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Some five hundred years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble
origin, created works of unearthly beauty. A star of Florence’s
art world, he was commissioned by a member of the city’s powerful
Medici family to execute a near-impossible project: to illustrate
all one hundred cantos of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, the
ultimate visual homage to that “divine” poet. This sparked a
gripping encounter between poet and artist, between the religious
and the secular, between the earthly and the evanescent, recorded
in exquisite drawings by Botticelli that now enchant audiences
worldwide. Yet after a lifetime of creating masterpieces including
Primavera and The Birth of Venus, Botticelli declined into poverty
and obscurity. His Dante project remained unfinished. Then the
drawings vanished for over four hundred years. The once famous
Botticelli himself was forgotten. The nineteenth-century
rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars and
art lovers to their knees: this work embodied everything the
Renaissance had come to mean. From Botticelli’s metaphorical rise
from the dead in Victorian England to the emergence of eagle-eyed
connoisseurs like Bernard Berenson and Herbert Horne in the early
twentieth century, and even the rescue of precious art during the
Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the
posthumous story of Botticelli’s Dante drawings is, if anything,
even more dramatic than their creation. A combination of artistic
detective story and rich intellectual history, shows not only how
the Renaissance came to life, but also how Botticelli's art helped
bring it about—and, most important, why we need the Renaissance
and all that it stands for today.
The child of Italian immigrants and an award-winning scholar of
Italian literature, Joseph Luzzi straddles these two perspectives
in My Two Italies to link his family's dramatic story to Italy's
north-south divide, its quest for a unifying language, and its
passion for art, food, and family. From his Calabrian father's time
as a military internee in Nazi Germany - where he had a love affair
with a local Bavarian woman - to his adventures amid the
Renaissance splendour of Florence, Luzzi creates a deeply personal
portrait of Italy that leaps past facile cliches about Mafia
madness and Tuscan sun therapy. He delves instead into why Italian
Americans have such a complicated relationship with the "old
country," and how Italy produces some of the world's most
astonishing art while suffering from corruption, political
fragmentation, and an enfeebled civil society. With topics ranging
from the pervasive force of Dante's poetry to the meteoric rise of
Silvio Berlusconi, Luzzi presents the Italians in all their glory
and squalor, relating the problems that plague Italy today to the
country's ancient roots. He shares how his "two Italies" - the
earthy southern Italian world of his immigrant childhood and the
refined northern Italian realm of his professional life - join and
clash in unexpected ways that continue to enchant the many millions
who are either connected to Italy by ancestry or bound to it by
love.
A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with
fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can
contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch
back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and
literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources
and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and
modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with
close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto
Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo
Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how
Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the
nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the
literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in
cinematic expression-what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry."
While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film-its link with
technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic
virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art-have reshaped
centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is
specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian
cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the
art film recognizably "Italian"?
A story of love and grief. 'I became a widower and a father on the
same day' says Joseph Luzzi. His book tells how Dante's 'The Divine
Comedy' helped him to endure his grief, raise their infant
daughter, and rediscover love. On a cold November morning, Joseph
Luzzi, a Dante professor, found himself racing to hospital - his
wife, eight-and-a-half months pregnant, had been in a horrible car
accident. In one terrible instant, Luzzi became both a widower and
a first-time father. Adrift and grieving, Luzzi found himself
sharing Dante's dark wood with an intimacy that years of reading
had never shown him: the words became a wise companion through the
Inferno of his grief, his healing, and ultimately his rediscovered
love.
A Cinema of Poetry brings Italian film studies into dialogue with
fields outside its usual purview by showing how films can
contribute to our understanding of aesthetic questions that stretch
back to Homer. Joseph Luzzi considers the relation between film and
literature, especially the cinematic adaptation of literary sources
and, more generally, the fields of rhetoric, media studies, and
modern Italian culture. The book balances theoretical inquiry with
close readings of films by the masters of Italian cinema: Roberto
Rossellini, Vittorio De Sica, Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo
Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bernardo
Bertolucci, and others. Luzzi's study is the first to show how
Italian filmmakers address such crucial aesthetic issues as the
nature of the chorus, the relation between symbol and allegory, the
literary prehistory of montage, and the place of poetry in
cinematic expression-what Pasolini called the "cinema of poetry."
While Luzzi establishes how certain qualities of film-its link with
technological processes, capacity for mass distribution, synthetic
virtues (and vices) as the so-called total art-have reshaped
centuries-long debates, A Cinema of Poetry also explores what is
specific to the Italian art film and, more broadly, Italian
cinematic history. In other words, what makes this version of the
art film recognizably "Italian"?
Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin,
created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of
Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by
a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to
illustrate all 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s
greatest poet, Dante Alighieri. A powerful encounter between poet
and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these
drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never
finished. Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity, and his
illustrations went missing for 400 years. The nineteenth-century
rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars to
their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come
to mean. Today, Botticelli’s Primavera adorns household objects
of every kind. This book is essential to explain not only how and
why this artist became iconic, but why we need still need his
work—and the spirit of the Renaissance—today. A New Yorker Best
Book of 2022
In this comprehensive guide, some of the world's leading scholars
consider the issues, films, and filmmakers that have given Italian
cinema its enduring appeal. Readers will explore the work of such
directors as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Roberto
Rossellini as well as a host of subjects including the Italian
silent screen, the political influence of Fascism on the movies,
lesser known genres such as the giallo (horror film) and Spaghetti
Western, and the role of women in the Italian film industry.
Italian Cinema from the Silent Screen to the Digital Image explores
recent developments in cinema studies such as digital performance,
the role of media and the Internet, neuroscience in film criticism,
and the increased role that immigrants are playing in the nation's
cinema.
In this groundbreaking study, unique in English, Joseph Luzzi
considers Italian Romanticism and the modern myth of Italy. Ranging
across European and international borders, he examines the
metaphors, facts, and fictions about Italy that were born in the
Romantic age and continue to haunt the global literary imagination.
The themes of the book include the emergence of Italy as the
"world's university" (Goethe) and "mother of arts" (Byron), the
influence of Dante's "Commedia" on Romantic autobiography, and the
representation of the Italian body politic as a woman at home and
abroad. Luzzi also provides a critical reevaluation of the three
crowns of Italian Romantic letters--Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi,
and Alessandro Manzoni--profoundly influential writers largely
undiscovered in Anglo-American criticism. Reaching out to academic
and general readers alike, the book offers fresh insights into the
influence of Italian literary, cultural, and intellectual
traditions on the foreign imagination from the Romantic age to the
present.
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