1,720,970 research outputs found
Catena d'onore, catena d'amore: Baldassarre Castiglione, Elisabetta Gonzaga e il gioco della 'S'
No full textIn the funerary chapel of Baldassarre Castiglione in Santa Maria delle Grazie (Curtatone, Mantua) we can see an unusual collar: it is a famous livery collar named the collar of the 'S'; Castiglione was given it by Henry VII of England in autumn 1507. This collar presents itself as a metallic chain composed of elements in the form of an 'S' shape. On the chain livery badges would be appended to indicate different levels of associations and different roles.
The collar was introduced into the court of England by Henry IV, the first Lancastrian king, at the beginning of the XV century and its use lasted throughout the Tudor age. In this period the collar had many forms according to the fashion of the time as we know by the many exemplars of this collar still preserved. The significance of the 'S' has been long debated by scholars. The hypotheses most accepted today are:
- 'S' representing the capital letter of Soverayne, the Sovereign
- 'S' representing the capital letter of Souveignex, the first word of the common motto ‘Soueignex vous du moy’ (remember me).
Probably the latter hypothesis is the most creditable because the knight always had to remember the relationship to his king. Before the coronation of Henry IV, when he was still duke of Lancaster, he was already well known for one of his personal emblems, the 'Forget-me-not'. Additionally a necklace that he commissioned was composed of alternating elements in the shape of the S and the forgetmenot flower. When Henry IV became king the meaning of the 'S' shifted from the 'Souveignex/forgetmenot' to 'Soverayne/Sovereign', and in this way had a double meaning with the 'S' changing from a personal emblem to a livery symbol which the English king gave to his knights to signify his gratitude and esteem.
Baldassarre Castiglione went to England as an ambassador many times and his role as such is recorded in the long epitaph written by Pietro Aretino on the tombstone in the chapel of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In a recent book Lina Bolzoni points out that Castiglione gives very often the impression that he knew well the symbolic and economic value of the collar. She suggests that on frequent occasions the elements of the collar were unlinked and sold but always later bought back and reconnected because the symbolic value was higher then the material one.
In the Cortegiano book, Castiglione proposed a wordplay about the 'S', a badge wich Elisabetta Gonzaga wore on her forehead. Bolzoni's hypothesis is that the jewel enclosing the 'S' which the lady wore was a gift from Castiglione and it was an element of his own collar. But we know that the Gonzaga family as well was given the sign of the 'S' by the king of England at the beginning of the XV century as this sign is shown in the frescos of Pisanello in Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, and this collar is listed in the inventory of the jewels of the Gonzaga family in the XV cent. We therefore hypothesised that the 'S' on the forehead is not a gift from Castiglione but a family jewel. It is not plausible, as Bolzoni wrote, that Castiglione did not know the meaning of the 'S'. When he returned from England to Urbino he brought the same symbol that Elisabetta had been given by her family, the Gonzagas. In this way the 'S' is charged with a new meaning: indeed the enterprise is by its nature polysemic. In the Cortegiano the gentlemen played wordgames and questioned themselves about the meaning of the 'S': the question about the symbol remained without an answer but Castiglione left the ambiguity open. The meaning of the 'S' was probably known only by Baldassarre and Elisabetta: the hidden meaning is the double servitude of the knight, to the love of the Lady and to the fidelity to the King
La medaglia di Isabela d'Este. Nemesi e le sue stelle
No full textDopo più di un secolo di tentativi critici di decifrare l’emblema prediletto di Isabella d’Este, la “Prima Donna del Rinascimento”, la sua medaglia è ancora un enigma. Questo saggio nasce dal lavoro di ricerca compiuto a partire dal 1996 all’interno del Seminario di Tradizione Classica e Iconologia dell’Università di Ca’ Foscari di Venezia: in esso si presentano i risultati di un accurato spoglio dei dati e delle diverse interpretazioni avanzate fino a oggi. Attraverso il confronto con alcuni esemplari di monete imperiali romane e un’accurata rilettura astrologica dei dati anagrafici di Isabella (finora mai considerati) si approda a una interpretazione coerente e completa della complessa simbologia dell’emblema isabelliano
From Hell to Hell. Recensione a From Hell - La vera storia di Jack lo Squartatore, regia di Albert e Allen Hughes, USA 2001
No full textVenus volubilis/venusta Victoria. Tradimenti, travestimenti, capricci, denudamenti dell’Afrodite di Brescia
No full text
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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