Verba Picta. Text and image of the artistic and literary heritage of the second half of the twentieth century

Wednesday 18 May at 5.30pm

NOVECENTO PRESENTS 
Verba Picta. Text and image in the artistic and literary heritage of the second half of the twentieth century 

Intervened Mario Domenichelli, Federico Fastelli, Teresa Spignoli. In collaboration with the Department of Languages, Literature and Intercultural Studies of the University of Florence.

The first part of the title refers to the interactive relationship between images and words that characterizes in various ways the Western tradition, from illuminated codes to Alexandrian calligrams, up to the valuable editions with illustrations of artists that develop in modernity (art editions, picture books, artist books). The second part, on the other hand, circumscribes the area of investigation to a precise chronological arc, that is from 1950 to 2000, with specific reference to both the artistic and literary heritage, to underline the intersection between the two areas within a cultural context that is very varied and rich in exchanges between poets, critics, painters and musicians. Among the authors considered are the names of Quasimodo, Ungaretti, Montale, Luzi, Sinisgalli, De Libero, Zanzotto, Giudici, Sereni, Sanguineti, Pagliarani, Balestrini, whose work is studied in relation to the activities of artists such as Fontana, Dorazio, Baj, Novelli, Valentini, and many others; to these are added the protagonists of the verbovisiva experimentation, such as Pignotti, Marcucci, Caruso and Spatola.

The web site www.verbapicta.it – main outcome of the project – offers, in this sense, a large catalog of art editions, illustrated books and artist books made in collaboration with poets and painters, with images of the works, information on publishing houses and authors. The presentation will explain how to consult and access the computer directory, as well as the research tools on the site. 

Mario Domenichelli

has taught English, American, Italian and comparative literature in the universities of Urbino, Bologna, Cagliari, Mogadishu, Pisa, Middlebury College (VT), and Florence. He was president of the Association for the study of the theory and comparative history of literature, president of the University Language Centre in Florence, director of the Department of Modern Philology at the University of Cagliari, of the Department of Anglicism at the University of Pisa, of the Department of Modern Philology at the University of Florence. He has directed his research on modern and contemporary novel in England (Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Lowry, Golding, The Antiutopia, Joyce), theatre (The Shadow Limit on the Elizabethan Period) Renaissance poetry (Thomas Wyatt), and Modern poetry (T.S. Eliot, E. Pound). Among his most recent publications in a comparative key: Cavaliere e gentiluomo (2002), the Dizionario dei temi letterari (2007), conceived by him, directed, edited together with Remo Ceserani and Pino Fasano, Lo scriba e l’oblio, sulla scrittura della storia (2012). He is a member of the editorial board of “Moderna”, the journal of the theory of literature, to which he contributed essays on American neo-historicism, historical novel, educational novel, European literary canon; he edited papers dedicated to Auerbach, to literary theory in Europe, a Cultura/e; has published translations, introduced and annotated, of Shakespeare, Conrad, Galsworthy, Dickens, Kipling, Swift, Pope and the Scriblerians.

Teresa Spignoli

Currently Researcher at the Department of Languages, Literature and Intercultural Studies of the same University, he is Scientific Coordinator of the Verba Picta Research Project. Interrelation between text and image in the artistic and literary heritage of the second half of the twentieth century, funded by the MIUR within the program “Future in Research 2010”. She wrote letters, publishing the correspondence between Piero Bigongiari and Giuseppe Ungaretti («La certezza della poesia». Lettere 1942-1970, Polistampa 2008), The correspondence between Carlo Betocchi and Antonio Pizzuto (Lettere 1966-1971, Polistampa 2006)and – with F. Fastelli – the Bibliographic Repertoire raisonné (1999-2009). Correspondence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries («Moderna» 2011). He dedicated a monograph to the Literary Cafés in Florence (Polistampa 2009; II ed. 2011), and published a series of essays on the relationship between literature and the figurative arts (Giovanni Testori’s narrative between Baroque and Informal, in Le forme del romanzo e le letterature occidentali tra Sette e Novecento, ETS 2010; No Man’s Land: From Free-word Tables to Verbal-visual Poetry, in The History of Futurism. The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies, Lexington Books 2012). In this context the monograph Giuseppe Ungaretti is noteworthy. Poetry, music, painting (ETS 2014) and the curatorship with the introduction of the volume Poetry in image / The image in poetry. Group 70, Florence 1963-2013 (Campanotto 2014).

Federico Fastelli

Is a PhD in Languages and Cultures of the Mediterranean, and, since 1 July 2012, has been a Research Fellow at the Department of Languages, Literature and Intercultural Studies of the University of Florence. He was Visiting Researcher at Syracuse University and collaborates with the Florentine headquarters of Middlebury College, for which he holds a course in modern and contemporary Italian literature. His studies focused mainly on the Italian avant-gardes of the second twentieth century: he dedicated essays to the work of Luigi Malerba, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alberto Arbasino, Nanni Balestrini, Guido Morselli. He published the first monograph on the poetic work of Elio Pagliarani (Dall’avanguardia all’eresia. The poetic work of Elio Pagliarani, Florence, Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011). He has also written more theoretical and comparative essays dedicated to the theory of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde, to the theatre of Group 63, to the rhetoric of Visual Poetry, to the theoretical Bigongiari of literature. His interest in the events of the Italian experimental novel in relation to contemporary French experimentation are the basis of his second monograph, Il Nuovo Romanzo. Avant-garde fiction in the first phase of postmodernity (1953-1973), Florence, Florence University Press, 2013. With T. Spignoli, he edited the Repertoire of bibliographical correspondence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries («Moderna» XIII, n. 1). He was part of the Scientific Committee of the International Conference of Visual Poetry Studies. For the fifty years of the 70 Group, and, together with T. Spignoli, M. Corsi and M. C. Papini, he edited the Acts (La poesia in immagine/L’immagine in poesia, Udine, Campanotto, 2014). He has been a speaker at numerous National and International Conferences, and has collaborated as a reviewer with the magazines «Oblio», «Semicerchio», «Arabeschi», «Narrazioni».