Representations Of Rome Research Articles

Shall i Compare Thee? Sonnet 18 and Robert Greene’s Menaphon

To what should we compare the first verse of what Helen Vendler justly calls ‘the most familiar’ of Shakespeare’s sonnets?1 Stephen Booth’s claim that ‘Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?’ ‘plays on the proverbial comparative formula “as good as one shall see in a summer’s day”’ is uncontroversial.2 But is the wording of Sonnet 18’s rhetorical question, introduced by a phrase that, in slightly varying forms, was presumably heard in everyday conversation, also rooted in a particular Elizabethan or Jacobean text? Two passages from the Geneva Bible seem likely candidates. Lamentations 2:13—‘What thi[n]g shal I co[m]pare to thee, o daughter Ierusalém … ?’—is quickly followed by a second question concerning the devastated city that might plausibly be linked to the sonnet’s anxiety about time’s threat to the fair young man: ‘Is this the citie that men call, The perfection of beautie, and the ioye of the whole earth?’ (2:15)3 It could be said of Jerusalem what A. Kent Hieatt, in his study of the commerce between Spenser’s Ruines of Rome and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, says of the former’s representation of Rome: ‘Shakespeare discerningly assimilated the central image … the ancient exemplary city … and integrally transmuted it into an image of the exemplary physically and morally vulnerable beloved’.4 Another possibility is Luke 13:18: ‘What is the kingdome of God like? or whereto shal I compare it?’ Could Jesus’s reply to his own question—‘It is like a graine of mustarde seed, which a man toke and sowed in his garden, and it grewe, and waxed a great tre, and the foules of the heaven made nestes in the branches thereof’ (13:19)—have had any bearing on Shakespeare’s reply to his, which also enlists a horticultural figure, the ‘eternall lines’ in which ‘to time thou grow’st’, in the service of a vision of immortality?5

The Spectacular Commodification of Rome in Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza

ABSTRACT This essay explores the postmodern image economy with regard to the depiction of Rome as a global city of the spectacle in Paolo Sorrentino’s La grande bellezza. It argues that an incongruity exists between the director’s auteurist and modernist aspirations to offer a film on Rome that provides depth models of beauty and truth while employing commodifying postmodernist film strategies and techniques of enchantment by spectacle. In other words, how does Sorrentino’s representation of Rome as a beautiful eternal city, a space not just overloaded but purposely overcoded with traces of the past, enter into dialogue with Rome as the seat of the debased and banalised image regime of our contemporary society of the spectacle first delineated by Guy Debord? Fellini is used as a point of comparison to investigate how Sorrentino grapples with similar dilemmas but in a substantially more advanced postmodern image regime of commodification involving advertising aesthetics, heritage filmmaking, and a diminished sense of historical immediacy.

A Poetic Caesar in Lucan's <em>Pharsalia</em>

This paper examines the poetic qualities of Caesar's speech in two episodes from Lucan's Pharsalia and argues that Caesar attempts to rival Lucan in the poetic representation of Rome's past. A close reading of Caesar's speech to Amyclas (5.532–7) reveals a density and complexity of figurative language that justifies the narrator's assessment of Caesar as indocilis privata loqui (5.539). In his simile comparing Pompey to a Hyrcanian tiger cub (1.324–35), Caesar employs a particularly Lucanian poetics: rhetorical, violent and tendentious. However, Lucan ultimately gets the better of his character by appealing to the reader's knowledge of Rome's literary (Vergilian) past.

Polychronia – negotiating the popular representation of a common past in Assassin’s Creed

Abstract Several of the most successful large-scale digital simulations in recent years are found in the immensely popular game series Assassin’s Creed, developed by Ubisoft. A variety of monuments and places figure prominently throughout the series, but at different levels of detail and accuracy. While not presenting a thoroughly imagined representation of any time period or place, these recreations emphasize the epistemological impact of particular visual modes when communicating the past, representing the collective idea of a place or time, rather than archaeological or historical facts. The time and spaces presented in the game series give us an opportunity to study how representations of the past can be assembled to be recognizable to a wide audience. This, in turn, gives us insight into the mechanics of cultural memory. In order to analyse these mechanics, we analyse the representation of the city of Rome created for Assassin’s Creed 2: Brotherhood, the third main instalment of the series. Not only has Rome been the subject of several centuries of archaeological reconstructions, but because of the countless popular representations available, the city holds a strong position in the public consciousness. In Ubisoft’s version of Rome, the archaeological record and popular imagination meet, are combined and sometimes collide. We argue that Rome as we encounter it here amounts to a concept that we call ‘polychronia’, a place where several timelines exist simultaneously in an organized manner to appeal to a common understanding. As a polychronia, the representation of Rome is made more recognizable to the recipient than a representation solely reflecting expert knowledge.

