Biography

Tancredi Artico received his PhD from the University of Padua in 2017. He has been Marie Skłodowska-Curie Seal of Excellence postdoctoral fellow at the University of Padua, Chargé de recherche at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ferrara. His work explores early modern Italian literature, with a particular emphasis on the development of the epic genre during the Baroque period, representations of religious Otherness, and the translations and circulation of Italian masterpieces across Europe. His PhD thesis, Anatomia dell’epica da Tasso a Graziani, was published in 2024 (Firenze, Cesati Editore).
 

Project Summary

Orientalism Unbound explores the genealogy of early modern Orientalism by uncovering its roots in the extraordinary success of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Arguing that their immense popularity not only shaped European literary aesthetics but also served as a powerful vehicle for the circulation of ideas, the project shows how Baroque opera libretti appropriated and transformed these epics to articulate a new mode of conceiving and representing the Muslim Orient and Other. As the epic genre declined in the early seventeenth century, the opera libretto inherited its narrative structures, characters, and intercultural plots, bringing the fictional representation of Muslim identity to a new level of prominence. By analyzing a corpus of opera libretti inspired by Ariosto and Tasso, this project identifies a distinctive “epic-libretto” style of Orientalism, built on recurring tropes of encounter (disguise, captivity, conversion, etc.), on codified Muslim characters, and on staged images of the East. It argues that this style is crucial for understanding how the Renaissance demonization of Otherness evolved into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fascination that characterized European cultural phenomena such as Turquerie and Orientalism.