Deborah Parker

Vasari's Ritratto di sei poeti toscani: A Visible Literary History

Giorgio Vasari’s Ritratto di sei poeti toscani, a painting rich in literary implications, illustrates six of Tuscany’s most distinguished poets engaged in animated discussions, surrounded by books and instruments of learning (fig. 1). While earlier studies have stressed the importance of viewing the painting’s significance in terms of sixteenthcentury cultural debates, the delineation of the issues involved has tended to be rather general. This essay seeks to clarify and further illuminate the complex of literary and cultural issues reflected in Vasari’s painting. In the choice of sitters and their arrangement, Vasari and his patron collaborated upon an invenzione that offers a remarkably sophisticated and self-conscious account of literary preeminence and genealogy. The subject or invenzione of the painting was likely suggested by Luca Martini, a distinguished figure in the court of Cosimo I. Martini commissioned the painting from Vasari on 10 July 1543, and the work was completed by September of 1544. Martini was one of the most active promoters of intellectual and cultural exchange between artists and writers in Florence: he helped Benedetto Varchi procure contributions for the Due lezzioni, a treatise on the paragone between sculpture and painting, and he was a well-known patron of the arts. Martini commissioned the first artistic work on a single episode from the Commedia, Pierino da Vinci’s 1548 relief of the death of Ugolino

Setting the Standard: The History of The Criterion Collection

Criterion’s success and the enduring nature of its mission to publish “important classic and contemporary films” can be credited to the strong figures among the company’s founders, beginning with Bob Stein.1 Prior to forming The Criterion Collection, Stein had become interested in work being done on optical videodiscs at places such as the Architecture Machine Group, later renamed the Media Lab, at MIT.2 Convinced that the medium’s capability to layer and store text, sound, and images could be effectively harnessed to engage the user more actively, Stein and his wife, Aleen Stein, decided to test these possibilities with film. They formed The Criterion Collection with Roger Smith, formerly a senior vice president of Warner Brothers Studio, himself interested in an entrepreneurial venture that would exploit the capabilities of laserdisc technology. The Steins had the ideas, and Smith the means and business connections to finance the making of the company’s first two titles.

The Function of Michelangelo in Vasari’s Lives

HOW IS MICHELANGELO presented in the biographies of other artists in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects? While Vasari’s 1550 and 1568 biographies of Michelangelo have been amply studied, less attention has been paid to the many references to the sculptor elsewhere in the Vite. References to Michelangelo in other biographies address a wide variety of subjects: artists who studied his work, Michelangelo’s evaluation of the work of other artists, his friendships and collaborations, antagonists who sought to thwart him, artists who influenced his work, and Vasari’s occasional disagreements with him. Although Vasari touches on some of these topics in the Life of Michelangelo, the individual biographies, taken together, provide a much fuller account of the rhythm of Michelangelo’s life and the nature of the artistic circles in which he moved. As this essay will demonstrate, a close examination of these references can provide considerable information about artistic practice in Renaissance Italy. The Michelangelo invoked throughout the other lives notably augments the “divino Michelagnolo” extolled in the sculptor’s own vita. Many of the stories about Michelangelo reported in other biographies are well known. My interest lies less in recalling them than in exploring the allusions as a group and showing how they contribute to the synchronic structure of the Lives. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the references to Michelangelo form a narrative, they do form a tendentious accumulation. Subjects recur and often appear in clusters over the course of two or more biographies: there may not be a

Illuminating Botticelli's Chart of Hell

This essay explores Botticelli’s Chart of Hell which represents an ingenious interpolation of the first canticle. The chart is one of ninety illustrations which the artist (1445–1510) executed for a lavish codex of the Commedia commissioned by Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici. Parker argues that one can read the map as one does the poem albeit in a distinctly different way. The essay seeks to provide a different perspective on the chart, one that explores Botticelli’s visual remediation of a complex poetic narrative and how the artist literalizes that which is allusive.

DVD Production and DVD Producers

While Manovich’s model allows us to give a brisk account of the DVD’s limitations compared with other new media, it does not open the discussion to a more elusive and important question: the relation of the DVD to the older medium of film. Here we must move from the intrinsic analysis of Manovich’s typology, which asks, “What is it?” to a more widely ranging, relational analysis, which asks, “What does it do?” The relation of the DVD and the film is not only fraught but also unstable, as film increasingly incorporates digital processes as well as a technical level of digital production. A film might well be digital in both apparent ways (special effects) and concealed ways (film stock transferred to digital for processing and then back to film for theatrical release). But for our purposes, in tracing the history of the DVD, we can limit the discussion by treating film and DVD as distinct media.

The Anthologizing Impulse

The format of the DVD was largely set by the laserdiscs released by The Criterion Collection in the 1980s and early 1990s, for which several producers established a durable repertoire of supplemental features. The persistence of this format, even as production has shifted from a company serving a small market of cinephiles to multinational film distributors addressing a mass market, suggests a kind of evolutionary fitness to these features. Even as DVD production has fallen more and more under the sway of marketing, the familiar supplements abide, albeit sometimes in a parodic form. Audio commentaries might lapse into diffuse exchanges of gratitude and congratulation among directors, actors, and producers, while “making-of” documentaries might become rehashes of the EPKs that accompanied the theatrical release of the movie or vanity productions to assuage exalted egos. But even such questionable efforts pay silent tribute to the originals from which they are derived.

The DVD and New Media

The acronym DVD is something of a mystery. Both “Digital Video Disc” and “Digital Versatile Disc” can be found in early media releases and references to the format—the latter, having the virtue of being a somewhat more precise description, has won out over time. The DVD Forum, an industry organization that defines format specifications, attempted to resolve the ambiguity by decreeing in 1999 that the letters stand for nothing at all, but use seems to have trumped this revisionist tale of origin.1 Nevertheless, as the salient aspects of the DVD are clearly “digital” and “disc,” a more general consideration of the history and implications of digital form is in order before we turn to the work of DVD producers and the supplements themselves. Where does the DVD fit into the landscape of new media?

Directorial Commentary and Film Study: The Case of Atom Egoyan

In the last chapter, our examination of intention drew upon the remarks and practices of directors in many audio commentaries. Our argument ranged among the rich archive of materials now available on DVD. In the present chapter, we would like to move from a study of cases to one case study, in which we focus not simply on statements of directors about a topic but on the deeper continuities in one director’s discussion of his work. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate another particular strength of directorial commentary. We believe that the form of the audio commentary has certain tendencies and that, as students of film, we can profit from this discourse in ways largely unavailable in other forms of discourse. In following the remarks of a director who provides a series of serious commentaries to his films, we can learn things that the question-and-answer format of an interview might preclude, that the argumentative protocols of an essay might mask, and that a brief conversational exchange might omit. The particular advantages of an audio commentary lie partly in its length, which allows for more expansive development, and also in the form’s tendency to elicit discussion that is more technical and pragmatic.

Scholarly Commentary and Film Study

Commentary by scholars has a long history, one now largely overlooked. But we might recall that the earliest manuscript books, in addition to performing the crucial scholarly tasks of transcribing and editing, provided commentary in the margins surrounding the text. These monkish lucubrations, the product of an age far more starved for information, sought largely to collect and treasure hard-won scraps of knowledge by which the abstruse references of ancient texts could be deciphered and understood.

Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poet

Introduction 1. A poetry of transgression: Bronzinos Rime in Burla 2. The comfort of friends in Bronzinos Canzoniere 3. The world of art in Bronzinos poems 4. The poetics of Bronzinos painting.