Roman Fever: Anarchiving Eternal Rome, from Roman Holiday to Petrolio

Canonical interpretations and representations of Rome appear to be dependent on its image as the ‘Eternal City’. This article presents these images as a dominant narrative that guides the ‘archive’ of the city’s images. Drawing on theoretical concepts that threaten the constitution of such an archive, this article reads queer images of Rome as disturbances that go against the ‘eternal’ archiving principle. With reference to Roman Holiday, it illustrates the close intertwining of eternality in Rome with heteronormativity and reproductive futurity. This connection allows the reading of queer texts and images, such as Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s novel Petrolio, as what we call ‘Roman fever’, that is, the deactivation of ‘eternality’ as the central driver of Rome’s archive.

Roman Fever: Anarchiving Eternal Rome, from Roman Holiday to Petrolio

Canonical interpretations and representations of Rome appear to be dependent on its image as the ‘Eternal City’. This article presents these images as a dominant narrative that guides the ‘archive’...

Patrons of Rome: the cult of Sts Peter and Paul at court and in the city in the fourth and fifth centuries

This paper will focus primarily on that most potent of all symbols of the new Christian city of Rome, the cult of Peter embodied in the apostolic memoria on the Vatican Hill. It will consider the roles of emperor, pope and senatorial aristocracy in its promotion in the fourth and fifth centuries, together with the interconnected development of the cult of Rome's other apostle, Paul, entombed to the south of the city on the Via Ostiense. In particular, apostolic cult, the key element in the representation of Rome as the Christian caput urbium, will be examined in relation to the renewed imperial engagement with Rome evident from the late fourth century through to the last years of the western empire.

Learning to Scrawl: The Evolutionary Strain in Titus Andronicus

Much has been written on the semiotic obsessions of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, less on their relationship with matters of theme. This paper argues first that the play’s engagement with the mutual relationships between language, labour and society draws on classical and early modern accounts of the symbiotic evolution of language and civilised society. It then suggests that the play’s particular rhetorical and kinesiological focus on hand and tongue anticipates the metonymies deployed in Darwinian accounts of human evolution. Key to this reading is the well-known scrawl/scrowl crux: far from opting for a definitive, exclusive meaning, the paper proposes that the semantic uncertainty unleashed at the crux mimics the play’s representation of Rome’s and, in the last resort, humanity’s hesitation between literate civilization and creeping barbarism. No longer a merely lexical quibble over the competing, variously obsolescent and emergent, notions of crawling, gesticulating and scribbling, the crux becomes the touchstone of an evolutionary reading of the play. Just as scrawl/scrowl debates endlessly between different stages on the human evolutionary scale, so Titus Andronicus leaves its readers and audience in uneasy contemplation of Rome’s¬ – and their own – perpetual teetering on the brink of degradation.

Venice and Rome in the Addresses and Dispatches of Sir Henry Wotton: First English Embassy to Venice, 1604–1610

