Academic literature on the topic 'Italian Fan painting'

The article describes Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky's visit to Italy. Fyodor Mikhailovich was in Italy three times. For the first time in 1862, after visiting Paris and London, in his winter Notes on summer impressions, he fought both for the mores, especially the bourgeois ones, and for the inhabitants, whom he despises to the maximum and ridicules them. Dostoevsky was not an ordinary tourist: he was interested in the history of the country, Italian politics, risorgimental movements, the struggle for unification. He was a big fan of Garibaldi. He visited Italy for the second time with his great love Apollinaria Suslova in 1863. The third time he arrived in Italy in 1868, after marrying Anna in 1867, they decided to move to Europe in order to avoid the imprisonment of Dostoevsky F. M. for debts, and also to protect Anna from the oppression that the family had caused her to suffer. Also Dostoevsky F. M. was strongly impressed by painting and in his works you can notice the presence of art in general and in particular Raphael.

This book provides an innovative, authoritative, and richly illustrated study of the myths relating to the Cyclopes from classical antiquity until the present day. It is the first such book-length study of the topic in any language. The first part, dealing with classical antiquity, is organized thematically: after discussing various competing scholarly approaches to the myths, Aguirre and Buxton analyse ancient accounts and images of the Cyclopes in relation to landscape, physique (especially eyes, monstrosity, and hairiness), lifestyle, gods, names, love, and song. While the man-eating Cyclops Polyphemus, famous already in the Odyssey, plays a major part, so also do the Cyclopes who did monumental building work, as well as those who toiled as blacksmiths. The second part of the book concentrates on the post-classical reception of the myths. Topics discussed include medieval allegory, Renaissance grottoes, Italian and Spanish poetry, Spanish drama, and the novels of Hugo, Joyce, and Ellison; in the visual arts, dozens of images are examined, beginning with the medieval and early modern periods, moving on to Surrealism and Abstract Impressionism, and ending with contemporary painting and sculpture. Movie Cyclopes also appear, as does a wonderful circus performance. The overall aim of the authors is to explore, not just the perennial appeal of the Cyclopes as fearsome monsters, but the depth and subtlety of their mythology, which raises complex issues of thought and emotion. All too often, a Cyclops is assumed to be nothing more than a gruesome one-eyed monster. This book seeks to demonstrate that there is far more to it than that—quite apart from the fact that Cyclopes are by no means always one-eyed!

This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s keen interest in the artist’s visual interpretations of, and additions to, Tasso’s great Italian epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581). It becomes clear that both the French painter and the English critic know the Italian poem well; it is far less certain, however, whether the intended English readership would have shared similar first-hand knowledge of either the picture or its literary source. Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasise Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’; problematically, however, the pre-eminence of the visual medium in this specific example can only be attested to by means of a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately seems to imply a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits.