Electa is publishing the volume Penelope on the occasion of the Roman exhibition at the Parco archeologico del Colosseo (19 September 2024 – 12 January 2025), which is sure to remain in bookstores well beyond the exhibition, as it is the first, necessary monograph on one of the most famous figures of myth, whose literary fortune is equal to that linked to her visual representation. This explains the joint curatorship by a writer, Alessandra Sarchi, with an art historian who is an expert in iconography, Claudio Franzoni.
The essays of the greatest scholars focus on Penelope in ancient literature, on her Homeric world, on the web she weaves, which is not just a metaphor for the stitching of songs. Several contributions analyse the image linked to the gesture and the veil (between melancholy, modesty and defence from what surrounds her), the reception between the Middle Ages and the modern age, until the 20th century, when her story was the subject of rewritings by important contemporary authors, with a final focus on the character in cinema and theatre.
This is followed by a diachronic visual atlas that organises and brings together for the first time, skilfully juxtaposed among an anthology of select quotations, almost all the illustrations, some previously unpublished, from the most varied works (vases, rings, statues and reliefs, miniatures, drawings and prints, paintings, even furnishings) that restore the appearance of Penelope to our eyes, narrating a parallel story in images.
Penelope, “the greatest dreamer of Western literature”, in our imagination linked to a normative ideal of the faithful wife, wise guardian of the palace-residence, patron saint of the schools of writing and embroidery, becomes more fascinating with her areas of mystery and in her contradictory aspects, which are also read in a psychoanalytic key, astute and challenging with respect to the status of objective minority to which women were relegated in Greek culture, by asking questions in the context of a topical reflection on the role and social condition of women.
Volume in Italian and English. Translation by Sylvia Notini.
