- Info
Maria Del Sapio
Professor Emerita, Roma Tre University
Maria Del Sapio Garbero is Professor Emerita at Roma Tre University and the founding Honorary President of the Shakespeare’s Rome International Summer School (SRISS). She has done extensive work on Shakespeare as well as Victorian, modernist, and postmodern literature and culture. Among her Shakespearean publications, the edition of several collections of essays (La traduzione di Amleto nella cultura europea, 2002; Identity, Otherness and Empire in Shakespeare’s Rome, 2009; Questioning Bodies in Shakespeare’s Rome, 2010; Shakespeare and the New Science, 2016; Rome in Shakespeare’s World, 2018). She is the author of Il bene ritrovato. Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances (2005) and the newly issued Shakespeare’s Ruins and Myth of Rome (New York and London: Routledge, 2022).
Making Ruins/Hecuba Speak: Lucrece’s Pictorial Performance of Her Traumatized Body.
Archaeologically underwritten by the imagery of the burning Troy, the semantics of ruins defines all tropes of invasion, destruction, and appropriation, in Shakespeare’s Roman canon. In The Rape of Lucrece ruins are discovered as a heuristic tool, an instrument of self-anatomizing knowledge for Shakespeare’s two protagonists, Lucrece and Tarquin, but most radically by Lucrece. In my talk I concentrate on Lucrece’s long drawn ekphrasis of the Troy piece – a “piece of skilful painting” (vv. 1366-67) – which takes place after her rape, and the way it serves a transaction between painting and body, Hecuba’s image and Lucrece’s trauma: a pictorial exploration of the self, I argue, through which, before putting an end to her life, Lucrece transforms her own face into a disquieting and speaking ‘anatomy of ruin’. Interacting with the vocabulary of the visual arts −and the heuristic intrinsic nature of the Renaissance art of design (see Vasari’s conceptualization of design as the ‘father of all arts’) − the paper brings to the fore the intersemiotic aspect of Lucrece’s performance of her mourning and the way it grows into a modern and challenging experiment in self-representation.
