On 15 November 2024, Prof. Matteo Rei of the University of Turin will hold a seminar on Marino and Arcimboldo-like transfigurations in the Portuguese Baroque poetry collection Fénix Renascida (V volumes, 1716-1728).

The seminar will be held online on the Google Meet platform

From its first appearance, Arcimboldo’s art seems to have had a privileged relationship with poetic creation. Indeed, if the verses of a man of letters from the court of Maximilian II accompanied the first appearance of the Four Seasons and the Four Elements in 1569, in the following years there was no shortage of Italian authors who commented on or transposed his composed portraits into poetry, with particularly felicitous results in the case of Giovan Battista Marino.

On the other hand, the compositional technique of the Milanese painter can also be found in numerous 17th century Portuguese poems gathered in the anthological collection of Fénix Renascida (1716-1728) or in contemporary manuscript or printed testimonies that convey the works of authors such as Jerónimo Baía, Gregório de Matos and Manuel Botelho de Oliveira, among others. It will be observed, therefore, how in these texts the (mostly female) portrait is constructed not only by juxtaposing, from time to time, flowers, precious stones, sweets or playing cards, but also by sometimes sublimating in a more abstract form the tasty corporeity of the Archimboldesque model, through the juxtaposition of place names, names of jurists or noble titles.