7/14/2023 0 Comments Mediated artifact meaning3 Indeed, at a moment when paranoid imputation and hysterical victimization pervaded the city, public buildings were deemed menacing, and to touch them was supposed to evince crime. As if the novelistic reappraisal of the epidemic’s social toxins of phobia and blame was inadequate, Manzoni strikingly appended to the second edition of I promessi sposi his now celebrated historical essay, Storia della colonna infame (“History of the Infamous Column,” 1840), which directly took as its subject the crooked trials of the untori. ![]() That was enough.” 2 To touch architecture-in this case, to ascertain its material-was culpable enough to justify conviction. With measured irony, the novelist wrote: “As if to make sure that it was really marble, one of them reached out his hand to touch (“ toccare”) the stone. ![]() This story was witnessed and noted down, in Latin, by the seventeenth-century Italian chronicler Giuseppe Ripamonti, and was immortalized nearly two centuries later by Alessandro Manzoni in his monumental I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed,” 1827), who referenced Ripamonti’s eyewitness accounts of the 1630 plague of Milan as his major historical source. Wronged as members of the untori, or “plague greasers,” a mythical group widely believed to have surreptitiously spread the contagious disease by daubing buildings with poisonous ointments, the visitors would have been lynched had the magistrates not apprehended the three of them. Scowling at the alleged evildoers, they quickly overwhelmed the young Frenchmen with furor and violence. ![]() In wordless awe, they rubbed the Candoglia marble as if sight alone could no longer suffice, unaware of a leery crowd of locals who distrustfully clustered around them. Contemplating the bas-reliefs on the still-incomplete façade of the Duomo, the foreign admirers were seized with a sudden impulse to stroke the sculptural figures with their hands. As the plague smoldered in Milan in 1630, three French youths-a scholar, a painter, and an artisan-journeyed to the city from the north, in the hope of surveying famed Milanese monuments.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |