Vespucci Conference

On 22-24 November the University of Florence will host a conference on Amerigo Vespucci. Interesting papers, programme below

The Sign of the Weeping Virgin

This is a very special post dedicated to a writer who is first a friend: Alana White. I “met” Alana virtually, she was the very first person to get in touch with me as soon as I started blogging on the Vespucci family a couple of years ago. We soon became “email friends” (can’t really say pen friends in this virtual age….) and started exchanging knowledge on the Vespucci and Renaissance Florence. I found out Alana was a short-story American novelist and that she was writing her first book with two Vespucci family members as main characters. That sounded so fascinating and I was thrilled when, a few months later, she announced that her book was going to get published…!

Here we go, The Sign of the Weeping Virgin is about to come out and I really c.a.n.n.o.t w.a.i.t to have it in my hands. What intrigues me most is the fact that, despite what one could imagine when thinking of the name “Vespucci”, her novel does not simply deal with Amerigo the explorer but also with his uncle Guido Antonio. Now, having studied the Vespucci for two years (can't believe two years are gone already!) I can assure you that nearly nobody knows who Guido Antonio is. Avid reader of Renaissance history, culture, and art books, Alana engaged with some serious research and I am curious to find out more about her work. If you want to know about Guido Antonio and follow him across the street of Florence with his nephew Amerigo do not miss out on this book. Oh yes, nearly forgot. They are investigating a fifteenth century crime,  Bring out the detective in you and get ready to solve this mystery…

Coming out in Winter 2012, it is possible to preorder a copy of The Sign of the Weeping Virgin through Amazon (here) If in the meantime you want to know more about Alana and her novels visit her website: http://www.alanawhite.com/the_sign_of_the_weeping_virgin_112597.htm

“If you have ever been to Florence or you are going to Florence, or you want to go to Florence, if you’ve ever whiled away an afternoon in company of Renaissance masters in an art museum - or if you just want a really good read filled with colour and intrigue a story peopled with characters who are at once exotic and humanly familiar in their universal lust, passions, fears, and ambitions, then this mystery, set in  Renaissance Italy, is for you. Through Alana White’s elegant prose and skillfully integrated research the 15^th century City of Flowers come to life” - Brenda Rickman Vantrease author of “The Illuminator” and “The Heretic’s Wife” 

Events - more to come!

Yet another book on Amerigo Vespucci and the Florentine explorers. Tantalizing title ...

Events, Events, Events!

So far 2012 has indeed been very much Vespucci-oriented (for my joy!). Many initiatives have been organized throughout Italy and, judging from what’s still to come, the Vespucci season has not finished yet.

For those of you who happen to be in Florence at the beginning of October (I know, short notice I am afraid...) do not miss out on the event organized by the Comitato Amerigo Vespucci, scheduled for Wednesday 3 October. In the church of Ognissanti at 4.00 pm attendants will have the opportunity to see a life-size copy of the Waldsemuller Map, displayed next to the Vespucci chapel. The presentation of the volume I segreti delle antiche carte geografiche by Claudio Piani and Diego Baratono will follow at 5.30 pm in the Libreria de’ Servi. The book will reveal the authors’ ideas on the Waldsemuller map and its relation with the frescoed lunette of the Vespucci chapel. Piani-Baratono already developed the hypothesis that the Waldsemuller Map might be derived from the cloak of the Virgin represented in the chapel’s lunette. According to the authors, in fact, the map has the same shape of the Virgin’s mantle. This theory is now further investigated in I segreti delle antiche carte geografiche where the authors sustain that the name America did not come from Amerigo but from Maria which would establish a link with the devotion the family showed towards the Virgin Mary in the fifteenth and sixteenth century (first contribution on the subject available online: http://www.mastromarcopugacioff.it/Articoli/Teofanie4.htm)

                                                  (Image from: www.vespucci2012.com)

For those of you who cannot make it to Florence there is still the chance to know more about Amerigo the explorer at the Italian Cultural Institute of Edinburgh on Thursday 15 November, 6.00 pm. Margherita Calderoni, an Italian journalist, historian and lecturer will take us through the life and travels of Amerigo Vespucci bringing the attention on Florence’s network dynamics that sealed the friendship between Amerigo, Leonardo da Vinci, Paolo Toscanelli and Lorenzo il Magnifico. Dealing with fifteenth century geographical discoveries, humanistic culture, and love-related gossips, the talk seems to have the right mix of ingredients to attract the curiosity of many. For more information on the event visit the Italian Cultural Institute website:

http://www.iicedimburgo.esteri.it/IIC_Edimburgo/webform/SchedaEvento.aspx?id=459&citta=Edimburgo

Enjoy!

Conference: New Directions in Renaissance Italy

I'll get the chance to publicize here on my blog an exciting upcoming event at The University of Edinburgh. I have been busy organizing this for the past six months with two other fabulous PhD students, Natalie Lussey and Jackie Spicer.

We are proud to announce that on 2 November the University of Edinburgh will host the interdisciplinary conference 'New Directions in Renaissance Italy'. Gathering postgraduate students and early career researchers from a wide range of disciplines, the event provides a forum to explore and discuss emerging areas of enquiry related to the Italian Renaissance. Please follow the link for information about programme, papers and registration http://edinburghnewdirection.wordpress.com/ 

Hope to see you all there!

Music and love: 2012 just like the Renaissance?

While investigating Renaissance marriages and wedding pieces, I came across studies on the connection between music, love and the erotic. This intersection, which can take various forms, has been widely explored by art historians and musicologists. Analyses have mainly taken into consideration the XVI rather than the XV century: while in the Quattrocento very few households had musical instruments listed among their possessions, by the mid sixteenth century the material presence of music in the home increased (Dennis 2010). Instruments were adorned with elaborate carved or inlaid decoration and kept in painted cases. Usual motifs involved naked bodies or mythological scenes with clear love-related references (Figure 1).  Explorations on secular vocal music has also revealed that explicit allusions to sexual practises where concealed in sung texts especially in genres such as the frottola or madrigal (Macy 1996).

In some works of the XV and XVI century, texts play on the syllables of the music scale: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si. By pulling these sounds together authors created erotic subtexts, embedded in the musical setting: “I should like you to sing a song/while you’re playing the viol for me/and that you would say fa ma la mi so la”. The text “hides” the sentence “fammel’a mi sola” which means “do it only to me” (Dennis 2010). Also Aretino, in his Ragionamenti, linked the musical scale to the erotic. Describing the culmination of an orgy he said “[..] listening to them you would have thought they were running the scales sol fa me re do” (Dennis 2010; Prizer 1991).

I happened to be in lovely Ferrara a couple of weeks ago.  While browsing through the open market in the main square (restaurant reservation at 1 pm, had a few minutes to kill!) I stopped in front a stall that sold T-shirts. They all featured quirky prints and some had this sentence written on the front: “Mi piacciono le ragazze che cantano si la do” (Figure 2). A literal translation would sound something like “I like girls that sing yes I give it”. I laughed. Now … The musical puns used by Aretino and others in the XVI century are still used today. Have things changed much between then and now??

PS. If you are in Edinburgh area don’t miss out the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments. The Renaissance pieces of the museum can be browsed online (some Italian examples too!)

REF

Dennis, Flora. 2010. “Unlocking the gates of chastity. Music and the erotic in the domestic sphere in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy”, Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy (Ashgate)

Macy, Laura. 1996. “Speaking of sex: metaphor and performance in the Italian madrigal”, The Journal of Musicology, 14: 1-34

Prizer, William. 1991. “Games of Venus: secular vocal music in the late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento”, The Journal of Musicology, 9: 3-56.

Weddings, aphrodisiacs and…..onions!

Piero di Cosimo’s Discovery of Honey has long been considered a marriage piece commissioned for the wedding of Giovanni Vespucci and Namiciana di Benedetto Nerli (c.1500). The presence of bees (wasps?) swirling around the hive on top of the tree was interpreted as a punning reference to the Vespucci family whose name has the same root of the modern Italian word vespa (wasp). Set in a rural landscape, the scene is populated by satyrs and fauns engaging in different activities. In the foreground Pan stares straight at the beholder holding up three onions. According to some, onions have all the rights to appear in a wedding painting due to their well-recognised aphrodisiac qualities (Geronimous 2006). Personally not aware of the onion-love association, I tried to investigate this curious aspect further.

Piero di Cosimo, The Discovery of Honey (Worcester Art Museum)

detail

Research has proven that onions - as well as garlic - were viewed as aphrodisiacs worldwide, from far China to the Mediterranean. Greeks identified onions as an erotic stimulant more than other aphrodisiac (Koerper and Kolls 1999) while in Rome it was often included in culinary recipe books. The writer Martial suggested to eat plenty of onions if “your wife is old and your member is exhausted” (for citations and other examples check the Wellness Blog). Love-related features seem to be embodied also in the round, golden object hold by Venus, goddess of love, in Bronzino’s Allegory (c.1545). Appearing like an apple, a closer looks reveal it might well be an onion. The artist’s interest in linking these two elements seems to be confirmed by the poem La Cipolla del Bronzino Pittore (On Bronzino’s Onion) where the effects of onions are compared to those of love (Cohen 2008).

