The gnoseological reflection of Giordano Bruno in De gli eroici furori (1585) is widely shaped by the use of expressive structures and images of the poetry which leads back to Petrarch and to the ...current referring to him. According to this hypothesis, the elements which explain this choice chiefly consist in structural analogies between the phenomenology of love as outlined in Petrarchan poetry and Bruno's conception of the relationship that connects a knowing subject and a known object (the infinite One). Even though Bruno in the end - against his intentions - highlighted exactly a certain philosophical value in Petrarch's lyrical poetry, he was not willing to recognize himself in any bond with that tradition. His radical rejection of Petrarch and those imitating and parodying him - on which prefatory pages are centered - particularly shows a necessity to differentiate between the actual object of inquiry and the most widespread profane lyrical poetry of his century (as well as the tout court lyrical poetry). Even leaving aside author's polemical position in order to rather comprehend what is evident from the text itself, the possibility to consider Bruno as much Petrarchist as Antipetrarchist nevertheless continues to elude. The reason for this is that adaptation and philosophical resemantization of that lyrical code are in Bruno's case set in a singular way compared to the then widespread relation between imitatio, inventio, emulatio; more generally, they are set outside of literary communication: that code primarily enters his work in cognitive function.
After having reviewed the notions of imitation and translation based on the theoretical texts of Fray Luis, we propose a global table of all the poetic translations carried out by the Augustinian ...friar. Next, we focus on the analysis of a poetic translation from Italian, that of the song XXXII of Rimes by Giovanni della Casa (1558), which had not yet been studied. The result highlights the high quality of this translation, while showing the permeability of the theoretical boundaries between the notions of translation and imitation.
This article presents an account of lyrical descriptions of the motif of feminine beauty in Spanish and Croatian oral tradition, paying special attention to Petrarchist poems with the carpe diem ...motif. Feminine beauty, taken literally and symbolically as natural beauty that permeates our ecological niche, is treated here as having ecological power to explain the unexplainable (unsayable) in Nature and in Humankind. Thanks to its cultural and artistic manifestations, it stands in opposition to a purely scientific approach to Nature, taken as a Machine. The paper presents a comparison of symbols of beauty in oral and written Croatian and Spanish literature, paying special attention to the thematic level as well as the discursive and metadiscursive level. The thematic and discursive aspect of poetry is based on the theory of the “formulaic nature” of the literary phenomenon, proposed by Paul Zumthor. Some poems in both the oral and the written tradition adopt contemporary esthetic ideals, laying emphasis on the ideal of artificial (made-up) beauty. The presence of the motif of artificial beauty may be explained by the fact that oral and written literature underwent fruitful encounters and are inextricably intertwined. Examples from Croatian and Hispanic oral tradition are provided; specifically from the coastal region around Dubrovnik (Luka on the island of Šipan) and from the Castilian, Sephardic tradition of the ballad “La bella en misa”. The argumentation is accompanied by a general and more specific interpretation of Petrarchist poetry compared for the first time in the context of the two oral poetry traditions. Many examples from the Hispanic tradition as reflected in the ballad “La bella en misa” find its counterpart in a single example of poetic discourse of the famous epic song and ballad singer, Ms. Kate Murat from the Dubrovnik region. Similar dual structures in both the traditional and artistic natural description of feminine beauty are recognized, according to Paul Zumthor’s terminology. We highlight the formulaic nature of the description of feminine beauty in Petrarchist and in traditional poetry, which gave it a mythical status of representativeness, disregarding for the moment the individuality of each individual poet as well as the individual impact of the epic and ballad singer. It is obvious why the motif of feminine beauty has attracted the attention of “everyday life philosophers”, i.e. of traditional singers, who, in these cases, come from urban, bourgeois surroundings. The fragility of the world we live in, which is echoed in floral and mineral or climatic metaphors in traditional and in Petrarchist poetry, may have its origin in the interdependence of the Humankind and landscape and traditional poems, and warrants laying stress on the (multicultural) esthetic qualities of the analyzed poetic texts.
Benedetto Varchi's Due Lezzioni not only represent the high point of the debate on the paragone between painting and sculpture but also bring up the question of the comparison of painting and poetry. ...The present article investigates this topic in Varchi's sonnets, focusing on a rhetorically consistent series of poems addressed to the painter Agnolo Bronzino. In these texts, Varchi renovates the Petrarchan model of Rvf 77-78 by setting up a Neoplatonic dialectic between dentro as the domain of poetry and fuori as the domain of painting, thereby shifting the comparison from the field of their mimetic capacity to that of their glorifying and immortalizing function. The final suggestion is that Bronzino's renowned portrait of Laura Battiferri marks a turning point in the contemporary debate on the superiority of poetry or painting as well as in Varchi's opinion about it, opening the way to integration and collaboration between the two arts within the realm of the dentro.
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