translated work by an author who featured in 2014’s event.
Diego Marani’s The Interpreter (original Italian L’interprete, Milan, 2004y YF.2004.a.24136) begins in Geneva at the United Nations where an interpreter has developed a strange malady and starts speaking gibberish while claiming he has discovered the primordial language of mankind. Before he can be sacked he disappears, then his boss develops the same illness and goes to a sanatorium in Munich for a language cure. While at the sanatorium he decides his only chance of being cured is to find the missing interpreter and find out about the mysterious illness which has taken over his life. There now begins a journey through Europe which takes him as far as the Crimea. This is no travelogue but an exploration of cultural diversity, language, identity and crime.
It is a very entertaining novel with a lot of humour but also dark and frightening. It shows how easily all the certainties of life can disappear and how an individual can be left defenceless to the buffetings of external forces beyond his control. The narrator in the novel loses everything but the power of the human spirit keeps him alive and he fights back. For him life is an obstacle race where the obstacles can change from day to day, and where you must adapt to survive.
As with Marani’s earlier novels, New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs, the importance of language and identity are at the heart of the novel:
Languages are like toothbrushes: the only one you should put in your mouth is your own. It's a question of hygiene... it's dangerous to let yourself be contaminated by the germs of another tongue.
It is your language and your culture which give you your identity and make you what you are. When times get tough it is a bulwark against chaos and adversity. Your language and culture help you belong in society and connect you to both the past and the future. Whatever journeys we undertake, we take with us our language and culture and we do not lose them however much our life changes. We can learn new languages and immerse ourselves in new cultures, but we still retain the language and culture which surrounded us in our formative years and in which we were educated. This is why exile is so painful for most adults. Indeed, people who have left their homes for work in foreign countries remain truer to the traditions that they grew up with than people who remain behind in a changing society. For the exile, a country can’t change as it exists only in his mind, frozen in aspic, and it is to this country of the mind that he wants to return. Indeed, as many returning immigrants discover, the country they left behind no longer exists and they can’t readjust to the country which has taken its place.
The themes of the novel are carefully embedded in a thriller plot and do not interfere with a cracking yarn rich in event and the unexpected. Diego Marani shows that he is at home with the detective story, so it is not a surprise that he has gone on to write detective fiction with God’s Dog. The issues raised in The Interpreter are answered, but what the narrator has learnt does not seem worth the price that he has paid and will continue to pay.
Books by Diego Marani from the British Library's collections
Eric Lane, Dedalus Books
21 September 2015
Joannes Stradanus and his Hunting Scenes
The Flemish artist Jan van der Straet, also known as Joannes Stradanus (1523- 1605), spent most of his working life in Florence where his enormous output included religious paintings, frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, tapestry cartoons, and also designs for various series of prints.
Portrait of Johannes Stradanus ca 1580. Print made by Johannes Wierix after J. Stradanus. British Museum 1879,0510.428 (©Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Between 1566 and 1577 Stradanus executed preparatory drawings for a series of hunting scenes for tapestries to decorate the Medici villa at Poggio a Caiano near Florence. The success of these led Flemish publishers to commission hunting scenes by Stradanus for engravings, an indication that the artist’s fame had by then spread north of the Alps. Six large-format engravings with scenes representing the tapestries at Poggio a Caiano were published by the renowned print publisher Hieronymus Cock in 1570, and in 1574 and 1576 Volxcken Diericx, Cock’s widow, published two series prints based on the same designs but without their ornamental borders.
Wild Boar Hunt with Nets. 1570 (Series of hunting scenes with borders). Engraving. Published by Hieronymus Cock, after Jan van der Straet. British Museum 1870,0514.1233 (©Trustees of the British Museum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Stradanus had by then begun his collaboration with Philips Galle (1537-1612), another engraver and print dealer who had earlier worked in Cock’s workshop. This resulted in two new series of hunting scenes. The first, which numbered 44 prints, was published in 1578-80 and some 15 years later an additional 61 prints were produced, providing a greater variety of scenes. Both series were combined into a single collection published in 1596 as Venationes, ferarum, arium, piscium [Hunts of wild animals, birds and fish]. Several engravers were engaged on this ambitious publication which was reprinted several times during the 17th century by Galle’s heirs.
Title page of Venationes Ferarum, Avium, Piscium. British Library C.107.k.7
The British Library has two copies of the work, 1899.cc.71 and C.107.k.7. Both have the same engraved title page, on which the name of Joannes Galle has replaced that of his father Philips, as it does on all the plates. This edition was first published in 1634 but as the date does not appear on the title page of either of our copies, perhaps they are later reissues. Judging by the quality of the plates, 1899.cc.71 is the earlier of the two. It is incomplete – a selection of 38 plates – whereas C.107.k.7 has all 104 plates.
The prints are approximately 20 x 26.5 cm. They are grouped into thematically related depictions of animal and bird hunts, fishing, scenes from history or legend, fights between animals, or between wild animals and men in arenas. At the bottom of each picture there are verses explaining its subject. The examples below give an idea of the great variety of subjects and their treatment, and of Stradanus’s inventiveness and exuberance. The landscapes, drawn following Flemish and Italian pictorial traditions, are a reminder both of the artist’s country of origin and of his adopted country.
Scenes from history and legend
Whale Hunt by the Emperor Claudius at Ostia. Engraved by Adriaen Collaert [Plate 86]. Claudius fought a killer whale which was trapped in the harbour, an event witnessed by Pliny the Elder. The whale sinks a boat with a gush of water from its mouth.
Animal hunts
Hunting panthers using mirrors. Engraved by Jan Collaert II [Plate 16]. In the foreground panthers are lured into traps which contain mirrors; on a wooded outcrop above, huntsmen wait to spring the traps; to right, other panthers are caught in nets; a group of hunstmen, with spears, approach along a riverbank.
Gazelle hunt. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 51]. One of the most spectacular engravings in the collection. At right foreground a group of hunters are preparing for the hunt, two of them putting on their climbing shoes. At left mid-ground, hunters armed with spears, accompanied by dogs, chase gazelles up cliffs; on the opposite side of the ravine, men drive the gazelles off the cliff.
Bird hunts
Hunting of reed warblers with owls. Engraved by Jan Collaert II [Plate 68]. Three owls perch on poles tethered with cords and a fourth stands on a cage. They attract the warblers which fly down to mock them. Lying on the ground are hunters camouflaged as bushes (their hands and faces can be seen) holding lime-twigs on which the birds land and become trapped. In the foreground, a couple is handing dead birds to an older woman who is putting them in a basket; a little boy observes the hunt.
Catching swallows from rooftops using discs. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 85]. One of the rare cityscapes in the series. In the foreground, boys catch swallows from the roofs and balconies of buildings using circular discs suspended from long sticks; groups of figures watch them from an Italianate square.
Beekeeping. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 83]. Beekeeping is curiously included as an example of bird hunting. A man on a ladder scrapes bees from the trunk of a tree into a hive; another figure supports the base of the ladder; two figures beat pans with sticks , and a third watches a swarm of bees flying above. A row of hives can be seen to right.
Fishing
Fishing with dip nets in the river Arno. Engraved by Joannes Galle [Plate 96]. In the right foreground a river god, holding a cornucopia, is seated upon a lion representing Florence; fishermen wade in the river Arno with dip nets; to left and right, the city of Florence flanks the river.
Chris Michaelides, Curator Romance Studies
References/further reading
Jan van der Straet, Philippus Gallæus, Cornelis van Kiel Venationes Ferarum, avium, piscium, pugnæ bestiariorum et mutuæ bestiarum. … . ([Antwerp, after 1634?]). 1899.cc.71.
Jan van der Straet, Joannes Gallæus, Cornelis van Kiel, Venationes ferarum, auium, piscium…. (Antwerp, [after 1634?]). C.107.k.7.
Alessandra Baroni & Manfred Sellink, Stradanus, 1523-1605 : court artist of the Medici (Turnhout, 2012). LD.31.b.3160
Alessandra Baroni Vannucci, Jan Van der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano: flandrus pictor et inventor. (Milan, 1997). LB.31.b.19393
Manfred Sellink, Philips Galle (1537-1612): engraver and print publisher in Haarlem and Antwerp. ([Amsterdam?], 1997). YA. 1999.b.4195.
Johannes Stradanus, compiled by Marjolein Leesberg; edited by Huigen Leeflang. (Amsterdam, 2008). YF.2009.b.2177
Yvonne Bleyerveld, Albert J. Elen, Judith Niessen, Bosch to Bloemaert : early Netherlandish drawings in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Paris, [2014]). YF.2014.b.1669.