Bronzino, Allegory (London, National Gallery)

As the aphrodisiac properties of onions were celebrated since ancient times, it comes with no surprise that Renaissance Florence - where classical culture was widely assimilated and reinterpreted - adopted the same attitude. Piero di Cosimo’s panel therefore present several elements that justify its nature as a wedding piece: onions; honey (again associated with sweetness and love); and the presence of Pan/the satyrs, symbols of physical love. Furthermore the tree trunk in the middle of the panel has been recently seen as the grotesque of a woman in labour (idea advanced in the Boston.com article “The Discovery of Honey byBacchus revisited”). Arguable point.  

Now…onion soup anyone? 

Beyond boundaries: translatability of cultures and visual arts in fifteenth century Florence

Most of us would agree with the description of European museums given by Mary Sheriff: sequential rooms dedicated to different national schools at different historical moments. We find the common chronological division Middle Ages/early Italian Renaissance/Baroque on one level while the Islamic, Chinese and Latin America arts located on a different floor - if not in an entirely different building (Sheriff 2010). This problematic aspect of display finds a parallel in the way the arts tend to be studied: great attention is paid to individual masters, national developments and local patronage.

Since the ‘50s cultural studies have been trying to overcome this strict classification by focusing on cultural transfer and cultural exchange. In 1949 Fernand Braudel discussed in his book Mediterranean the importance of "cultural frontiers" stressing the idea of us/them, the encountering of the other, and the symbolic boundaries that resist mapping. Later on cultural historians turned to the study of material culture – especially food, clothes, art – showing how these elements reveal cultural codes and identity (Burke 2004). The study of cultural transfer therefore moves towards a theory of cultural hybridity, sharpening awareness and sensitising people to the necessity of cultural variety (Roeck 2007. Farago 2010).

Europe is indeed rich in its cultural variety, consisting of countries different one from the other on many levels. Nevertheless Europe is also highly cosmopolitan due to its diverse countries linked through webs of political, economic, religious, and social ties (Belozerskaya 2002). Cultural encounters between these distinct identities generated cultural translation/cultural exchange that encompassed several domains from language and religion to cuisine, fashion and the arts (Burke 2004). In the past few years numerous studies have been devoted to the interaction and exchange between European countries and, in art history, this led to a reconsideration of the Renaissance in the light of the interaction occurred between Italy and – to mention some – the Netherlands, Russia, the Balkan and Asia (see contributes in Roodenburg 2007). Transfer and globalism have also constituted the topic of recent academic conferences world-wide such as Harvard’s Ornament as Portable Culture. Between globalism a locatism; Edinburgh’s From Influence to Translation: Art of the Global Middle Ages; and London forthcoming Fashioningthe Early Modern at the Victoria and Albert Museum. 

When exploring interaction between different entities it is necessary to take into account encounters on a larger scale such as those between Europe and the New World in the age of discovery. Scholarly output tried to elucidate and explore the dynamic processes that influenced European artist’s creativity and that, consequently, shaped the visual arts after 1492 (Sheriff 2010. Farago 2010). While it is easier to recognize mutual exchanges between Europe and Latin America (or Asia) from mid-sixteenth century onwards, exchange “practices” in late fifteenth century are still hazy. However some considerations can still be drawn regarding Florentine art.

Piero di Cosimo’s series of panels said to represent the “early history of man” (The Hunt; The Return from the Hunt; The Forest Fire; the stories of Vulcan) share common features, representing fights, wild men and primitive scenes (Figure 1). Speculations have been made on whether a possible connection could be established between these panels and the geographical discoveries undertook in the fifteenth century by navigators such as Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci and Paolo Toscanelli (Brown 2010; Geronimous 2006). Explorers’ travel accounts and letters (of which illustrated editions appeared, Figure 2) were in fact enriched with the descriptions of alien lands, savages and barbaric episodes. Could have these written text influenced the imagination of Florentine patrons and artists? Positive answer. Bellicose, primitive scenes, monstrous animals and mythical figures such as tritons, satyrs and centaurs can be found not only in Piero di Cosimo’s panels but also elsewhere in Florence: in the frieze decorating Scala’s urban villa in Borgo Pinti; in the painted architecture of Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles; and in Giuliano da Sangallo’s decorative frieze design for a fireplace executed for Giuliano Gondi; (Geronimous 2006. Meltzoff 1987).

