“L’equivoco del bianco: Percorsi interdisciplinari tra musica, letteratura e arti visive” by Cristina Santarelli

Cristina Santarelli, collaborator of CESEM’s Musical Iconography Thematic Line, is the author of a new book, “L’equivoco del bianco: Percorsi interdisciplinari tra musica, letteratura e arti visive”. The book is a publication of the “Libreria Musicale Italiana” and can be purchased online, via the publisher’s website. The book abstract indicates (free translation): “Between the 19th and 20th centuries, starting with Nietzsche, Rohde and Bachofen, there was a change of direction in the reinterpretation of the Hellenic world, seen no longer just as the place of Apollonian equilibrium, but as an ambivalent reality characterized by the manifestation of the irrational. Forms of thought, above all in the field of ritual practice: an aspect analyzed and highlighted by the comparative studies of Frazer, Dodds, Burkerdt and Kerényi, true dividers in scientific research, almost “sacralized” and untouchable as far as the ancient Mediterranean is concerned. Linked by cross-references, the ten essays that make up this book illustrate different aspects of that Nachleben of classical civilization that constitutes a constant reference parameter for literature, music and the visual arts, highlighting both Winckelmann’s somewhat icy reading and his edenic vision proposed by German romanticism, which are often contradicted by the emergence of a phenomenology of the unconscious capable of being a spokesman for the anxieties that mark modernity.”