15 June 2015
Pasolini and St Paul
Roger Fry, the Bloomsbury art critic, thought that Caravaggio would make a superb “cinema impresario”. With his dramatic use of light and dark, the Italian painter pretty well invented cinematic lighting. His great altarpiece of 1601, The Conversion of St Paul, glowed with such a photographic sharpness that contemporaries suspected some trick.In a revolutionary re-telling of the scriptures, Paul lies prone beneath his horse on a dirt road to Damascus, his arms outstretched in proto-filmic shafts of light. There are no heavenly visions in Caravaggio, only humans on the long, grubby pilgrimage of life.
Caravaggio ‘The Conversion on the Way to Damascus’, 1600-01. Rome, Santa Maria del Popolo (image from Wikimedia Commons)
Much has been made of Caravaggio’s influence on the fierce pauperist Catholicism of Pier Paolo Pasolini. At the end of his film Mamma Roma (1962), staring Anna Magnani, the working-class hero lies dying on a prison bed like a sanctified Jesus, a stark image that also refers to Mantegna’s Dead Christ. The implied blasphemy of Caravaggio’s low-life Christs and Virgin Marys thrilled the iconoclast in the Italian film-maker, whose miserable death was somehow foretold in his own work.
On the morning of 2 November 1975, in slumlands outside Rome, Pasolini was found beaten beyond recognition and run over by his Alfa Romeo Giulia. A 17-year-old rent boy was charged with the killing – a homosexual tryst gone murderously wrong. Or was Pasolini the victim of a political hit? His presumed killer turned out to be affiliated to Italy’s neo-fascist party; the verdict is still open. Pasolini was 53.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, from La Rabbia. (Photograph by Mario Dondero, ©1963. With the kind assistance of the Ccentro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini di Casarsa delle Delizie, Pordenone)
Saint Paul, published posthumously in 1977 and presented for the first time in English in 2014 (translated by Elizabeth A. Castelli, British Library. YC.2015.a.592), is Pasolini’s screenplay for the life of the apostle Paul. Drafted in 1966 and re-written subsequently, it was intended to form a sequel to his film The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), shot in the lunar landscape of Italy’s remote Basilicata region. The screenplay, with its New Testament voiceover, typically mingles an intellectual Leftism with a Franciscan Catholicism: blessed are the poor, for they are exempt from the unholy Trinity of materialism, money and property. The film was never made for lack of funds.
Pasolini’s solidarity with the Italian poor was at heart romantic. La Ricotta, his 35-minute episode in the collaborative movie RoGoPag (1963), features Orson Welles as an American director shooting a film in Rome about the Passion of Christ. Stracci (“Rags”), the sub-proletarian actor who plays the part of the good thief, dies on set from a case of real-life starvation. For all its manifest compassion, the film led to a suspended prison sentence for Pasolini on blasphemy charges. Over a tableau vivant inspired by Rosso Fiorentino’s painting of the Deposition Welles cries out sacrilegiously: “Get those crucified bastards out of here!”
The deposition tableau from Pasolini’s La Ricotta (left) and Rosso Fiorentino’s painting (right).
Like La Ricotta, Saint Paul champions those who have been disinherited by capitalism and the “scourge of money”. The consumerist “miracle” of 1960s Italy had undermined the semi-rural peasant values of l’Italietta (Italy’s little homelands), Pasolini believed. In his retelling of the Bible, St Paul stands as a bulwark against the “corruption” brought to Italy by the trappings of American-style consumerism.
Nevertheless, as a Pharisee and former persecutor of Christianity, Paul was an ambivalent figure for Pasolini. After his conversion Paul took his mission round the world and became the founding father of the Christian Church in Rome with its hierarchy of prelates and pontiffs. In some measure, then, Paul lay behind the Catholic church that Pasolini had come to know in 1960s Rome, with its Mafia-infiltrated Christian Democrat Party and pursuit of power and political favours. In the screenplay, Paul is by turns arrogant and slyly watchful of his mission.
The saint’s story is updated, cleverly, to the 20th century. Cohorts of SS and Vichy French military collaborationists stand in for the Pharisees of the first-century Mediterranean. With a fanatic’s heart, Paul oversees the killing and mass deportation of Christians. The action then fast-forwards to 1960s New York, where the post-Damascus Paul is preaching to Greenwich Village “beats”, “hippies”, “blacks” and other outcasts from conformist America. His attempts to overturn capitalist values in Lyndon Johnson-era America are met with hostility by FBI operatives and White House flunkies. In the end he is murdered on the same hotel balcony where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968. Pasolini’s approximation of the apostle of black liberation to the apostle of Orthodox Christianity just about works.