Figure 1. Piero di Cosimo, A Hunting Scene (NY, Met)

Figure 2. Woodcut from A.Vespucci Mundus Novus (1505)

It seems therefore plausible to link the primitive (negative?) depictions that circulated in the last decade of the century to the fights and invasions related to the geographical discoveries.  The presence of these images however makes us wonder if, and to what extent, these representations could also be connected to the unbalancing changes Florence was experiencing locally at the time: the Medici exile; Savonarola’s apocalyptic preaching (Weinstein 1970); and the descent of Charles VIII. In the last decade of the century wild men, fauns and satyrs appeared in pageants across the city (Pieri 1988) while in ad outside Florence people started to fear what was defined as mostro (beyond Florence “disturbing” images and performances took place in Venice where later on, from 1500, representations depicted hell populated by devil-like presences. See Aikema 2001). The use of this word is recorded in connection to Charles VIII, seen more as a monster than a man (Niccoli 1990), and to the birth of baby-monsters (Bec 1988). When seen in the light of Florence’s historical circumstances, these examples may help to understand why the proliferation of savages and monster-like images found some fertile ground in the Tuscan city and, more generally, in Italy. Political events, apocalyptic prophecies, geographical discoveries and encounters with the Other contributed to shape Florentines’ imaginary world and the arts. Artists assimilated new ideas and transported them in re-adopted classical modes of expression (fauns, centaurs) embodied with new social meanings based in the life of the present (Dempsey 2012).

And more...

For those who happen to be in Florence, interesting conference. Don't miss out!

And so the celebration began…

This morning, in the sunniest day Florentines had in weeks, the celebration in honour of Amerigo Vespucci - and the Anno Vespucciano - officially kicked off. Made sure I had time for a quick breakfast before and while enjoying coffee & jam croissant I found an article about Amerigo Vespucci in one of the national newspapers. At 9.15 a service was celebrated in the church of Ognissanti. The small number of people that turned up (probably the only who managed to get up on time!) was slightly disappointing but contributed to create a very intimate atmosphere. Over the mass the navigator and his family were remembered several times especially in the priest’s sermon centred on ideas of fame, faith and dust (men like Amerigo, who left an imprint in the world’s history, became important thanks to their cleverness and their faith in God. It does not matter how famous one is during his life, we must remain humble and remember that we were dust, and dust we will be again).

After the service everybody (big crowd waiting outside the church) gathered on the square in front of Ognissanti for the speeches or Florence’s mayor, the president of the “Comitato Amerigo Vespucci a Casa Sua” and Sarah Morrison the US Consul General. The programme of Florence’s initiatives planned for 2012, designed to mark the relationships between Florence and the New World, was briefly explained (will post more about this!). The audience comprised Florence’s citizens, representatives of the town hall and various associations, and members the Marines dressed head-to-toe. It was a feast of music, words, laughs and coloured flags. 

The morning ended in the courtyard of the ex-Vespucci hospital, the Ospedale San Giovanni di Dio, where official pictures were taken and a lot of hands shaking was done. A horde of people kept coming and going, welcomed in the building by three gorgeous girls dressed up as fifteenth century ladies (clearly inspired by images of Simonetta Vespucci and, possibly, Botticelli’s three Graces. But that is just my personal bet). The Visconti, a Florence-based company famous for the production of writing tools, presented their new limited edition pen bearing a geographic pattern inspired by the Waldsemuller Map. Managed to get a free (well, hopefully free) Visconti metal bookmark and also fell in love with the most amazing-looking tie I ever seen. This friendly American man, who I started chatting to, was wearing a white silk(ish) tie filled in with blue question marks and a red sentence at the bottom “Who named America?”. A bit cheesy someone might argue but definitely fun and spot on. Loved it and secretly wanted it.

2012, Florence and the Vespucci celebration

Last year Florence’s mayor Matteo Renzi announced that 2012 was going be the year dedicated to the 500 years of the death of Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine explorer who, in the fifteenth century, sailed the Atlantic and reached the coasts of America that was named after him.

The city has an interesting calendar of activities lined up aiming at exploring the strong links Florence-New Continent from the fifteenth century up to nowadays. One of the forthcoming event is the exhibition “Americani a Firenze. Sargent e gli impressionisti del Nuovo Mondo” (Americans in Florence. Sargent and the impressionists of the New World) scheduled from March 3^rd to July 15^th at Palazzo Strozzi.

For those who happen to be in Florence next week a couple of appointments are worth mentioning. On Monday 20^th the “Comitato Amerigo Vespucci a Casa Sua” will held a conference on the Tuscans navigators – specific focus on Amerigo Vespucci - at Villa il Ventaglio (details below). The “Comitato” is active in Florence and surroundings to promote the study and research on Amerigo’s life and travels. Interesting articles have recently appeared in the group’s publications “Quaderni Vespucciani. I Navigatori Toscani” (the number 4 has just been issued) that can be found at the Libreria de’Servi (via de’Servi, Florence)

Celebration will continue on Wednesday 22^nd in Ognissanti, the original “hub” of the Vespucci family since the thirteenth century, where the annual speeches/music band performance will be carried out in honour of Amerigo (details below)

Enjoy!