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January 2024 - January 2025
Giulia Zava was trained at Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, where she obtained her PhD in 2020 with Double Diploma at the Université de Genève. In 2021, she was awarded a research fellowship at the Fondation Barbier-Mueller pour l’étude de la poésie italienne de la Renaissance in Geneva. From 2021 to 2023, she was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. Her interests mainly cover 15th- and 16th-century Italy, facetious production and the forms of the comic in the early modern age, Petrarca and his reception in the 15th century, and the relationship between literature and art.
The Italian Quattrocento is characterised by a significant number of vernacular canzonieri (collections of poems), written after the death of Francesco Petrarca (1304 - 1374, author of the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta and fundamental model of Italian early modern poetry) and influenced by his example with different degrees of intentionality. The objective of the project is to analyse the iconography of the canzonieri in the 15th century: how can a miniaturist transform the lyricism of a poem into an image? How could the ineffability and the indeterminacy of the verses be visualised? How do the images relate to the ideologies of the poets and illuminators and to their historical and cultural contexts? The research is of particular interest in comparison with the Petrarchan view: the poet did not introduce (or even hypothesise) any illumination for his fragmenta, in contrast to the narrativity of his other vernacular work, the Trionfi, rich in visual and descriptive verbs. The project will explore the different ways in which 15th-century canzonieri were decorated and their relationship to Petrarchan iconography. Did Petrarchan illuminations pave the way for those of the collections inspired by his work? The project will provide a complete picture of the illumination of Italian vernacular canzonieri by analysing the historical, literary and cultural, social and medial contexts in which the individual texts and their illustrations were produced.