Though fascinating, Saint Paul is not the “literary work of the first magnitude” that the French philosopher Alain Badiou would have in his foreword to the screenplay. (Rather, it reads like a preliminary sketch for something to be coloured in later.) Inevitably one scans the screenplay for clues to Pasolini’s murder. The novelist Italo Calvino believed that Pasolini was killed from a “D’Annunzian” hankering after redemption through violence. The scene of the film-maker’s murder, the shanty town of Idroscalo near Fiumicino airport, presents a typically Pasolinian pasticcio of the poetic and the squalid: shacks lie scattered across a filthy, blackened beach and in the distance rise the tenement slums of Nuova Ostia. At best, Pasolini’s was a sleazy kind of martyrdom; at worst, it was a bludgeoning out of tabloid crime-sheet.
Ian Thomson, University of East Anglia
References
Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mamma Roma. (Milan, 1962) X24/8626.
Pier Paolo Pasolini Per il cinema. (Milan, 2001). YA.2002.a.5985.
Ian Thomson will deliver the Italian Studies Library Group Annual Lecture ‘Pasolini and Rome’ at the British Library on 29 June 2015.
24 May 2015
The War Poet who wasn’t: Simon Gregorčič and the Soča Front
May 24th marks the centenary of Italy’s entry into the Great War. In previous blog entries related to this event, I have focussed on the Isonzo/Soča Front, which bore the brunt of the first Italian military operations. For today’s entry, I return there again, to write about a character who played a significant role in that action, but who had died almost a decade before war broke out.
Portrait of Simon Gregorčič from Anton Burgar, Simon Gregorčič: življenjepis (Ljubljana, 1907) X.989/6888.
Simon Gregorčič is one of Slovenia’s best-loved poets, and a significant figure in the 19th-century struggle for national rights. He was born in 1844 in the village of Vrsno, nestling beneath Mount Krn very close to the then Austro-Italian border, and the local landscape and lifestyle imprinted itself profoundly on his work. His family were peasant farmers who raised sheep in the pastures of the Soča valley, but young Simon had been born at a time of fast-rising literacy. He went to the grammar school in the regional capital Görz/Gorica (now Gorizia, in Italy), and then studied to become a priest; yet, apart from a brief period at the University of Vienna, he never really went far from his beloved Valley.
He worked as a chaplain in Kobarid, not far from his birthplace, where he had a formative love affair with a young teacher and promoted the cultural life of the little town. During subsequent appointments, Gregorčič began to publish poetry, each of his four books called “Poezije”, with its number. For these, which he promoted in public readings, he became a local celebrity in his own lifetime. His style was profoundly musical, full of feeling and even sensuality – for this Catholic priest had quite a number of intense relationships with women. He wrote about social injustice, Slovene rights, the landscape that surrounded him. Among his best-known poems – and one of the few which have been translated into English - was ‘Ash Wednesday Eve’, in which he warned the rich and proud among his congregation of their mortality while inviting the poor and dispossessed, including his relatives, to take their place in the Church and celebrate “Resurrection morn.” Its theme may sound gloomy and didactic, but the poem is so beautifully written that it evokes the twilight falling over his native Valley, its little churches lit up amid the dark peaks, spilling smells of incense into the night air as the people hurry in from near and far.
Gregorčič’s most famous poem of all is ‘Soči’ – ‘To the Soča’- describing the river’s progress from its mountain source to the plains of Trieste. At the beginning the turquoise water (it really is!) is fast and vigorous, “like the walk of the highland girls”, and its refrain runs, “You are splendid, daughter of the heights!” (“Krasnà si, hči planin!”). But when the river reaches the exposed plain it grows sluggish, sensing its vulnerability. Gregorčič foresaw a day when it would be filled with blood, surrounded by a “hail of lead”, and would need to burst its own banks to “draw the foreigners ravenous for lands to the bottom of your foaming waves.”