Sir Henry Wotton served as first English ambassador to Venice in three successive missions - from 1604 to 1610, 1616 to 1619, and again from 1621 to 1623 - where he effected a two-way fashioning of Venice to England and England to Venice.1 Whilst in Venice he also sought to further English interests by strategically engaging various other autonomous, distinct, yet interrelated, Italian urban locations, such as Rome, Florence, and Padua. This article looks primarily at how Wotton handled affairs in Venice by monitoring activities at Rome and deploying strategic representations of Rome. The two sections of this article examine different but related aspects of Wotton's activities in Venice in this respect. The first section looks in part at Wotton as supervisor of English travellers to Italy, and particularly Rome, and sets him alongside two other contemporary travellers to Italy: Anthony Munday, who infiltrated the English College at Rome in 1579 and exposed the subversive activities there of Jesuits and English scholars;2 and Thomas Coryat, who tried to cultivate Wotton's acquaintance in Venice in 1608, and whose presence there testifies to an increase in English travel to the signory in the wake of Wotton's appointment. 3 The second section considers Wotton's attempts to stir up anti-Papal feeling during a specific historical incident that dominated his first embassy: the Venetian-Papal split of 1606-07 in which Rome placed Venice under an interdict for its perceived infringement of ecclesiastical liberties - a jurisdictional conflict involving a protracted consideration of the proper limits of secular and religious authority.4Sources of tension between Venice and the Papacy were exacerbated on 17 April 1606, when Pope Paul V issued Venice with a bull of Interdict and Excommunication for its refusal to surrender the two clerics arrested on criminal charges and to annul its decrees prohibiting both the holding of public office by priests and the erecting of new churches without governmental consent. Venice issued an edit declaring the bull to be invalid, dismissed the Papal Nuncio, and expelled the Jesuits from its territories, partly because their obedience to the Pope was seen to challenge their allegiance to the state. Paolo (Pietro) Sarpi stood as advisor to, and apologist for, the republic, his Consolatione della Mente, translated as Rights of Sovereigns and Subjects (1722),5 challenging Rome's encroachments of power, identifying limits to Papal jurisdiction, and reassuring the republic of the invalidity of the excommunication, which he saw as not only undeserved (Venice not having departed from the Catholic faith), but also as a misuse of a spiritual weapon to serve the Pope's temporal ambitions.6 As the second section of this article shows, Wotton sought to exploit this split with the Papacy, and to use it further to cement links between Venice and England, by utilising what scholars call 'the Myth of Venice', which had taken shape by accumulation around discrete historical events that it also served to help navigate.7 Involved in this 'Myth of Venice' were the combined features of its unique constitution, its political independence, and its longevity. There existed a perceived link between the harmonious operation and unimpeachable justice of Venice's governmental system and its continued freedom from external oppression. James Howell's S.PQ.V. A Survay of the Signorie of Venice (1651) begins with a verse 'Upon the Citty and Signorie of VENICE' that includes the lines:Could any State on Earth Immortall be,Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayd;Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,Nor any Forren mixtures can endure ....8Howell is typical in attributing Venice's duration to the soundness of her constitution, and in using the metaphor of her virginity to signal her resistance to foreign domination. …

Rome Personified, Rome Epitomized: Representations of Rome in the Poetry of the Early Fifth Century

THE LAST YEARS OF THE FOURTH AND THE BEGINNING of the fifth century (the reigns of Theodosius and his sons) mark a crucial stage in the Christianization of Rome. 1 The hold of the city and all it stood for on the imagination of the ruling classes was as strong as ever. But Theodosian legislation had definitively established the dominance of Christianity in the empire, and even in Rome the aristocracy was becoming progres- sively more Christian. 2 These changing circumstances find expression in the way Rome was represented in contemporary literature. While still indebted to the traditional language of the laudes Romae and to well- established literary traditions, the authors of the period find new ways to inflect the image of Rome that mirror their differing religious and cul- tural allegiances. Three poets make the largest contributions to that evolution in the representation of Rome. Claudius Claudianus was born in Alexandria (c. 370) but came to Rome in 394. His first Latin poem celebrated the consuls of 395, Probinus and Olybrius, but thereafter most of his poems served the interests of his patron and the emperor Honorius' chief min- ister, the Vandal general Stilicho. Of particular importance for the repre- sentation of Rome are his consular panegyrics, for the consulships of Honorius (396, 398, and 404) and Stilicho (400), and his two historical epics on the campaigns against the African warlord Gildo (De bello Gildonico 398) and against Alaric in 401-402 (De bello Getico 402). Claudian wrote his last dated poem in 404. Nothing is heard of him after that date and it is likely he died soon thereafter. Claudian's Christian contemporary, Aurelius Prudentius Clemens, was born, according to the verse preface he wrote to his collected works, in 348. After a successful career in the imperial administration, he

Du Bellay, poet of Rome, in Rome

This paper examines the representations of Rome in the poetry of Joachim Du Belly. During his stay in Rome from 1553-1557, the poet writes four collections of poetry that he publishes upon his return to France. Du Bellay’s real and poetic persona describes the voyage to an exile in Rome through his own experience and by different means of imitation. The places he depicts are both real and idealized, both sites and sights. Visibility in writing is assured by enargeia, a rhetoric figure that makes readers believe that they see what they read. Du Bellay ostensibly exploits this possibility. He also makes ample use of another rhetoric device, antonomasia. This figure allows the poet to transgress the lines between proper and common names and to expose the quest for “Rome in Rome” by combining images of ancient splendor and present decay. The main objective is to examine how the portrait of Rome, both by fictions and facts, informs the shaping of Renaissance France.