Gabriele d’Annunzio e Ivo Andrić: un confronto fra le poesie Consolazione e Il Ritorno

The present work aims to investigate the influence of Gabriele d’Annunzio on Serbian writer Ivo Andrić, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. The possibility of the influence of d’Annunzio on Andrić is analysed by a comparison between two poems, d’Annunzio’s Consolazione and Andrić’s Il Ritorno, focusing on their similarities and differences. The results represent the homage to the studies of prof. Željko Đurić who also considered the importance of d’Annunzio’s poem Consolazione in one of many of his pieces of research dedicated to the influence of d’Annunzio on Serbian and Croatian writers.

D’Annunzio e l'arte contemporanea europea

The essay considers three different aspects of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s encounters with artists and trends in contemporary foreign figurative arts in the early 1900s and during his stay in Paris, connected to the novel Il fuoco and the city of Venice, and new interests in scenography and theatre. They concern the famous German portraitist Franz von Lenbach and the image of Eleonora Duse, and the Art Nouveau decorative arts, in particular the glass vases by Emile Gallé that d’Annunzio saw and admired with the guide of his friend Robert de Montesquiou and the batik fabrics by the Dutch Agathe Wegerif-Gravestein. The topics are part of a large overall study on d’Annunzio and European contemporary arts from 1883 to 1915.

Il Vate e il suo doppio ironico

In Germany, beginning from the last decade of XIX century, the fame of Gabriele d’Annunzio grew increasingly thanks to a continue flow of translations, which made him one of the most celebrated writers of the Jahrhundertwende in the country of Goethe. Among the German admirers of the ‘Vate’ there were poets and novelists such as Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann. On the contrary, Thomas Mann’s appreciation of d’Annunzio was problematic: he disliked his aestheticism, his superficial Nietzschean Übermensch cult and moreover his far too refined, turgidly baroque prose. Nevertheless, he read attentively his colleague’s narratives – albeit using German translations, unlikely George and his senior brother Heinrich –, and undoubtedly made allusions – often in a deeply ironical sense – to d’Annunzio’s Triumph of Death in his novel Tristan. This essay reconstructs the cultural context of the relation between Mann and d’Annunzio, and offers a detailed comparison of selected passages and/or fragments from both works aimed at analysing the nature of Mann’s borrowings from the Italian writer, in order to show the ‘dialectical’ character of such a procedure.

D’Annunzio e Goethe: un intreccio elegiaco

D’Annunzio’s relationship with Goethe presents itself as a case of intertextuality. A hundred years after the publication of the Römische Elegien, d’Annunzio composes a poetry collection with the same title that in several places refers to the German text. Quotes are also found in the Chimera and in Il piacere.

Pour la douce France: un progetto editoriale

Pour la douce France is the title of a painting by Romaine Brooks, an American artist who lived in France during World War I, who became a close friend of D’Annunzio at the times of La Capponcina. The newspaper Le Figaro published a picture of the painting in its May 5, 1915 issue together with several poetical texts of D’Annunzio. These materials were then included into an elegant folder, put on sale the same year in order to raise funding for the Red Cross. However, that volume remained a project: the publication was supposed to bring together his other texts and lectures on war to be subsequently edited and published by the librarian and bibliophile Édouard Champion. The project eventually produced only some drafts, which are now preserved in a private collection in Switzerland.

Cabiria, opera d'arte autonoma

Cabiria is ‘an autonomous work of art’, between aesthetical and stylistic peculiarities. In order to legitimately recognise these specificities, we should not exalt the high level of the technical cleverness mixed with ‘tricks’ or mechanisms of technological artificiality. On the contrary, we should – first and foremost – be aware of the identity of the movie, expression of the figurative art which combines painting, sculpture, architecture, theatre and cinematograph, constitutive nucleus of a poetics of the marvellous, created by d’Annunzio’s fervid fantasy and by the director Pastrone, invention – though in a real historical context – precise as regards the chronological limits, of forms, visible signs, allegories and symbols of the Jungian ‘collective subconscious’. Visions of a tangible reality, concrete, recovered by the truth, but raised to the realm of dream, in the oneiric atmosphere of the unreal, conquer the human sensibility. It is like the idea by de Chirico, who thinks the picture as a mental theatre, stage and ideal container of a moving drama that conveys the familiarity of the represented environment with figurative clarity. Thus, the work of the master-director-demiurge becomes an organic solution of all the arts between innovation and modernity.

Una suggestione archilochea ne La Città Morta?

This note proposes the hypothesis that in La città morta, Act II, sc. I, d’Annunzio used a fragment of Archilochus, sent to us by Plutarch and Athenaeus.

L’epifania della gran meretrice: La Pisanelle e la lubrica arte di Moreau

La Pisanelle is a work in which the author realises his ideal of ‘total theatre’. Written in French, it presents all the typical elements of d’Annunzio’s work. In particular, it is characterised by a remarkable visual component and by the repetition of the topical of the dancer-harlot. So there is an evident link with the painting of Gustave Moreau, the painter known and loved by decadent artists, who has presented in his paintings many figures of femmes fatales, cruel and insensitive prostitutes. On this model d’Annunzio built the character of the protagonist of his work, and also the particular exotic scenography of the pièce.