I’m immensely happy to talk about the release of the book Galassia Ariosto. Il modello editoriale dell’Orlando Furioso dal libro illustrato al web, edited by Lina Bolzoni and published by Donzelli.

Galassia Ariosto is more than a book: it is the tip of the iceberg of the five-years project Looking at Words through Images run at the CTL – Centre for Data Processing of Texts and Images in the Literary Tradition, Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa – and dedicated to the editorial galaxy grown during the Sixteenth century around the international success of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. Particularly, the project addressed the spreading of illustrated books and the network of relations this editorial format established between texts and images.

The CTL’s research group, coordinated by professor Lina Bolzoni, explored this galaxy on many levels and reproduced and interpreted it through an outstanding digital collection: Galassia Ariosto. Un archivio digitale dei poemi narrativi illustrati tra Cinque e Seicento.

The book is a synecdoche of the work done for the project and the construction of the digital collection. The essays collected in the book show how relevant the materials available on the website are for wide-ranging literary, figurative and historical topics. The proposed case-studies are examples of how these materials can be studied, analysed, and related to other cultural objects and wider critical issues.

In the book, I published an essay titled Signa imperii. Immagini della sovranità nelle illustrazioni della Liberata, in which I look at the iconography of sovereignty conveyed by the illustrated editions of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata.