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malachia-il-bibliotecario · 18 hours ago

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@girldante @eresia-catara

On this day in 1869 the Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti's pet wombat Top died

Rossetti lamenting the death of his Wombat, 1869

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malachia-il-bibliotecario · 18 hours ago

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Italian literature tournament - Second round.

Propaganda in support of the authors is accepted, you can write it both in the tag if reblog the poll (explaining maybe that is propaganda and you want to see posted) or in the comments. Every few days it will be recollected and posted here under the cut.

Propaganda in favor of Guido Cavalcanti by @eresia-catara

May I add further propaganda for Guido: He's a noble, he disdains aristocrats, he was Florence's number one Server of Cunt, he was the city's faggot, he was heretical, he went on a random pilgrimage but interrupted it and managed to be buried in a church anyway, he had an archenemy who sent some men to murder him on said pilgrimage, he came back and tried to murder him back in plain daylight, he gave zero fucks about politics, he got exiled because he was considered a menace for the city. He SAW DANTE's poetical talent, encouraged it, shaped it, and through him the whole of italian literature. Think about it. Also they became besties until they evolved to a tormented psychosexual haunting dynamic (see break-up poem) where Dante himself actually exiled him. In the 13th century his poetry anticipates so many of the literary themes of the XXth century, going from fragmentation of the self (his is basically vivisection and dispersion of his parts), to dissociation from one's own mind and body, lack of identity, irony, desecration, his poetry is full of schizophrenic-like hallucinations, reading them is truly a trip, and yet his language is profoundly meoldic and sweet. And there's also gender-fuckery. and theater, of course, because his poems develop like a scene from a theater (adding layers to the dissociation). So really he has it all guys.

Guido Cavalcanti propaganda by @girldante

GUIDO CAVALCANTI PROPAGANDA ABBIAMO:

LA DISSOCIAZIONE SCHIZOFRENICA:

IL COMICO, IL SIMPATICO BURLONE, IL MEMATORE ANTE LITTERAM:

IL MACABRO, IL GORE, I SINTOMI™

IL BREAKUP TOSSICO PASSIVO AGGRESSIVO CON DANTE

in conclusione

#PORCODIO RAGA VA BENE LEVI MA SIAMO SERIIIIIII

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malachia-il-bibliotecario · 21 hours ago

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HII I JUST NOTICED THAT GUIDO SHOWS UP IN ANOTHER ROSETTI PAINTING (maybe) CALLED "Dante Drawing the Angel"

IM PREtty SURE ITS HIM!! HE HAS THE SAME HAT AND AND THE SAME GREEN CLOTHES oh and the same RED HAIR!!!

you're frying my brain right now. i decided to dig a bit deeper here because i remember the painting being a rendition of a specific passage in Vita Nova (XXXIV) where Dante is thinking of Beatrice on the anniversary of her death and drawing an angel when he realizes some people - he says "men" specifically - were standing behind him watching him long before he realized they were there, but i also didn't remember Guido being one of those men, as Dante almost always refers to him explicitly in the Vita Nova. so i decided to reread the chapter and look deeper into the painting to figure out DGR's interpretation.

first off, only now that you're telling me i realize that the man touching his shoulder in the painting looks a lot like the way Guido is represented in Giotto painting the portait of Dante (1852), which was produced just one year before Dante drawing the angel (1853), and we know that the preraphaelites and DGR specifically were all about symbolism, and thus very intentional use of color, composition and iconography. so clearly Rossetti wanted to suggest a specific idea when he painted this man, like you said, in the exact same green clothes with golden floreal patterns, very similar green hat, red hair, and most importantly:

in the exact same position, same angle, leaning over Dante's shoulder from the back and touching it with his left hand.

hell, even his feet and right hand are in the same position are you kidding me

i'm not finished yet, because unfortunately i cannot help but notice patterns (cit.) so i compared the two paintings as wholes.

look, i might be delusional and reading into it too much, but to me the compositional logic looks similar: there's two distinct couples of figures who divide the paintings exactly in half, Dante's body is facing a painting, a pomegranate appears close to his hand, he has a weird green guy leaning over his shoulder, and they're not making eye contact as he's looking at a woman. speaking of her, in DGR's own commentary of the picture he gives us some interesting pieces of information, one an indication as to who this woman is supposed to be; another a possible contradiction to the man in green really being Guido; another seems to be a clue:

After McCracken bought the picture DGR wrote him a long letter on 14 May 1854 [...] commenting specifically on this picture: “I had an idea of an intention of the possibility of a suggestion that the lady in my drawing should be Gemma Donati whom Dante married afterwards and for that reason meant to have put the Donati arms on the dresses of the three visitors, but could not find a suitable way of doing so. The visitors are unnamed in the text. But I had an idea also of connecting the pitying lady with another part of the V[ita] N[uova] and in part the sketch is full of notions of my own in this way, which would only be cared about by one to whom Dante was a chief study”

so, it appears the man in question was originally supposed to be a donati, which doesn't align with the hypothesis of him being Guido, but DGR also says that he couldn't "find a suitable way" of representing the Donati in the three people, and the aesthetic aspect remains very suggestive of a link with Guido...

DGR also alludes to another meaning of the lady figure, and from his choice of words it seems that he's suggesting an alternative meaning to the visitors altoghether, but again, that might just be me reaching. either way, there are three sketches of this painting, one of which annotated:

below is the passage from Vita Nova, but right on Dante's head an inscription reads "Beata Anima bella, chi te vede, 9 Giugno, 1290." this is a verse from Donna pietosa e di novella etade, from Vita Nova XXIII, a chapter and poem where Dante describes a premonitory vision of the death of Beatrice, whom the verse refers to, that he had during a high fever in which he was assisted by a female relative mostly interpreted to be his sister Tana, who mistook his cries as being due to his illness and wept for him. the "pitying lady" DGR refers to might be a reflection of the role of that female relative, who in turn reflects Beatrice herself in the poem. if this is the final interpretation, we might argue that the painting itself is encapsulated by Beatrice on both sides, as would be more suitable for the subject matter of the painting and the chapter it refers to, and thus the original intention of representing the Donati might not factor in the final representation, making the presence of Guido possible... which could or could not be a stretch... i suppose the verdict is up to the observer.

the problem now is identifying the potential purpose of this supposed Guido representation. what does Guido have to do with this episode at all? he isn't mentioned or implied by Dante as one of the men interrupting him, and surely he doesn't appear in the chapter either way, does he? ...does he?

well, the episode told by Dante in the Vita Nova is meant to introduce a very peculiar poem, which he claims to have written in memory of Beatrice for the anniversary of her death, and for which Dante gives two different beginnings:

Primo cominciamento Era venuta ne la mente mia la gentil donna che per suo valore fu posta da l’altissimo signore nel ciel de l’umiltate, ov’è Maria. Secondo cominciamento Era venuta ne la mente mia quella donna gentil cui piange Amore, entro ’n quel punto che lo suo valore vi trasse a riguardar quel ch’eo facia. Amor, che ne la mente la sentia, s’era svegliato nel destrutto core, e diceva a’ sospiri: "Andate fore"; per che ciascun dolente si partia. Piangendo uscivan for de lo mio petto con una voce che sovente mena le lagrime dogliose a li occhi tristi. Ma quei che n’uscian for con maggior pena, venian dicendo: "Oi nobile intelletto, oggi fa l’anno che nel ciel salisti".

a good english translation:

First version: There came into my mind the gentle lady who through her virtue was placed by the highest Lord in the Heaven of humility where Mary is. Second version: There came into my mind the gentle lady whom Love weeps for, at the moment when her virtue drew you to gaze at what I made. Amor, who felt her in his mind, was woken in my ravaged heart, and said to my sighs: ‘Go now’: so that each departed sadly. They went weeping from my chest with a voice that often brings woeful tears to my sad eyes. But those that issued with the greatest pain, came saying: ‘O noble intellect, it was a year ago you leapt to Heaven’

Dante makes an interesting placement: we have one religious opening with Beatrice as an angel of God, placed next to the Virgin Mary for her value, which is detached from the text, and a second, more "secular", Stilnovistic opening, with the figure of Love weeping for Beatrice, and it is this opening that Dante chooses to place on top of the rest of a poem that we soon find out is literally overflowing with Cavalcanti references:

(from my feltrinelli edition of Vita Nova commented by Manuela Colombo) he's referencing one of Guido's verses almost word for word and employing Guido's expressive means, such as the "destroyed" heart, Love talking to Dante's personified sighs, who get out of his chest, who have voices of their own and bring tears to his eyes.

every situation described in the prose parts introducing the poems in Vita Nova is specifically constructed by Dante to contextualize the poem and assign it a meaning, so we should interpret Dante placing himself between the memory of Beatrice represented by the angel drawing and the mysterious interrupters as the duality that he goes on to represent in the two versions of the poem, an interpretation maybe further reinforced by the duality in the immediate next chapter, where he famously introduces the "gentile donna", a pitying woman who will momentarily distract him from Beatrice, and who Dante later tells us in the Convivio to be Philosophy, a short episode of indecision after which he will decidedly choose the path of Beatrice (the new poetry).

if we link the angel-woman opening to the angel drawing and thus the path of Beatrice, could we also link the Stilnovistic-Cavalcantian poem (Guido) to the interrupting figures and by extension to the "kind woman"?

is this what DGR was trying to render when he placed Dante between the drawing on his desk and the man in green?

#they should be paying you for this #I honestly think that without some adjusting this (like All of this) is publication material #waiting for @girldante and @girlartemisia's book

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