613

PAVEL KALINA
Czech Technical University, Prague

Italian Renaissance and Baroque
in Central European Context
Olomouc, 17th-18th October 2003

At the end of October 2003, the Art Centre of
the Palacky University in Olomouc, in col-
laboration with the Institute for Italian Stu-
dies of Warsaw University and Department for Ita-
lian Studies Department of Prague's Charles
University, organised an international and interdisci-
plinary conference, dedicated to the influence of Ita-
lian Renaissance and Baroque arts in Central
Europe. The symposium, whose official languages
were (experimentally!) Polish and Czech, was visi-
ted by musicologists, historians of literature and the-
atre, and art historians mainly from Poland and the
Czech lands of both Moravia and Bohemia. It distin-
guished itself by an extremely friendly and vivid at-
mosphere, demonstrating that the difference
between modern Polish and Czech languages does
not represent any serious communication barrier in
informal contact. Some papers, on the other hand,
were not entirely comprehensible to those who were
not just experts in the field, and in this respect langu-
age presented a certain barrier; especially when the
flow of speech was too fast or when it was not ac-
companied by digital projection, which permit the
combining ofpictures with short texts. The conferen-
ce was sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Founda-
tion of New York, Council of American Overseas
Research Centers of Washington, Fondation de la
Maison des Sciences de 1'Homme, Paris; Istituto Ita-
liano di Cultura, Prague and, naturally, by the Palacky
University itself. It is my opinion that gratitude must
be expressed to all these institutions for a meeting
which was, in fact, much more than another academic
undertaking. This brief survey of the conference to-
pics will, of course, be influenced by the fact that its
writer is himself an art historian, addrsssing the re-
adership of an art history journal. Thus, I only briefly
mention those papers whose content is outside my
own discpline, and focus on purely art historical

contributions, in the awareness that in this way I am
unfortunately removing the spell cast by this sympo-
sium.
The papers presented by musicologists were de-
voted to Italian influences in several Central Euro-
pean cultural centres and areas. Thus the paper of
Tomislav Volek, for example, titled Italian Baroque
Opera North of the Alps stressed the importance of
18th-century Prague, and especially the fact that the-
re was a continous tradition of opera. Similarly, the
presentations by his PhD student Milada Jonaśova
(The Transition of Venetian and Neapolitan Opera
Repertoire into the Czech Lands), as well as of Mo-
ravian and Polish, colleagues Jifi Sehnal (Italian
Musie in Moravia in the 1 7th and I8th centuries)
and Tomasz Jeż (The Reception of the Work of Ita-
lian Composers in Baroque Wrocław) followed the
varied paths of Italian inspiration in the formation of
a generał basis for Central European musical life
during the period. The contributions dedicated to the
history of literature brought a wider profusion of
approaches. Piotr Salwa in his The Literature of Ita-
lian Renaissance in Early-Modern Poland stressed
the contrast between the generał knowledge of Italian
Renaissance literature, a kind of knowledge which is
limited to the most famous names, and actual unawa-
reness of the proper texts, frequently unavailable in
modern translation. Anna Galewicz (The Book of
Cortegiano and the Polish Courtesan: the Geopoliti-
cal Preferencies) demonstrated how the Polish trans-
lation of Castiglione's famous book on cortegiano
was influenced by the geopolitical orientation of its
author, whereas Anna Klimkiewicz (The Poets of Ita-
lian Renaissance in Poland) scrutinised the history of
Polish translations of Italian Renaissance literature.
The contribution of Alessandro Catalano under title
Moltissimi sono i verseggiatori, pochi i Poeti. The
Role of Italian Literature in 17th- and 18th-century