Reality Refracted: Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso

• In Event: Vision and Its Instruments in Early Modern Literature II

Abstract

The 300 new bulletins of Traiano Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnaso (1612–15) warn against the prevalence of artifice and corruption in Italy and across Europe. The only antidote, the author suggests, is to see the world through the “occhiali politici” or political glasses, associated with Tacitus’s writings. Most scholars have focused on the lenticular object to examine the relationship between Boccalini and the Roman historian. By considering these lenses alongside other optical and ocular references in the text and within their scientific context, this paper extends the “occhiali politici” to a mode of representation. It proposes that Boccalini, while cautioning the readers against the duality of lenses as both manipulative and corrective, favors the artificial lens to both the natural eye and the mirror. Furthermore, he also adopts an aesthetic of refraction to uncover dissimulation and to depict the social and political reality of the early Seicento in its true form.

Author

• Sanam Nader-Esfahani, Amherst College