Synopses & Reviews
This book presents the life stories of twelve extraordinary women who lived passionately and recorded in poetry their happiness and heartbreaks. Our English translations of their poetry are intended to make their poems seem to speak their thoughts, and we have included a CD with sixty-eight of their poems recorded in Italian literature, so that we do in fact hear their thoughts. In addition, several chapters take up some controversial art-historical problems centered on one or another of the women, suggesting possible solutions. This copiously illustrated, interdisciplinary book of 239 poems-poetry-in-context--- is not an anthology; together with the CD of readings, and the challenging art-historical discussions of several paintings, it is unique. There is no other similar book.
Review
"especially suitable for classroom use"
Synopsis
Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune presents the life stories of twelve extraordinary women who lived passionately and recorded in poetry their happiness and heartbreaks. The setting is the Italian sixteenth century, the cinquecento, the period of the High Renaissance.
In twelve chapters -- one for each woman -- the focus is on noblewomen, bourgeois women, and courtesans. What were they like, and what was life like for them? This was a world ruled by dukes in whose splendid courts entertainment was lavish, love was the topic of choice in formalized conversations among brilliant, erudite, witty courtiers and ladies, and serious intellectual game-playing at courts and literary academies engaged the rich, the powerful, and the gifted.
But no matter how different from each other these twelve women were and how different the regions of Italy in which they lived, they all shared the heritage of culture that had flourished in the ancient Mediterranean world and was again flourishing with renewed vigor, and all aspired to making their names immortal through poetry.
Their lives unfolded in the glitter of the ducal courts; they were accepted in intellectual academies and almost forgiven for being intelligent and learned. Their poetry speaks of their hopes, fears, anxieties, and, above all, their loves, the blissful woe that was at once the reward and the punishment for their generous-spirited feelings for men who, platonically correct, idealized them but, in truth, hardly appreciated them -- even betrayed them.
This copiously illustrated volume offers an unusual insight into how it felt to be a woman in the sixteenth century -- if, that is, one was among the aristocracy or upper bourgeoisie, andhad more than a rudimentary education.
Besides offering 239 poems, both in the original Italian and in translation, the text also addresses challenging art-historical problems involving one or another of the women and suggests possible solutions.
The CD included with the volume presents 68 of the poems recorded in the original Italian by distinguished Italian-born scholars of Italian literature.
About the Author
IRMA B. JAFFE's books include Joseph Stella; Baroque Art and the Jesuit Contribution; The Italian Presence in American Art; Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets; and Giuseppe Betussi and Eleanora Falletti, Polygraph and Poet at the Dawn of Popular Literature. The recipient of many awards and grants, she founded the department of Art and Music at Fordham University, where she is Professor Emerita of Art History.