{"id":147402,"date":"2016-03-29T16:37:50","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T20:37:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/?p=147402"},"modified":"2016-04-22T15:15:04","modified_gmt":"2016-04-22T19:15:04","slug":"parting-words","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/newscenter\/parting-words\/","title":{"rendered":"Parting words: Leave-taking during the Renaissance"},"content":{"rendered":"

Literary critic Jane Tylus considers Renaissance rituals of separation\u2014and why bidding farewell was so hard<\/h2>\n

Saying good-bye\u2014in life and in art\u2014isn\u2019t easy.<\/p>\n

For Jane Tylus, a professor of Italian studies and comparative literature at New York University, the idea that there\u2019s a convergence between both forms of leave-taking became clear when she saw a 15th<\/sup>-century painting that she describes as \u201cprobably the most beautiful and thought-provoking painting I\u2019ve seen in a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The Humanities Center<\/a> welcomes Jane Tylus, the 2016 keynote speaker for the Ferrari Humanities Symposia, an annual event designed to highlight the broad interdisciplinary connections that are fundamental to a liberal arts education. The director of NYU\u2019s Center for the Humanities, and a professor of Italian studies and comparative literature, she will take part in sessions from April 4 to 6.<\/p>\n

University Trustee Bernard Ferrari \u201970, \u201974M (MD) and his wife, Linda Gaddis Ferrari, established the symposia to broaden the liberal education of the University\u2019s undergraduates, enhance the experience of graduate students, and expand the connections of University faculty with other scholars from around the world. Established in 2012, the series has hosted speakers including Anthony Grafton and Stephen Greenblatt.<\/p><\/div>\n

It was Congedo della Vergine<\/em>, by Sano di Pietro, at Villa I Tatti, near Florence. The painting depicts a non-Biblical story of the Virgin Mary\u2019s leave-taking from the disciples as she prepares to be reunited with Jesus Christ. In one panel of the painting, Saint Peter stands at the threshold of her house\u2014there to say good-bye, but hesitating at the moment of doing so.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis gesture of Saint Peter, who knows what is in front of him, but isn\u2019t ready to go in just yet\u2014this, to me, captures the posture of the poet who is ready to say good-bye to a poem but hasn\u2019t sent it off yet,\u201d says Tylus, who also is faculty director of the NYU Center for the Humanities. Like Saint Peter, she says, the artist stands before a work, declaring, \u201c\u2018I\u2019m about to say good-bye\u2014but not yet. I can\u2019t bear to say good-bye yet.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The painting led Tylus to what she calls a \u201cnew way of thinking\u201d about \u201cwhat a lot of visual and literary art is doing in the Renaissance.\u201d<\/p>\n

As this year\u2019s keynote speaker for the Ferrari Humanities Symposia<\/a>, Tylus will outline some of her new ways of thinking about how artists and others in early modern Europe depicted rituals of separation in a public talk, \u201cSaying Good-bye in the Renaissance: Leave-Taking as a Work of Art,\u201d on April 5. The keynote lecture is one piece of a three-day visit that involves a variety of activities, including a meeting with humanities graduate students, a public talk on the future of the humanities, and a presentation and roundtable conversation on the city in history with faculty and students from a multidisciplinary undergraduate course, Cities: Contested Spaces.<\/p>\n

In her recent work, Tylus has written about the most significant women writers in Renaissance Italy, including Catherine of Siena, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, and Gaspara Stampa. Thomas Hahn, a professor of English and the organizer of the symposium, praises Tylus\u2019s skill as a translator whose work \u201cextends far beyond linguistic expertise and elegance\u201d in books such as Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literacy, Literature, and the Signs of Others <\/em>(Chicago, 2009)\u2014winner of the Modern Language Association\u2019s Howard R. Marraro Prize\u2014and Siena: City of Secrets <\/em>(Chicago, 2015).<\/p>\n

\u201cHer purpose in these books wasn\u2019t just to recover the past but to situate these writers alongside the monuments and poetry that we all regard as a common heritage\u2014for example, the work of Dante, Petrarch, and Michelangelo,\u201d he says. \u201cShe \u2018translates\u2019 not just the words of individual writers, but a full sense of an age, a city, a work of art.\u201d<\/p>\n

The topic of Tylus\u2019s keynote address was spurred by personal experience: coming to terms with the loss of parents and reflections on mourning and grieving. But her scholar\u2019s mind soon ranged beyond her private sadness to thoughts about how contemporary beliefs and practices surrounding loss differ from what they were centuries ago.<\/p>\n

A practicing Catholic, Tylus says she realized that \u201cin my life, there\u2019s a lot more continuity with the Middle Ages. There are sharp differences that Protestantism introduces to Catholic practices of not really saying good-bye.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the Protestant Reformation came enormous departures from Catholic religious practice, including a rejection of the idea of purgatory, where souls would be purified before ascending to heaven. Practices such as allowing the living to shorten, through paying for indulgences, the deceased\u2019s time in purgatory meant that relationships continued, in some fashion, after death, Tylus says.<\/p>\n

At the same time, artists were carrying on a long poetic tradition of pausing before the end of a work to contemplate the act of letting go. With many names\u2014among them, the congedo<\/em> in Italian and the envoi<\/em> in French\u2014the end of a poem was often a place where poets would turn to address the work itself and consider what might happen to it once it leaves them.<\/p>\n

Michelangelo\u2019s non finito<\/em>, or unfinished, sculptures for the tomb of Pope Julius II\u2014itself unfinished\u2014are one example Tylus points to of a similar phenomenon in the visual arts. The figures \u201clook like they\u2019re imprisoned in the stone because they\u2019re not finished,\u201d she says. Late in his life, Michelangelo wrote a series of sonnets about his art\u2019s lack of value when it comes to his life beyond death. \u201cIt\u2019s a sad kind of rejection of the meaning he\u2019s had as an artist, as he\u2019s also saying good-bye to that life itself in his poems,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Produced a century later, Shakespeare\u2019s work is \u201criddled with questions about when and how we say good-bye to loved ones,\u201d she says. One particularly well-known example is Polonius\u2019s comically excessive leave-taking from son Laertes in Hamlet<\/em>, but Tylus finds particular meaning in the famous closing speech of Shakespeare\u2019s final play, The Tempest<\/em>. Prospero implores the audience to \u201crelease me from my bands\/With the help of your good hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a real sense that Prospero is going to die and is calling to the audience for life beyond death,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

For Michelangelo, who was heavily influenced by some tenets of the Reformation, these radically new ideas struck at the roots of a sense of human community extending beyond death.<\/p>\n

What was at stake, Tylus says, was nothing less than \u201cthe worth of a work of art in the face of the Reformation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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