Identita e impresa rinascimentale.

Armando Maggi. Identita e impresa rinascimentale.

Ravanna: A. Longo Editore, 1998. 207 pp. IL 45,000. ISBN: 88-8063-150-0.

Maggi's book takes as its theme the ways of imagining identity as it is formulated through the medium of the impresa, then narrativized and theorized in the discussions that grew up around such imprese in late Renaissance Italy. To develop his analysis Maggi opens books noted in Mario Praz's canonical bibliography, but little known and less studied, as is clear from the programs of recent emblem conferences. Names like Arnigio, Belloni, and Giuglaris, and works like Ercole Tasso's Virginia are all but unknown to emblem scholars today. They deserve more and closer attention, and Maggi opens the way most provocatively for scholars interested in the vogue of the impresa in sixteenth-century Italian academies.

In examining Alessandro Farra's Settenario de'll'umana riduzione in his first chapter, Maggi sets out his understanding of the impresa, and makes it clear that he conceives of the impresa as neo-Platonic and mystical in its relation to the Idea or to God. The second chapter compares and contrasts the work of two poets who combine verse with an emblematic image, Maurice Sceve in his well-known Ddtie of 1544, and Ercole Tasso in his little known La Virginia, overo la Dea de' nostri tempi, published in 1593. The intention is to show the impresds role in defining the self through a confrontation with the other, here in the form of the beloved, but, given the cultural sea change that took place in France after mid-century, and since we do not know Sceve's role in the insertion of his "emblesmes,"it is not clear how pertinent the example Sceve can be to this demonstration. The works, it seems to me, are not comparable.

The third chapter turns to the more promising terrain of the academies and some detailed analyses of the devices they chose to represent their ideal and provide the different members of the group with guidelines for developing their individual devices together with their own individuality along the lines of the academy's ideal. Among the interesting discussions in the Rime degli accademici occulti, ostensibly composed by Bartolomeo Arnigio, some of the most revealing are those concerning the Silenus device and that of the firefly. While sixteenth-century academies combined neo-Platonism with Catholicism and other intellectual trends, the Accademie Partenie organized by the Jesuits in the early seventeenth century reduced the complex philosophical and theological mix to straightforward moral instruction coupled with a notion of the individual that depended on a rigorous defense of one's virginity.

The fourth and final chapter treats "La narraxione delle imprese" as it appears in three works by Ammirato, Trevisani, and Giuglaris. In Scipione Ammirato's Il Rota, the motto becomes central, replacing the image and serving as the starting point for a narrative about how the impresa in question came into being. The process is a social, rather than mystical, one. To the extent that such imprese define an identity, it is the identity of a character in a "novella," it seems to me, rather than one from a novel. In all these works, conversation and dialogue play a broad role in the social and intellectual interaction. Cesare Trevisani's discussion, for example, works on two levels, as a narration, and as a narration of a narration, in such a way as to replicate, Maggi tells us, a Platonic friendship along lines drawn by Ficino. This double narration is, in turn, directed to a patron and friend who will be the recipient of the impresa that emerges from it. Finally, the narrative of Luigi Giuglaris emerges rather through a description of the ceremonies that comprise the elaborate funeral of Vittorio Amedeo, Duke of Savoy, in 1637. His description of the architectural space and all its decoration (emblems, inscriptions, blasons, wax statues, baldacchni, etc.) produces a kind of hagiography/biography of the dead prince.

Maggi's book closes with three appendices that present little known works by Trevisani, Ercole Mariscotti, and Bernardino Percivallo. On balance, this is a largely satisfying exploration of areas of emblematics little known to scholars in the field. It is a book that brings emblem studies into broader contact with the world of late Renaissance humanism, and sheds useful light on the fascination with the impresa in the academy culture of early modern Italy.