Postcard, reproduced in Mihael Glavan, Simon Gregorčič na Soški fronti (Nova Gorica, 2012) YF.2014.a.12826
Simon Gregorčič suffered lifelong ill-health (probably tuberculosis) and died in Gorizia in 1906. His funeral procession from the city to his grave in the village Smast was a huge public event. Nine years later, Gorizia, along with Trieste and the whole Soča Valley, would be among Italy’s chief targets in its attack on the Austrian Empire. Simon Gregorčič was summoned from the grave to spur on the Slovene troops in defence of their homeland: he was shown on postcards greeting the Emperors Franz Joseph or Karl when they visited the battle-torn region, or looking protectively down upon the river with the military commanders Archduke Eugen or Svetozar Boroević von Bojna alongside him in the sky (pictures above). Sadly prophetic, the words of ‘Soči’ featured widely, particularly the verse urging the river to drown the foreign invader.
Funeral of Simon Gregorčič un 1906 (From Wikimedia Commons)
Austria’s one major victory in the awful stalemate was 1917’s infamous Caporetto (the Italian name for Kobarid). The town which lay so close to the poet’s heart was symbolically the site of a total rout of the Italian invaders. A bust of his friend, the composer Hraboslav Volarić, symbolically watched from a corner of the square.
They would, however, return victorious a year later, and Kobarid stayed under Italian rule until 1945. Volarić’s bust, along with other symbols of Slovene culture, was badly damaged by fascists, but in 1945 the town became part of Yugoslavia. The bust was replaced, and a full-length statue to Gregorčič erected in 1959 on the opposite side of the main square.
Naturally, Simon Gregorčič’s birthplace is now a tourist site, and hikers can follow his route and inspiration through the villages and meadows around.
Janet Ashton, WEL Cataloguing Team Manager
With particular thanks to Jože Šerbec of the Kobarid Museum.
Bibliography:
Mihail Glavan. Simon Gregorčič na Soški fronti. (Nova Gorica , 2012). YF.2014.a.12826
Simon Gregorčič. Poezije. (Ljubljana, 1885-1908). 11530.a.26
W.A. Morison (translator). “Ash Wednesday Eve”, in The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 23, No. 62 (Jan., 1945), pp. 23-25, Ac.2669.e. (also available online via JSTOR).
Translation of Soči by an unknown author at http://spinnet.eu/wiki-anthology/index.php/Soca_River
20 April 2015
Educating Italians in 19th-century London
The recently acquired journal Il Pellegrino: giornale istruttivo, morale e piacevole ad uso della Scuola Italiana Gratuita di Greville Street, Hatton Garden, represents a remarkable and unique addition to the British Library’s Italian collections. Launched on 4 June 1842 with a clear pedagogical intent, the journal was an initiative of the Italian exile Giuseppe Mazzini. It became the official publication of the Free Italian School set up by Mazzini in the previous year in the heart of London’s Little Italy.
The first issue of Il Pellegrino, London, 4 June 1842. British Library RB.23.b.7515.
Mazzini first arrived in London on 12 January 1837. To the Italian patriot, England offered the opportunity to leave behind a life spent in hiding and on the run, whilst still remaining actively involved in revolutionary and conspiratorial activities. Although he died in Pisa, Mazzini spent most of his adult life in London, moving from one cheap boarding house to another. In England he acquired several eminent admirers who appreciated his moral principles and unfaltering dedication to the cause of Italian unity. Dickens, George Meredith and Swinburne openly declared their esteem. Mazzini became a personal acquaintance of the Carlyles and was welcomed as a honoured guest by John Stuart Mill.
Giuseppe Mazzini, portrait from vol. XVI of Scritti editi ed inediti di Giuseppe Mazzini (Imola, 1913). 012226.d.1.
Mazzini first mentioned his idea of setting up a school for the many illiterate Italian immigrants in London in a letter to his mother, dated 3 September 1841. The school would be free and open to “workers, young organ-grinders, those selling plaster figurines, etc.” The daily classes would be held in the evening to encourage attendance. Subjects taught included Italian grammar, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, mechanics and, at the students’ request, English, with general lectures on moral principles or Italian history every Sunday. Students would be provided with all necessary materials, including paper and ink.
Mazzini at first remained prudently in the shadows to avoid any possible association between the School and the revolutionary political organisation of which he was the leader. The teachers were unpaid volunteers. Among them were such prominent figures as Antonio Gallega, Carlo Pepoli, Gabriele Rossetti, and Joseph and George Toynbee. The famous American writer and journalist Margaret Fuller addressed the students on more than one occasion. Mazzini himself did a share of teaching, primarily history and geography, which he considered vital in cementing and reinforcing the students’ feeling of being Italian.
