Calendar of Events

I propose reading for atmospheres in two medieval Italian texts: Dante’s Comedy and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The rationale here is that both texts strategically employ a term that is related to atmosphere, aura, in correlated narrative spaces, the Earthly Paradise in the Comedy and the Valley of the Ladies in the Decameron. But the atmospheres of […]

Against dominant interpretations that equate Western classicism with permanence and durability, the work of Donato Bramante—unanimously acknowledged as one of the founders of this tradition—points in a different direction. Seen through the eyes of his contemporaries and across a broader temporal frame, his method demonstrates a consciously transformational approach to construction: one that values the […]

Pulcinella, the Neapolitan clown of the commedia dell’arte tradition, took to the streets in Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was a star on popular stages, and a Carnival emblem for all to emulate. He also, in the early eighteenth century, climbed the Gianicolo hill, where a group of learned men had tried […]