(March 21, 2017) “Words, Images, and Music: A Dialogue on Torquato Tasso and the Arts at The Library of Congress”: this is the title of the conference to be held on March 24 at the Library of Congress, organized in partnership with the Embassy of Italy and the Italian Institute of Culture in Washington. A meeting aimed at exploring the links between the Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, the visual arts and music. Laura Benedetti (Georgetown University) and Peter Lukehart (Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) will talk about the role played by Tasso's poem as inspiration to artists and composers through the centuries. "The meeting itself is conceived as a dialogue - explains Benedetti -. Analysis and interpretation of significant pieces of the “Jerusalem Delivered” will alternate the images and notes inspired by them, in a meaningful exchange of ideas and suggestions which we will try to evoke and examine. " For Lukehart the Tasso's poem is part of a shared European cultural heritage. "Since its publication in 1581, the text of the Jerusalem Delivered has emerged as a source of narrative material for carvers, painters and craftsmen, as evidenced by the lavishly illustrated editions and residences decorated with scenes of the poem in Italy and France. Bernardo Castello, Domenico Tintoretto, Annibale and Agostino Carracci, and Nicholas Poussin are just some of the artists who have been inspired by Tasso's genius, in a movement that has spanned over centuries and national borders. " The meeting will be held in the largest library in the world, the Library of Congress, along with an exhibition of rare editions of the poem edited by Lucia Wolf, librarian of the European Division, which on this occasion will expose some of the treasures of the collection. (Red)

ABOUT / TORQUATO TASSO

Among the major Italian poets of the sixteenth century, Torquato Tasso (Sorrento 1544 - Rome 1595) represents in his works the aspirations and contradictions of modern man. After the composition of the pastoral fable Aminta (1573), where he resumed sentimental and idyllic motifs of the bucolic classical tradition, Tasso renewed the poem of chivalry with Jerusalem Delivered (completed in 1575), a reworking of a historical event in which the author inserted different themes to present the vision of a world full of conflicts and contradictions, in which are fighting on one side the angelic powers and the Christian sense of wonder, on the other the powers of hell and evil magic. Tasso dedicated the last years of his life to the rewriting of his works and the composition of new texts on religious subjects.