Giorgio Vasari’s Tondo for the Madonna of the Rosary: Angels With Roses, Emblems of Love

In 1569,Giorgio Vasari(1511-1574)completed painting an altarpiece of the Madonna of the Rosary and a Tondo of angels dispersing roses.The commission was for the private chapel of the Capponi family in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.In his Ricordanze(Book of Records),Vasari explained the commission as well as documenting the assistance of his favorite Florentine pupil,Jacopo Zucchi(1541-1590),in the completion of the commission.This essay focusses on Vasari’s design,location,and meaning of the Tondo and its emblematic symbolism of love through the rose motif.

The Poison of Polygamy:Genre of the English Translation

When the Chinese-language The Poison of Polygamy was translated into English,some critics identified the work as picaresque.Skeptical of this conclusion,the author of this paper broadens the field of inquiry to suggest classification in an emigrant sensational genre.Briefly,the first two plots of the multi-strand work unfold the adventures of Chinese emigrants travelling by sea and land to Melbourne’s Gold Mountain.Interestingly,we are also afforded a glimpse of emigrant miners’cooperation regardless of race and colour when a mine disaster occurs.The work provides sharp recognition of migrants’dilemmas,such as marriage,before tackling the bigamy issue,the gender war,the fallen lifestyle of the female protagonist and so on.As the work unfolds,further shocking tales of murders and indulgence are revealed.Unlike the picareque’s episodic style,the translated Poison of Polygamy is coherent,realistic,serious and critical,and completely lacking in both sarcasm and playfulness.To investigate the appropriateness of assigning the work to the picaresque genre,the paper compares briefly with representative Spanish picaresque works such as Lazarillo and Gusman and English canonical Moll Flanders,watching carefully for commonalities.However,The Poison of Polygamy would seem to resonate more with Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret,a sensational fiction which shocked the English world in the 1860s.The contexts of both novels are close,mid-Victorian and Edwardian,where the latter is a continuation of the Victorians.The author is further enlightened by research results of literary translators who advocate that a text,once translated into a target language,becomes a canon of that culture and is cherished as such by its readers-as in the case of Shakespeare being revered as a German poet when read in translation.From this experiment the paper deems that cross-lingual comparative literature is not only possible but significant and resourceful.

The Continuum of Grief. From Scandinavian Mythology to Zen Buddhism： Janet Frame＇s Intertextual Strategies in Snowman, Snowman

In the wake of Richards Benton＇s ＂Keats and Zen＂ （published in Philosophy East and West （1966））, this paper sets out to examine Janet Frame＇s appropriation of Buddhist philosophy in Snowman, Snowman （1962）. The novella＇s allusions to a Buddhist-like epistemology, together with its subtle references to Scandinavian myths, however, have so far remained uncovered and are therefore best approached in the light of what has been called ＂the suppressed intertextuality in post-colonial writing＂. The author＇s intention in this paper is twofold： On the one hand, the author will suggest that post-colonial writers do not necessarily write against the Western canon and that maintaining the contrary amounts to vindicating the centrality of imperial texts in the contemporary literary scene--an endeavour which is hardly post-colonial. On the other hand, the author will go some way towards shifting eastward the core of Frame＇s ontology by suggesting that her poetics is anchored not only in Western thinking, but also, perhaps more importantly so, in Eastern philosophy. The author＇s primary impulse, however, in examining the interplay between canonical and peripheral intertextualities, is to illuminate in fundamental fashion the haunting beauty of the writer＇s universe and the lyricism of Snowman, Snowman.

Giorgio Vasari’s Madonna of the Rosary: A Rose Garden of Blessings

In 1569,Giorgio Vasari(1511-1574)completed a painting of the Madonna of the Rosary for the private chapel of the Capponi family in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.In his Ricordanze(Book of Records),Vasari explained the commission as well as documenting the assistance of his Florentine pupil,Jacopo Zucchi(1541-1590),in the completion of this painting.This essay discusses Vasari’s symbolism of the rosary as a reflection of the Tridentine Reform in Florence as well as a visual interpretation of Italian Mannerist painters on this devotional subject.