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Fortuna delle eroine d'un tempo. Da Omero a Villon
Fernandelli, Marco
2008
Abstract
In catalogic poetry and more specifically in genealogical poetry, the extensive learned content takes a form which, by means of its very organization, is a guarantee of truth: it consists of an appropriate limitation and disposition of the internal parts of the work, but also requires that the content be framed as appropriate into the organic culture of its community. This means placing the catalogic complex from the outside into a temporal order, whose dimension and internal articulation the catalogue itself will constitute and determine. The Catalogue of Heroines is part of a plan which aims at a full integration of opposites: male-female, ancient heroes-ancient heroines; time of death -time of life; form of genealogical catalogue - form of epic mimesis. Because of its fluidity, the catalogue is open to reworkings: in a series of texts which derive from Homer and which will be considered in this paper - the great fresco by Polignotus; book VI of the Aeneid; the V canto of Dante’s Inferno, François Villon’s ballad Des dames du temps jadis - the catalogue of heroines remains a necessary tool for the representation of the Underworld, while the technique of combination of the codes - catalogic and narrative - evolves by increasingly concentrating on the sapiential importance of the catalogue while limiting its formal autonomy.