Dante's house

Some friends of mine in Italy had the pleasure of visiting "Dante's house" in Florence recently. Besides being very jealous, I am excited about the cool pictures. Here is the link. Thanks Hutchinsons! Check out how Eric manages to use the words "Inferno" and "haunts" in the same sentence.

Fitzgerald's "Aeneid" Postscript

The Postscript to Fitzgerald's translation of Vergil's Aeneid is good. In sections v and vi he puts the war scenes in the context of the Vergil's times, the social war and Civil wars. As I read these last six books (the "neglected" books) in my Aeneid seminar, I keep recalling the end of section vi (pg. 414):

I first read through all twelve books of The Aeneid in my Oxford Classical Text in the spring, summer, and early fall of 1945, the closing months of the Second Great War, when I was stationed on an island in the western Pacific. Living and working in commodious Quonset huts on neat coral driveways amid palms regularly treated by DDT sprayed from a slow biplane, staff oficers had little to suffer but boredom off duty, and Virgil remedied that for me. Our navy's Actium had been fought long before at Midway. But the last island fighting continued, first at Iwo, then on Okinawa, where kamikaze season got into full swing. There we were on our island in our fresh khakis, laundered and pressed, the little bars gleaming on our collars and caps, saluting the old admiral with his snowy Roman head and the urbane operations officer who held in his crystal mind the location, course, destination, and speed of every least landing craft over thousands of miles. The scene could not have been more imperial or more civilized. APO mail from the States came fast. We played tennis, skipped rope, and worked out on the heavy bag. At night at my neat desk in the B.O.Q. I read Virgil by the light of a good lamp. I heard young submarine skippers, the finest Annapolis products, give their lighthearted accounts of shelling poor junks to smithereens in the China Sea. Meanwhile, offshore of the big Japanese island to the north, picket ships where having their prows or upperworks and the men who manned them smashed into flaming junk by Japanese fighters aflame; ashore, men with flamethrowers were doing what I had heard a briefing officer in Sanf Fransisco, with an insane giggle, refer to as "popping Japs;" and a good many young and brave of both sides were tasting the agony and abomination that the whole show came down to, in fact existed for. The next landings would be on Honshu, and I would be there. More than literary interest, I think, kept me reading Virgil's description of desperate battle, funeral pyres, failed hopes of truce or peace.

More than literary interest surely moved the first Roman readers of these books of The Aeneid, for war, the Roman specialty, had within their memories gone fratricidal and got out of hand. If Virgil intended, as he almost certainly did, an analogy between the task of Aeneas and that of Augustus, the hardest and hugest part for both was waging war to end war, to work out settlements so magnanimous as to challenge no more strife but to promote concordia and the arts of peace.

Some of my friends and I in the seminar keep discussing the emphasis on the first six books of the Aeneid by most modern readers. Vergil, however, calls his second "Iliadic" half his maius opus, or "greater task," in line 44 of Book 7. It has been somewhat of a discovery process for me to read these books now, though I'd read the poem in translation before. Now that I'm really examining Vergil's work, the war scenes seem to me some of his most powerful poetry.

Alberti to Brunelleschi about the Duomo

A draft of this post has been sitting for a while, but I find myself with some free time this Thanksgiving holiday.

For my class on Reception (of the classical world) a couple of weeks ago, I was assigned to read a letter from Alberti to Brunelleschi. For those interested, here's a site with some pictures of Alberti's architectural designs, and here's one for Brunelleschi. Each quote Vasari's Lives of the Artists, which we've also been reading from for Reception, so much so that I've become interested enough to want to own it-- if only I could find a bilingual edition!

As I mentioned in a previous post (Sono italiana in spirito!*), I've become really excited about Italian. As such, I was very pleased that my professor provided both English and Italian versions of the letter. Here's an excerpt, in which Alberti is marvelling about Brunelleschi's architectural accomplishment, the Duomo (i.e. Santa Maria del Fiore) of Florence (from On Painting and On Sculpture, ed. and trans. by Cecil Grayson, Phaidon, 1972):

What man, however hard of heart or jealous, would not praise Filippo the architect when he sees here such an enormous construction towering above the skies, vast enough to cover the entire Tuscan population with its shadow, and done without the aid of beams or elaborate wooden supports? Surely a feat of engineering, if I am not mistaken, that people did not believe possible these days and was probably equally unknown and unimaginable among the ancients.

Chi mai sì duro o sì invido non lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo qui struttura sì grande, erta sopra e' cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti e' popoli toscani, fatta sanza alcuno aiuto di travamenti o di copia di legname, quale artificio certo, se io ben iudico, come a questi tempi era incredibile potersi, così forse appresso gli antichi fu non saputo né conosciuto?

I chose this quotation because the Duomo is my favorite building--it really is awesome (in the original sense of the word), which is what Alberti is trying to convey here. Oh, and notice that Alberti calls his friend by the familiar "Pippo" in the Italian, but that's not reflected in the translation.

'Dante and Vergil' Bibliography

On Tuesday I gave a brief presentation on my project for my Reception class, titled for the occasion, "Dante as a Reader of Vergil's Aeneid III in Inferno XIII." I worked up a bibliography for the class, which includes some of my notes on particular books. I also added a section on "Art" for the History of Art students in the class. I'll post it here in the hopes that someone who is also interested in the topic might stumble across it and find it of some use. A girl can dream.

Editions and Commentaries of the texts:

Aligheri, Dante, The Divine Comedy, trans. and commentary by Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970-75).
--Bilingual, a standard English edition of the complete poem.

Aligheri, Dante, Inferno. trans. Robert Pinsky, (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).
--Bilingual, a verse translation that attempts to recreate some of Dante’s terza rima in English, with useful notes in the back-- a very accessible edition.

Aligheri, Dante, Inferno: The Indiana Critical Edition. ed. and trans., Mark Musa. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1995).
--Includes useful commentary and several critical essays on a range of topics.

Tozer, Rev. H. F., An English Commentary on Dante’s Divina Commedia, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901).
--Useful detailed commentary on the Italian text, particularly the more archaic passages.

Vergil, Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).

Vergil, Aeneid, ed. with introduction and notes by R. Deryck Williams, (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996).

Vergil, Opera, ed. R.A.B. Mynors, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

Secondary Sources, General:

Comparetti, Domenico, Vergil in the Middle Ages, trans. E.F.M. Benecke, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997).
--A seminal work on Vergil Reception, though written 125 years ago. This edition includes a fine introduction from Jan M. Ziolkowski. An easy to read and elucidating work.

Hollander, Robert, Dante: A Life in Works, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2001).
--Includes discussion of all of Dante’s works, incl. some insightful chapters on the Commedia.

Kallendorf, Craig, ed., Vergil, (New York : Garland Pub., 1993).
--From The Classical Heritage Series, this collection of essays is a useful and varied introduction to the Reception of Vergil, incl. two chapters pulled from VMA (above) and articles on Dante (Robert Hollander) and Vergil in Art (Alexander G. McKay)

Scott, John A., Understanding Dante, (Notre Dame, Ind. : University of Notre Dame Press, 2004).
--A very full book, with discussions of every work of Dante, his contemporary world, and a lengthy chapter on “Dante and classical antiquity.” Each heading is subdivided, making this large work relatively easy to use.

Secondary Sources, Specific:

Hawkins, Peter S., Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1999).
--A collection of essays focusing on Dante’s models, incl. Vergil.

Jacoff, Rachel, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, eds., The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia,” (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP, 1991).
--Collection of essays by variety of scholars. The introduction is useful, as are the contributions of Stephany, pgs. 37-44 (see also below), Douglas Biow, “From Ignorance to Knowledge: The Marvelous in Inferno 13,” 45-61, and Michael C.J. Putnam, “Virgil’s Inferno,” pgs. 94-112.

Putnam, Michael C.J. “The Third Book of the Aeneid: From Homer to Rome,” in Essays on Latin Lyric, Elegy, and Epic, ed. Michael C.J. Putnam (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 267-287.

Speroni, C., “The Motif of Bleeding and Speaking Trees of Dante’s Suicides,” Italian Quarterly 9 (1965), 44-55.

Sheehan, David, “The Control of Feeling: A Rhetorical Analysis of Inferno XIII,” Italica, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1974), 193-206.

Lindheim, Nancy, “Body, Soul, and Immortality: Some Readings in Dante’s Commedia,” MLN, Vol. 105, No. 1, Italian Issue (Jan. 1990), 1-32.

Spitzer, Leo, “Speech and Language in Inferno XIII,” Italica, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Sep., 1942), 81-104.

Stephany, William A., “Dante’s Harpies: “tristo annunzio di futuro danno,” Italica, Vol. 62, No. 1 (Spring, 1985), 24-33.

Art:

Brieger, Peter H., Millard Meiss, and Charles S. Singleton, Illuminated manuscripts of the Divine Comedy, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1969).
--Two big volumes, one all plates.

Donati, Lamberto, Il Botticelli e le prime illustrazioni della Divina Commedia, (Firenze: L.S. Olschki, 1962).

Kallendorf, Craig, “The Aeneid Transformed: Illustration as Interpretation from the Renaissance to the Present,” in Poets and Critics Read Vergil, ed. Sarah Spence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, 2001), 121-148.
--Discussion of woodcuts and engravings accompanying Aeneid editions and translations, includes many good images.

Klonsky, Milton, Blake’s Dante: The Complete Illustrations to the Divine Comedy, (New York: Harmony Books, 1979).

Pope-Hennessy, John, A Sienese Codex of the Divine Comedy, (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1947)

Numismatics as problem-solving

About a week or so in my work at BMC Collections on Bryn Mawr's coins, I came across a coin with a perplexing inscription. The undergrad also working with the coins pointed out that the early identification of the coin as a 10th c. Byzantine coin was absurd. From the portraiture it was clearly late Roman, but provincial-- the inscription was in Greek. At the time we set it aside, but during the course of the week I came across a coin that elucidated the reverse inscription-- our "Byzantine" coin was from Tarsus.

After this discovery, I felt sure I could identify the coin-- I had the reverse, now only the obverse eluded me, and as such the identification of the emperor depicted in his radiate crown. I worked on it for quite a while, desperately trying every transliteration of the Greek to determine to which emperor the obverse description referred.

Eventually, Dennis came up to the lab for some of my boss' famous extra-strong coffee, and got excited about the hunt, as well. The thing about coin identification is that it feels somewhat like solving a mystery or going on a treasure hunt-- the clues are there, and the answers seem only a synaptic connection away. The inscription began with the clear letters "AVKAIG(gamma)." I had guessed that the AV KAI was a Greek transliteration of the Latin abbreviation for Augustus Caesar, which was a good start. The inscription begins several provincial issues of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, for example at Hadrianopolis in Thrace. But looking at these issues, Dennis noticed that often "AV" was written "AVTOK," and with characteristic ingenuity he realized this must be an abbreviation for "autokratos," which would be the Greek equivalent of the Latin "IMP" for "imperator," so commonly beginning Latin imperial obverse inscriptions. That the upsilon was behaving like a Roman V was a bit of a concern, but we chalked it up to being probably a characteristic of the location and the date.

With that question answered, we focused on the rest of the inscription, letters not as clear. The next letter appeared to be either a gamma or a lambda, and further along appeared "OVIBION" I had already searched Wildwinds for coins with such inscription, or emperors with any combination of those letters in his name. We searched for Lucius Vibius and Caius Vibius, ignoring the inexplicable "O" for the time being. We found Caius Vibius Trebonianus Gallus, and detirmined that this must be our emperor. Upon closer inspection we could now make out the letters "ALL" further along in the inscription, confirming our analysis. We still hadn't figured out that "O," but at this point I, who had been at the question longer, was ready to let it rest for another time, being ready for lunch. Dennis, still excited by the hunt, realized triumphantly through his background in linguistics that the Greeks transliterated the Roman "w" sound with the characters omicron upsilon, "OV," because they had no letter that equaled it. A firm identification is a satisfying end to such a mystery, and it allowed us to go to lunch (finally).

I wish I could show a picture of the coin, which is actually pretty cool looking. Here are two similar examples, also from Cilicia, from the principate of Trebonianus Gallus: example 1, example 2. A Roman example is found in the Wikipedia article linked above.

A great deal of satisfaction comes from working out a mystery like this, which is part of the great fun of Numismatics. I do not do the excitement of the journey or the discovery justice above, for which I apologize; I wish more people got a chance to study ancient coins, and could experience it for themselves.

Avahi Cleesei

Again my friend John leads me to an article, this time to this article about a new species of lemur being named after British actor John Cleese.

If you haven't seen Fierce Creatures, the appropriateness of this may be lost on you. In the movie, Cleese plays a director of a failing zoo. In an attempt to win him over (so that her department's funding doesn't get cut) a keeper names one of her lemur's after Cleese's character.

The article also mentions Cleese's official website, which has a lemur theme-- not kidding.

"Violence" update; "AIDS" awareness

A couple posts ago (Book Sale and "Violence") I said I hoped Dennis would review the movie soon. Here is his review.

***

Also, this article discusses a case where a man was found to be HIV-positive one year and negative the next, suggesting he might hold the cure. My question, however, is why the article calls Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome "Aids" rather than AIDS. They seem to have had no problem with HIV as an all-capitalized acronym, but perhaps when an acronym is a homonym for the third person singular of a synonym for "to help," it slips by writers and editors.

