Now that we have imagined this hypothetical picture, I will try to put myself in this student’s shoes. In fact, I am writing these very lines in a small town in southern Monferrato, 14.5 miles away from Alessandria, a city with 90,000 inhabitants, a public library, an art gallery, and a museum. The closest university is one hour away in Genoa, and in an hour and a half I can travel to Turin or Pavia, and in three to Bologna. This location already puts me in a privileged situation, but for this experiment I will not take advantage of the university libraries. I will work only in Alessandria.
I will accept the precise challenge posed to our hypothetical student by his hypothetical professor, and research the concept of metaphor in Italian baroque treatise writing. As I have never specifically studied this topic, I am adequately unprepared. However, I am not a complete virgin on this topic, because I do have experience with aesthetics and rhetoric. For example, I am aware of recent Italian publications on the baroque period by
Giovanni Getto, Luciano Anceschi, and Ezio Raimondi. I also know of Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian telescope) by Emanuele Tesauro, a seventeenth-century treatise that discusses these concepts extensively. But at a minimum our student should have similar knowledge. By the end of the third year he will have completed some relevant courses and, if he had some previous contact with the aforementioned professor, he will have read some of the professor’s work in which these sources are mentioned. In any case, to make the experiment more rigorous, I will presume to know nothing of what I know. I will limit myself to my high school knowledge: I know that the baroque has something to do with seventeenth-century art and literature, and that the metaphor is a rhetorical figure. That’s all.
I choose to dedicate three afternoons to the preliminary research, from three to six p.m. I have a total of nine hours at my disposal. In nine hours I cannot read many books, but I can carry out a preliminary bibliographical investigation. In these nine hours, I will complete all the work that is documented in the following pages. I do not intend to offer this experiment as a model of a complete and satisfactory work, but rather to illustrate the introductory research I will need to complete my final thesis.
As I have outlined in section 3.2.1, upon entering the library I have three paths before me:
1. I can examine the subject catalog. I can look for the following entries: “Italian (literature),” “(Italian) literature,” “aesthetics,” “seventeenth century,” “baroque period,” “metaphor,” “rhetoric,” “treatise writers,” and “poetics.”4 The library has two catalogs, one old and one updated, both divided by subject and author. They have not yet been merged, so I must search both. Here I might make an imprudent calculation: if I am looking for a nineteenth-century work, I might assume that it resides in the old catalog. This is a mistake. If the library purchased the work a year ago from an antique shop, it will be in the new catalog. The only certainty is that any book published in the last ten years will be in the new catalog.
2. I can search the reference section for encyclopedias and histories ofliterature. In histories of literature (or aesthetics) I must look for the chapter on the seventeenth century or on the baroque period. I can search encyclopedias for “seventeenth century,” “baroque period,” “metaphor,” “poetics,” “aesthetics,” etc., as I would in the subject catalog.
3. I can interrogate the librarian. I discard this possibility immediatelyboth because it is the easiest and because it would compromise the integrity of this experiment. I do in fact know the librarian, and when I tell him what I am doing, he barrages me with a series of titles of bibliographical indexes available to him, even some in German and English. Were I not engaged in this experiment, I would immediately explore these possibilities. However, I do not take his advice into consideration. The librarian also offers me special borrowing privileges for a large number of books, but I refuse with courtesy, and from now on speak only with the assistants, attempting to adhere to the allotted time and challenges faced by my hypothetical student.
I decide to start from the subject catalog. Unfortunately, I am immediately exceptionally lucky, and this threatens the integrity of the experiment. Under the entry “metaphor” I find Giuseppe Conte, La metafora barocca. Saggio sulle poetiche del Seicento (The baroque metaphor: Essay on seventeenth-century poetics) (Milan: Mursia, 1972). This book is essentially my thesis realized. If I were dishonest, I would simply copy it, but this would be foolish because my (hypothetical) advisor probably also knows this book. This book will make it difficult to write a truly original thesis, because I am wasting my time if I fail to say something new and different. But if I want to write an honest literature review, this book could provide a straightforward starting point.
The book is defective in that it does not have a comprehensive bibliography, but it has a thick section of notes at the end of each chapter, including not only references but also descriptions and reviews of the sources. From it I find references to roughly 50 titles, even after omitting works of contemporary aesthetics and semiotics that do not strictly relate to my topic. (However, the sources I have omitted may illuminate relationships between my topic and current issues. As we shall see later, I could use them to imagine a slightly different thesis that involves the relationships between the baroque and contemporary aesthetics.) These 50 titles, all of which are specifically on the baroque, could provide a preliminary set of index cards that I could use later to explore the author catalog. However, I decide to forgo this line of research. The stroke of luck is too singular, and may jeopardize the integrity of my experiment. Therefore, I proceed as if the library did not own Conte’s book.
To work more methodically, I decide to take the second path mentioned above. I enter the reference room and begin to explore the reference texts, specifically the Enciclopedia Treccani (Treccani encyclopedia). Although this encyclopedia contains an entry for “Baroque Art” that is entirely devoted to the figurative arts, there is no entry for “Baroque.” The reason for this absence becomes clear when I notice that the “B” volume was published in 1930: the reassessment of the baroque had not yet commenced. I then think to search for “Secentismo,” a term used to describe the elaborate style characteristic of seventeenth-century European literature. For a long time, this term had a certain negative connotation, but it could have inspired the encyclopedia listing in 1930, during a period largely influenced by the philosopher Benedetto Croce’s diffidence toward the baroque period.
And here I receive a welcome surprise: a thorough, extensive, and mindful entry that documents all the questions of the period, from the Italian baroque theorists and poets such as Giambattista Marino and Emanuele Tesauro to the examples of the baroque style in other countries (B. Gracián, J. Lyly, L. de Góngora, R. Crashaw, etc.), complete with excellent quotes and a juicy bibliography. I look at the date of publication, which is 1936; I look at the author’s name and discover that it is Mario Praz, the best specialist during that period (and, for many subjects, he is still the best). Even if our hypothetical student is unaware of Praz’s greatness and unique critical subtlety, he will nonetheless realize that the entry is stimulating, and he will decide to index it more thoroughly later. For now, I proceed to the bibliography and notice that this Praz, who has written such an excellent entry, has also written two books on the topic: Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra (Secentismo and Marinism in England) in 1925, and Studi sul concettismo (Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery) in 1934. I decide to index these two books. I then find some Italian titles by Benedetto Croce and Alessandro D’Ancona that I note. I find a reference to T. S. Eliot, and finally I run into a number of works in English and German. I note them all, even if I (in the role of our hypothetical student) assume ignorance of the foreign languages. I then realize that Praz was talking about Secentismo in general, whereas I am looking for sources centered more specifically on the Italian application of the style. Evidently I will have to keep an eye on the foreign versions as background material, but perhaps this is not the best place to begin.
I return to the Treccani for the entries “Poetics,” “Rhetoric,” and “Aesthetics.” The first term yields nothing; it simply cross-refers to “Rhetoric,” “Aesthetics,” and “Philology.” “Rhetoric” is treated with some breadth. There is
