Notes to pages 87–8 211 8 The ‘poesia rusticana‘ originates in the strambotti (one-stanza poems in hendecasyllables, usually an octave or sextet), one of the most ancient Italian popular verse forms, and rispetti (stanza of eight verses usually with the following rhymes abababcc
altern has become synonym for any marginalized or disempowered minority group, particularly on the grounds of gender and ethnicity‘ (354). ‚ The only full-size portraits I found in medieval Italian vernacular were in the anonymous ballads of ‘poesia giullaresca,‘ and in Poliziano’s ‘Una vecchia mi vagheggia.‘ Thanks to the longer format of the ballad, these poems provide more detailed descriptions of female ugliness. The descriptive convention of effictio or descriptio extrinsica does not appear in the poetry of Dante and in the Stilnovo, despite the fact that Brunetto Latini provided in his Tresor the most important and influential examples of descriptio pulchritudinis in his elaborate description of Iseult’s beauty (Dempsey, 56). Pozzi develops these concepts in two articles (‘Codici, stereotipi‘ and ‘Il ritratto della donna‘) that are summed up in ‘Temi, topoi, stereotipi.‘ In Arts and Beauty in the Middle Ages Umberto Eco delineates precisely proportion, light, and colour as the founding elements in the medieval aesthetics. The eleven stanzas containing Emilia’s description are translated into English in Charles Dempsey (59–60). In Ameto feminine portraits of the six nymphs all focus on harmony, balance, and proportion. Many female literary portraits are so similar because of their adherence to rhetorical norms and their imitation of conventional models such as Boccaccio’s; see, for example, Luigi Pulci’s Antea, Poliziano’s Simonetta, or Ariosto’s Alcina. Dempsey detects this same aspect in the pictorial representation of the female goddesses in Sandro Botticelli’s painting Primavera (60). Continue reading „For the category of the Other and the subaltern, see Young’s Postcolonialism, particularly part 5, ‘Formations of Postcolonial Theory“