This seems similar to the phenomenon of the term "pin number" for PIN, acronym for Personal Identification Number, where the ubiquitously common use of the term has led to English speakers forgetting (or ignoring) what the acronym stands for. And isn't it a job of the acronym to help us not say all those words? We can say "I'll just enter my PIN" so that we don't have to say "I'll just enter in my personal identification number." Sometimes when I hear at the checkstand, "Oh, just enter your pin number," I think "my personal identification number number?" I don't let it get under my skin at all, mind you, in the case of my secret little number code, I just think it's a little silly. But when it comes to AIDS, I feel like journalists should spell correctly.

Dante and Vergil

Lately I've been reading Domenico Comparetti's Vergil in the Middle Ages (VMA). Published originally in 1885, VMA is considered a seminal work in the field. Right now, I'm primarily interested in Dante's reception of Vergil, and I really liked this quotation from page 199, which suggests what makes Dante different from others in the Middle Ages and from those in the Renaissance:

"...[Dante] has a high opinion of the human intellect, and though he considers its powers as limited, yet he feels a great respect for those of its representatives who were independent of and anterior to the mission of Christ; hence he is not merely aquainted with the ancients through the medium of the schools of grammar, nor does he confine his study of them to what is barely necessary, but he devotes himself directly to them, not as a grammarian or a philologist, still less as a humanist, but as a thinker and a poet."

One of Comparetti's arguments for Dante's choice of Vergil as his guide on the spiritual journey of the Divina Commedia is that Dante responded strongly to the poetic power of his predecessor. I like this idea, it has a Romantic ring to it.

Sono italiana in spirito!*

Recently I've been studying French while I eat my breakfast. This morning, however, I was inspired to pick up an Italian lessons book instead (my program requires modern foreign language skills: in French or Italian, plus German). My book is Italian Lessons by A. Arbib-Costa (1933), with practice sentences like this one on page 38:

Io capisco benissimo il francese e lo spagnolo, ma mio fratello non capisce bene il tedesco che ha studiato per sei mesi solamente.

[I understand French and Spanish very well, but my brother does not understand German well, which he has studied for six months only.]

There seem to be several sentences in this lesson about the difficulty of understanding German, which confirm my own experience.

For some reason (probably my years of high school Spanish), I find Italian much easier and more fun to work with than French, which so many of my fellow classicists read with ease. Though I'd love to read Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac in French (I have original texts, and I can work through some of the language), I have much more interest in works written in Italian: Petrarch, Dante-- heck, all the Italian humanists & Renaissance guys! So although I'm sure I'll eventually work French out, for right now I'm focusing on Italian with great...gusto.

*A quotation (modified for gender) from A Fish Called Wanda

Trip to the PMA

Today I finally got to visit the Philadelphia Art Museum. Haley was as excited about the prospect as I, so we made sure to spend one day of her visit there.

I was particularly impressed by their European and Asian Art wings on the second floor, which each had architectural representations built into the exhibits. Haley and I especially liked a stone window used as a door. The parts of European churches and buildings made me want to go back there, and the Asian rooms made me want to visit the buildings in their original contexts.

I discovered an artist I'd never seen before, Giorgio de Chirico. Some of his more extreme Surrealist paintings I'm not as interested in, but I do like his many representations of an ancient (or classicizing) sculpture of Ariadne in a piazza in Italy with modern elements peeking in, like a steam engine. Here is an example, but I saw two others of the same theme that I preferred at the museum.

Haley and I both liked William Maw Egley's paintings "Just as the Twig is Bent" and "The Tree's Inclined." I couldn't find good representations of them online, but the images tell an age-old story. The first has three young children-- two sisters, a blonde and a brunette, and a little boy playing soldier. The boy clearly prefers the blonde, while the brunette sits back at a table looking at the pair. In the second painting, the trio has grown up. At first you only notice the boy, now a real soldier, and his blonde love. In a small mirror above the scene, however, you see the reflection of the brunette sister, looking at the pair in jealousy.

Also on display was a painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo called "Venus and Vulcan." The image is from Book VIII of the Aeneid, when the goddess of love asks her metalsmith husband to forge an epic shield for her son. The description on the wall at the PMA described Vulcan as her "estranged" husband, and referenced the book from the Aeneid as the source of the story. Having just read Book VIII last week for class, I don't remember anything in Vergil's text to suggest that Vulcan and Venus were having marital difficulties. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps, as the scene is vaguely reminiscent of the adultery scene in the Iliad between Mars and Venus (Ares and Aphrodite there, of course), this is to what the description referred. My objection to the word "estranged" is the subsequent reference to Vergil's Aeneid VIII, where Venus easily convinces her husband to do this task for her, she is the goddess of seduction, after all.

The museum itself is beautifully designed, and the blue-pink sunset yesterday only aided in the appreciation of the architecture as we left. As I remarked to Haley at the time, things tend to look different for a while after visiting a museum. Haley agreed that we tend to see the world for its forms, at least for a while.

Book Sale and "Violence"

Another first Saturday of the month, another dock sale at the Harvest Books outlet.

My friend Haley had come up from Maryland to visit me on her last break from AmeriCorps before heading home via a six-week road trip. She got to experience the book sale too, and picked up some good reading for the evenings on her long trip home. I got some good stuff, too. I've already put them up on LibraryThing-- some art history, literature, and linguistics texts. I picked up a book called La Sculpture Grecque Classique by Jean Charbonneaux, who worked at the Louvre in the early 40s. I've looked online, and haven't been able to find a biography for him which includes information on his activities during the German occupation, during which this book was published (1942). Just curious.

That evening we played Scrabble-- always a treat, even when I go last (i.e., when I lose, which always happens when I go last!).

After a Thai dinner, Haley, Dennis and I saw A History of Violence, a David Cronenberg film starring Viggo Mortensen. I thought it was pretty interesting, and definitely had some cool scenes. I look forward to Dennis' online review. I don't get a chance to go out to movies often, due to lack of funds and time, but I'm glad I saw this one. During at least one scene, the score reminded me of The Silence of the Lambs. I checked-- both were done by composer Howard Shore. The only other Cronenberg film I've seen in full is Dead Ringers-- a thriller starring Jeremy Irons as twin gynocologists-- yes, twin gynocologists.

A busy day! Having a guest visit makes me actually get out and do stuff, which I appreciate.

Originality

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, in her The Printing press as an agent of change: communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe (Cambridge: 1979), pointed out for me a fascinating phenomenon. The context is a discussion of the Renaissance attitude toward the Greek and Latin classics as reliable based on their "originality," i.e. their closeness to the origins of wisdom. On page 192 she explains the "puzzlement" (191) of later scholars towards this attitude.

"Its old meaning was 'closest to divine inspiriation; closest to the fount, to the well-spring, to the original, or to the source." This inspired the slogan, 'To the sources,' Ad fontes! The modern meaning is quite different. As every art-critic knows, to be original is to break with precedent, to depart from tradition. A given artist, scholar or scientist is being original when he does not go back to an earlier work but strikes out in some new direction on his own."

She does not give her source for these definitions, but the same idea can be found in the OED: The word "original" means (OED 1a), "That is the origin or source of something; from which something springs, proceeds, or is derived; primary" and it also means, (OED 5a) "Created, composed, or done by a person directly; produced first-hand; not imitated or copied from another."

Her interesting observation perhaps can give us an insight into the mind of Renaissance scholars, who gave so much credence to things buried (literally, in some cases) for hundreds of years.

***

Petrarch, in his Coronation Oration of April 8, 1341, delivered what Ernest Wilkins called "the first manifesto of the Renaissance." Wilkens published an English translation in Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch (Cambridge, Mass: Mediaeval Acadamy of America, 1955) which enriched my view of Petrarch as both a scholar and a poet. On page 306 of Wilkins' edition, he translates Petrarch's Latin, "while there are some who think it shameful to follow in the footsteps of others, there are far more who fear to essay a hard road unless they have a sure guide." Petrarch goes on to explain how he hopes to be just that sort of guide for others, which of course he did.

50s food

James Lileks' Gallery of Regrettable Food, an "introduction" to recipe books from the 30s, 40s, and 50s, is hilarious. My favorite so far are the Knudsen's books, with some of the most revolting meal ideas I've ever seen.

From the introduction to the More Fun With Coffee recipe book: "In this booklet, coffee takes you all over the world, introducing you to exotic beverages and foods, and charming customs of other lands." (That extra comma is the copy editor's fault-- perhaps he'd been drinking too much coffee?) Now doesn't that sound intriguing? I'm very curious about what these editors fifty years ago considered "charming customs of other lands." Unfortunately, Lileks doesn't show us that much of the book, but there is plenty on this site to check out.

Oh, and I love the 10 pm Cookery's "Especially For the Girls" recipes. But when I compared the "Strictly Stag" page, I was even more impressed.

And of course, many of the cookbooks include aspics & gelatin delights, so popular in the fifties. Now, after looking at meat jello and technicolor mush, I get to go have lunch.