VISUAL, VERBAL AND MUSIC
I often choose to work on the interrelation of Literature and Arts, especially painting and music. The question of the relation between visual arts and literature and the investigation of visual-verbal dynamics in Michelangelo's and Bronzino’s poetry is at the heart of my research interests. The magnificence of Michelangelo’s achievements as a visual artist often overshadow his devotion to poetry. I’m currently holding a course at the University of Zurich called La produzione poetica di Michelangelo Buonarroti : during these lectures I have the opportunity to open a dialogue between the author, his visual art, his poems, and his viewers and readers. Next Autumn, I will held lectures at the Centre for Renaissance Studies (of University of Zurich) in which I will offer a commentary on the interaction of the visual and literary arts at a particularly fertile period of the Italian Renaissance and I will seek to clarify the deep meaning of this long Bronzino's capitolo called Il Piato. In 1996 I published Considerazioni sul rapporto eikon-logos nella letteratura italiana medievale e rinascimentale, «Bloc Notes», Université de Lausanne, nr. 35, 12 (pp. 107-116) and in 1997 Similitudini nelle Rime Buonarrotiane, «La Parola del Testo», II, 2. Semestrale di Filologia e letteratura italiana comparata dal Medioevo al Rinascimento, Roma (pp. 293-308). I’m currently writing an essay that considers the cultural production and reception of images and texts (poems and letters) of some of the more prominent Florentine artists, writers, and intellectuals. As far as the painter Agnolo Bronzino is concerned, in 1998 I edited: Agnolo di Cosimo, detto il Bronzino, I Salterelli dell'Abbrucia sopra i Mattaccini di ser Fedocco, edizione critica, introduzione, commento e note, Salerno Editrice, "Documenti di Poesia", Rome. Regrettably, Bronzino's poetry has attracted scant critical notice : while art historians such as Robert Gaston, or Elizabeth Cropper have explored the influence of a variety of vernacular works on Bronzino's paintings, less attention has been paid to the artist's own poems. Renewed attention to Bronzino's poetry would illuminate the artist's literary culture and the social world that fostered so striking a combination of activity. Moreover, closer study of Bronzino's poetry contributes greatly to our understanding of an artist who has remained, as Ronald Firbank observes, largely "unglimpseable."
