The Ancient Mediterranean Sea in Modern Visual and Performing Arts: Sailing in Troubled Waters by Rosario Rovira Guardiola
2018; Classical Association of the Middle West and South; Volume: 114; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tcj.2018.0004
ISSN2327-5812
Autores Tópico(s)Classical Antiquity Studies
Resumo382 BOOKREVIEWS The Ancient Mediterranean Sea in Modern Visual and Performing Arts: Sailing in Troubled Waters. Edited by ROSARIO ROVIRA GUARDIOLA. Imagines: Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts. London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. xv + 325. Hardback, $122.00. ISBN 978-1474 -29859-9. This volume, the second in Bloomsbury’s series Imagines–Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts, presents several of the papers delivered at the conference “Sailing in Troubled Waters” in Faro, October 2014. To judge from this collection, even though the conference took representations of the Mediterranean as its organizing principal, many of the papers gave only a token nod to the topic. The editor, Rosario Rovira Guardiola, has attempted to organize the published papers thematically, but here, too, no consistency results. The character of the contributions varies widely, from narrowly focused research-based studies through general overviews of an artist’s oeuvre or a category of works to a report on a project to aid troubled children. In her introduction the editor does try to explain her thinking about how to organize the volume, and she briefly summarizes each chapter. The contributors have not engaged each other’s work, even when they treat closely related topics; in only one instance does one essay cross-reference another. Therefore the value of this collection derives solely from the individual parts. The following characterizations followmy own thematicorganization. Federico Ugolini (“Roman Adriatic Ports and the Antiquarian Tradition”) shows how early modern artists illustrating the ancient ports of Ravenna and Rimini drew first on the antiquarian tradition and then early archaeological investigation.Theydidsoin order toserve the interests of local communities and interested states in establishing identity and controlling the Adriatic. Marco Benoît Carbone (“Chronotopes of Hellenic Antiquity: The Strait of Reggio and Messina in Documents from the Grand Tour Era”) and Dorit Engster (“Quod mare non novit, quae nescit Ariona tellus? [Ov. Fast. II, 83]”) catalog perceptions of an exotic south of Italy—“at once exotically beautiful yet subtly threatening” (33)—and artistic and literary references to dolphin-riders from the ancient Minoans throughOvidtothe Romantics,respectively. Several chapters treat cinema. Francisco Salvador Ventura puts Mur Oti’s Fedra (1956) in the context of Franco’s Spain as he analyzes the role of the sea as actor as well as background in the film (“The Eternal Words of the Latin Sea”) and Óscar Lapeña Marchena surveys films that include the nostos-theme, focusing on Franco Piavoli’s primitivist Nostos, il ritorno (1990: “Ulysses in the BOOKREVIEWS 383 Cinema”). Cecilia Ricci points out how the sea plays an important role in many films, for example as a metaphor for change (Ben-Hur films), a place of conflict (the Battle of Actium in Cleopatra films) or a metaphor for decline (Fellini’s Satyricon: “Cinematic Romans and the Mediterranean Sea”), while Monica S. Cyrino focuses specifically on representations of the Battle of Actium, especially in Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) and the television series Rome (2005–7: “Screening the Battle of Actium: Naval Victory, Erotic Tragedy and the Birth of an Empire”). A number of the essays turn to the performing arts and provide important descriptions of otherwise ephemeral productions. After pointing out a shift from the Enlightenment and Romantic view of the Mediterranean as abridge between the modern and classical world to more recent perceptions of it as a dividing and fragmenting force, Sotera Fornaro describes contemporary plays that use the latter image, especially with reference to the refugee crisis (Odyssee Europa, 2010,andDieSchutzbefohlenen,Elfriede Jelinek,2013).Fornaroshows how the sea can become a tomb for refugees, not merely an obstacle, and the clashing metal plates of European cities endanger and disorient as much as the sea does (“A Sea of Metal Plates: Images of the Mediterranean from the Eighteenth Century until Post-Modern Theatre”). Erika Notti and Martina Treu survey many plays—mostly recent and many also referencing the refugee crisis—that draw on the Odyssey, organized by episodes in Odysseus’s journey (“Sailors on Board, Heroes en route: From the Aegean World to Modern Stage”). Jesús Carruesco and Montserrat Reig describe the 2010 performance in the Salzburg Festival of Wolfgang Rihm’s Nietzschean Dionysos: Szenen und...
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