Lavin, More Than Meets the Eye, Published

We are happy to announce the publication of Irving Lavin’s More than Meets the Eye, edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. In 2004, Irving Lavin gave the six lectures that make up this book. They were delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

This book’s subtitle, “Irony, Paradox, and Metaphor in the History of Art,” contains terms associated with rhetoric, oratory, and literature. Such terms ready the reader to meet ideas that lie beyond, under, over, and around the works to be considered. Lavin thus uncovers – within the artist’s intellectual and emotional tool box – meanings not usually associated with static and stable visual images, namely “figures of speech” set forth in visual form. The aim of this book is to unveil this inner life, the mysterious “more” offered by the visual artist. 

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has now assembled, edited, and updated these lectures, their notes and bibliography to present a comprehensive collection of richly illustrated essays. This follows upon her previous edition of Irving Lavin’s Slade Lectures at Oxford, published by Italica Press in 2020 as The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance.

352 pages, preface, notes, bibliography, index.
302 black-and-white and color figures.

Art history, history, cultural studies,
Italian Renaissance & Baroque studies. 

Pascoli’s Convivial Poems now in dual-language translation

Italica Press is pleased to announce the publication of a new dual-language edition of Giovanni Pascoli’s Convivial Poems, translated by Elena Borelli and James Ackhurst.

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is renowned as one of the founders of modern Italian poetry. Embodying the Zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Italy, his works are inspired by French Symbolism and Decadentism. They also draw on the classical tradition so alive in Italian culture. His unique poetic voice is filled with traditional metrical forms, an uncanny use of onomatopoeic language, and a multilingual vocabulary. He fills his depiction of nature with haunting images and a disquieting sensitivity. 

Convivial Poems (Poemi Conviviali) is named for Il Convito, the literary journal where these poems first appeared. The collection represents one of Pascoli’s highest achievements. Like T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and contemporary post-modernist works, it revisits the classical world to draw new symbols for the modern condition. 

Convivial Poems consists of twenty poems, with facing Italian and English, each devoted to a classical figure, fictional or historical. Ulysses, Helen of Troy, and Alexander the Great, among others, are the protagonists of these stories, but they are also signifiers for themes such as desire and the quest for identity in a modern universe deprived of God. Exquisitely written in a language that at times replicates the forms of Latin and Greek, these poems encode the past into the present and blend the old and the new in a vibrant modernist style.

“One of the greatest poets of all times.” — Seamus Heaney

Introduction, notes, glossary, 
dual-language poetry. 332 pp.

Musto, Writing Southern Italy, New Revised Edition

Italica Press is pleased to announce the publication of the second, revised edition of Ronald G. Musto’s Writing Southern Italy before the Renaissance. This is the first comprehensive book in English to examine the works of trecento historians of the Mezzogiorno. It introduces these writers, their lives, works, sources, language choices, narrative communities and strategies, and their styles and forms. 

Musto brings to bear current methodological and theoretical frameworks to develop this analysis. Central to his examination are the role of trecento visual language and the impact of fictional forms on this historiography. He traces the fine line between historia and fabula and the ability of trecento writers to absorb and utilize the symbolic forms deployed by such artists as Giotto, Lorenzetti and Francesco da Barberino and such romances as Meliadus, the Contesse d’Anjou and Constance. 

To illustrate and test these analyses, Musto offers case studies examining rituals of punishment and prison dialogues. He traces the development of a grand narrative — the black legend of the Angevins — through Petrarch, Villani, Boccaccio and Gravina. A final chapter compares trecento historiography to that of the southern humanists.

This second, revised edition is published by special arrangement with Routledge. It presents revised text; revised and updated notes; a chronology of persons and events; and a complete, updated and comprehensive bibliography. It also incorporates selected new source materials and secondary research published since that first edition. For consistency of reference, all numbering of chapters, subsections, annotation and pagination remain the same as in the hardcover edition.