Parlare dell'arte nel Trecento

The literature of the Italian Trecento is rich in artists’ anecdotes, stories and ekphrasis, in which works of art play an important role. This publication addresses how art and artists were talked about just before and during the period when art theory was being established as a literary genre. It focuses on the question of "art conversations" on site, tracing their inclusion in literary reflections, for instance in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Petrarch’s sonnets or Boccaccio’s and Sacchetti’s novellas. Alongside the rhetorical and topical dimensions of the texts, it examines the interplay and competition between words and visual arts, as well as views about art, and how they can be understood in the language and practices of contemporaneous artists’ workshops.