Mazzini teaching at the Free Italian School, image from Jessie White Mario, Della vita di Giuseppe Mazzini. (Milan, 1886) 10630.i.5.
The popularity and success of the school surpassed all expectations. 51 students enrolled on the first evening, rising to 65 on the second. Mazzini was struck by this enthusiasm; he acknowledged that for “[these] poor souls [who] work or carry street-organs about all day … it cost a lot to devote two hours to studying”, adding that “if they come of their own will, this shows their typically good Italian character”. The number of students increased to 230 in the following year, including a few female pupils. Following the example of the Free Italian School, similar institutes were established by Italian exiles in Boston, New York and Montevideo.
The School in London, however, had many opponents and detractors too. Antonio Panizzi expressed his disapproval and grave concern. Thomas Carlyle cautioned his wife not to get involved with what he called “a nest of young conspirators”. Many saw the School and the courses it provided as an excuse to teach children the ‘four Rs’: reading,’riting,’rithmetic, and revolution. Even stronger opposition came, as Mazzini had foreseen, from the students’ employers, the Piedmontese authorities in London and the Catholic Church. In Mazzini’s mind, however, the School never had a political agenda. Its primary purpose was to educate and ameliorate the conditions of Italian immigrants in London.
Edited and published by Luigi Bucalossi at 5 Greville Street, Hatton Garden, Il Pellegrino (‘The Pilgrim’) was printed by H. Court of 14 Brooke Street, in Holborn, and appeared every Saturday. The price was set at ‘three half pennies’, but the journal was distributed free of charge to pupils attending the school. Each issue consisted of four pages, printed in double columns; the pagination was continuous from issue to issue. The journal survived for just over a year, with the last issue, no. 52, published on 17 June 1843.
Issue 24 of Il Pellegrino (10 November 1842)
The content of Il Pellegrino – the title refers both to the journey of learning and to the exiled condition of many Italian émigrés – is inspired by pedagogical motives. Various subjects are covered, including scientific ones, but the emphasis is on Italian history and literature. The paucity of details relating to the journal’s administration makes it difficult to establish how many copies were printed of each issue and how widely they were distributed. It is, however, probable that just enough copies were printed to cover the number of students in the school. This would explain the extreme rarity of the British Library’s copy, so far the only one known to have survived.
Il Pellegrino and the other journals that Mazzini published in London, the Italian School, and the Union of Italian Working Men (which he set up in 1840), were all part of a single moral, educational and philanthropic project. Though not a systematic thinker, Mazzini, was a brilliant and acute interpreter of his times and of the political passions which eventually led to a unified Italy, although as a monarchy rather than the republic he had fought for. He saw education for the lower classes as an inalienable right and a way – perhaps the only way – to achieve emancipation and acquire full consciousness of belonging to a spiritual community, transcending geographical borders – a Nation.
The discovery of this apparently unique run of Il Pellegrino casts additional light on Mazzini’s ideas about schooling and education for the ‘prezioso elemento’ (‘precious element’), as he described the Italian working classes, who were to be the cornerstone of a future nation. Now available for consultation at the British Library, it should prove of singular importance to scholars and historians and to anyone interested in Victorian newspapers and foreign-language or foreign-edited journalism in London.
Andrea Del Cornò, The London Library
Further reading
Andrea Del Cornò, ‘Un ritrovato giornale mazziniano: “Il Pellegrino”’, in Le fusa del gatto: libri, librai e molto altro (Torrita di Siena, 2013)
Franco Della Peruta, Il giornalismo italiano del Risorgimento (Milan, 2011) YF.2011.a.12906
Michele Finelli, Il prezioso elemento: Giuseppe Mazzini e gli emigrati italiani nell’esperienza della Scuola italiana di Londra (Verrucchio, 1999) YA.2000.a.10829
Denis Mack Smith , Mazzini (New Haven, 1994) YC.1994.b.4150
Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester, 1988) YC.1988.b.8035
Margaret Campbell Walker Wicks, The Italian Exiles in London, 1816-1848 (Manchester, 1937) Ac.2671/35.
The blue plaque commemorating Mazzini at 183 Gower Street, London
12 January 2015
Collecting the Renaissance: Aldus Manutius and his legacy
2015 is the 500th anniversary of the death of Aldo Manuzio (or Aldus Manutius in the equally familiar Latinised form which he himself used), one of the most important figures in the history of printing and publishing. When he was active, these trades were still in their infancy (the new technology of printing with moveable type had spread to Italy by the 1460s, within two decades of its first appearance in Germany) and Aldus did much to shape their development not only in Venice, where he set up his publishing house, but across the continent more generally.
Aldo Manuzio / Aldus Manutius, from Antoine Augustin Renouard, Annales de l'imprimerie des Alde (Paris, 1834). British Library 11917.f.34.
In what promises to be a crowded schedule of exhibitions, conferences and other events taking place all over the world to mark the occasion (see the Manutius Network 2015), the British Library has entered the field early with a small display drawing on its incomparable collections of Aldine editions in the Ritblat Gallery: Collecting the Renaissance: the Aldine Press 1494-1598. The display is open to the public until Sunday 25 January.
What makes Aldus so lastingly significant in the annals of printing and publishing in Italy and beyond? He started his career as a typical Renaissance humanist, passionately dedicated, like so many in 15th-century Italy, to the study and recovery of the classical tradition – in Aldus’s case especially Greek – and, as a teacher, with its transmission. It is possible that he first moved in the late 1480s or early 1490s to Venice, the home of many Greek scholars in exile after the fall of Constantinople, in order to pursue the study of the language more intensively. His interest in publishing was sparked off there, in the city which was already – and would remain for the best part of the 16th century – the hub of the European booktrade, and grew directly out of his scholarly interests, as part of a wider cultural project to disseminate books in Greek and promote the study of major authors such as Aristotle. His first edition, published in 1494 and included in the display, was the Erotemata, a Greek grammar by Constantine Lascaris.
Aldus maintained his scholarly interests and his standing as a scholar: his printing house became a celebrated meeting point for learned men from all over Europe, some of whom contributed directly to the firm’s editions, and his last book published in the year of his death 1515, also in the display, was his own Greek grammar on which he had been working all his life. But printing in Greek was not for the faint-hearted (or impractical); it presented significant technical and editorial challenges which Aldus seems to have relished and it is his natural flair for all the aspects of the profession which was the foundation of his enduring success. One of the most striking aspects of his activity is his appetite for innovation and experiment with books as material artefacts, with formats, typefaces and page design. Many of these innovations – for example, the pocket-sized and enormously successful series of Latin and Italian classics he began to produce round the turn of the century, the quintessential ‘Aldine book’ – proved to be turning-points which shaped the subsequent development of book production and of the book trade all over Europe.
Petrarch, Le cose volgari (Venice, 1501) G.10714.
Dante Alighieri, Le terze rime (Venice, 1502) 1071.f.3.
The British Library display includes copies of some of the most celebrated editions produced by Aldus, as well as a few books published by his descendants – his son Paolo and grandson Aldus junior – who carried on the firm after his death, with only intermittent success; while sharing his scholarly interests, they lacked his business flair and acumen.
The celebrated and enigmatic Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 could not of course be omitted: it is perhaps the iconic Aldine edition, despite its being in almost every way an unclassifiable one-off and certainly uncharacteristic of his overall production (most famously for being copiously illustrated with elegant and densely allusive woodcuts). But the Hypnerotomachia is shown here for its ornate sixteenth-century binding, indicating how much its French owner, Thomas Mahieu (Maiolus), prized it, just as the small-format editions of Italian and classical texts are exemplified by copies – of Martial, Virgil and Petrarch – personalised by their purchasers with richly illuminated title-pages. These features show the parallel focus of this small display – on Aldus and his dynasty but also on his collectors, both in Aldus’s time and much later, whose bibliophilic passion for his editions did so much to preserve his fame. It is their libraries, dispersed over the centuries, which have gone to enrich the Aldine resources of the UK’s national library and to make them into the comprehensive, various and multiple collection the current display allows us to glimpse.
Thomas Mahieu's binding (top) and a typical page-opening (above) from Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice,1499) C.24.c.19.
The display has been curated jointly with the Warburg Institute in the University of London, which will be hosting a one-day colloquium in February on the similar theme of Aldus and his cultural legacy seen from the perspective of bibliophilia and its connections with the antiquarian book trade. It is hoped that a permanent record of the display, with images, will be included in one of the 2015 issues of the Bibliographical Society’s journal The Library.
Stephen Parkin, Curator Italian Studies
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