Italian Bookshelf (download as PDF) - Ibiblio

458 “Italian Bookshelf.” Annali d’italianistica 25 (2007)
The famous Laocoön statue, by contrast, offered generations of artists a
paradigmatic model for a muscular, nude male in agony, struggling either against
serpents or against the ropes that restrain him. It is clear that Titian was influenced by this
model in painting the St. Sebastian of his Resurrection altarpiece (1522). Virgil once
opined that Laocoön was screaming; later, Christian writers describe him as groaning, or
making a stoically faint sound. The challenge that artists faced when applying this model
to Christian martyrs, or to the flagellation of Christ, for example, was the question of how
much their Christian subjects were presumed to be in control. Traditionally St. Sebastian
was represented as virtually unaware of the arrows penetrating his body, so focused was
he on a beatific vision. Indeed, religious decorum and the high style appropriate to such
subjects would have encouraged an emotionally detached treatment.
Oddly enough, the genre known as violent art was being rediscovered in the
Renaissance; Titian used it in his St. Peter Martyr Altarpiece, as well as in Cain and
Abel, the Sacrifice of Isaac, and David and Goliath. In contrast to Horace, Aristotle, we
recall, favored showing violent acts onstage to arouse fear and pity. Clearly Titian drew
water from the Aristotelian well when he felt the need to picture violence. And lest
anyone question the intensity and breadth of Titian’s literary friends and influences,
D’Elia has provided a well researched and convincing “Catalogue of Writers,” all Italian
and all known to have had contact with the painter, that reads like a who’s who of literati
in early modern Italy: Ariosto, Bembo, Castiglione, Della Casa, Mutio, Nardi, Tasso, and
Vasari, to name a few of the better known ones (157-88).
Skipping ahead a century, we encounter a vastly different cultural and aesthetic
milieu reflected in the paintings of Poussin (1594-1665). Links between painting and
literature evidently only got stronger in the intervening decades. Unglaub makes the point
that this well educated French artist, having lived in Rome for most of his career, could
read Tasso in Italian with ease. The book’s principal thesis is that Tasso’s poetic
discourses (understood here as his “poetics”) were the primary literary and ideational
source for Poussin’s own theory of painting.
Most students of Italian are familiar with Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), but
perhaps not with his poetic treatises, Discorsi dell’arte poetica (1587) and Discorsi del
poema eroico (1595). The latter are solidly grounded in classicist Aristotelian poetics
rather than the alternative poetic of the romance, found in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso
(1532). Unglaub identifies in Poussin’s oeuvre at least eight “distinct compositions, as
paintings or highly evolved drawings, that feature subjects from the Gerusalemme
liberata — as many as any painter not specifically commissioned to produce a series after
the poem […]” (3). Like his contemporaries, Poussin focused his attention on the
“amorous interludes of Tasso’s epic” rather than the battle scenes. But he did so with
classicist imagery and a statuesque posing of his figures, often resorting (as Titian had
done before him) to an exuberant palette of colors.
Unglaub organizes his study of Poussin into seven chapters: (1) “‘Ut pictura
poetica’: Poussin and the Poetics of Tasso”; (2) “Poussin’s Novità”; (3) “Metaphorical
Reflections in Echo and Narcissus and Rinaldo and Armida”; (4) “The Critique of
Gerusalemme liberata and the Visual Arts”; (5) “Poussin, Marino, and Painting in the
Ovidian Age”; and (6) “Poussin, Raphael, and Tasso: The Poetics of Pictorial Narrative.”
His concluding chapter is “Poussin and the Gerusalemme liberata: Action into Episode,
History into Myth.”