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Nell’Eneide, Virgilio inventa il personaggio del puer che, volendo combattere come un guerriero (iuuenis) e mostrarsi un degno eroe (uir), finisce per essere abbattuto da un maior hostis. L’articolo presenta un’analisi comparativa di queste figure e riflette sulle possibili ragioni che hanno portato Virgilio a insistere così tanto su di loro.

Il contributo intende indagare il rapporto tra la nozione di eroe, la morte e la fine del racconto nella difficile transizione dal romanzo al poema eroico a metà Cinquecento, prima dell’esperienza tassiana. In particolare, vengono indagati e posti a confronto, al fine di metterne in rilievo gli elementi di continuità e discontinuità, i duelli risolutivi dell’Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto e dell’Italia liberata dai Goti di Gian Giorgio Tissino, che rappresentano due poli opposti ma interdipendenti della suddetta transizione. Nei duelli tra Ruggiero e Rodomonte, e nella disfida di Lipadusa, nel poema ariostesco, e nella parabola di Corsamonte e nello scontro finale narrati da Trissino, si concretizza, attraverso la dialettica epos/romanzo, un nuovo modello eroico, in grado di rispondere alle esigenze della modernità. The essay investigates the relationship between the notion of Hero, Death and the End of the Story in the difficult transition from chivalric romance to heroic poem in the mid-sixteenth century. In particular, the decisive duels of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and of Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Italia liberata dai Goti are investigated and compared, in order to highlight the continuity and discontinuity elements. The two poems represent two opposite but interdependent poles of this transition from chivalric romance to heroic poem. In the duels between Ruggiero and Rodomonte, and in the battle on Lipadusa (in Ariosto’s poem), and in the Corsamonte’s venture and in the final clash (in Trissino’s poem), a new and modern heroic model takes shape through the dialectic between epos and chivalric romance.

Questo articolo affronta il tema della morte dell’eroe nella cultura kassena dell’Africa occidentale (Ghana e Burkina Faso). La mancanza di dettagli sulla morte dell’individuo eccellente nella mitologia kassena può essere messa in connessione con una cosmologia che concepisce il mondo e la vita come processi sempre in corso e l’azione creatrice degli antenati come perdurante. Se le narrazioni kassena esplorano o incorporano il tema del non finito, questo va inteso non come fatto episodico o accidentale, ma come tratto estetico coerente con un quadro culturale. This article deals with the death of the hero in the Kassena culture of West Africa (Ghana and Burkina Faso). The lack of details about the death of the illustrious individual in Kassena mythology can be interpreted in the context of a cosmology that sees the world and life as neverending processes that are always in the making and the creative actions of the ancestors as persisting. If Kassena narrations explore and embody the idea of the unfinished, this feature is to be interpreted not as incidental, but as an aesthetically congruent cultural element.

Imaging methods based on visible luminescence induced by ultraviolet (UV) radiation are well consolidated in the investigation of ancient works of art, to map varnishes, retouches, and possibly some pigments. As far as contemporary art is involved, the wide range of synthetic materials, especially pigments, introduced from 1850 onwards, makes the possible application of the technique particularly challenging. Among the colouring substances used by artists in the 19th and 20th centuries, only cadmium-based pigments received attention due to their typical near-infrared luminescence. Nevertheless, the fluorescence emission exhibited by several synthetic pigments upon visible excitation was recently demonstrated and confirmed using UV radiation in the present work. The subsequent possibility of individuating such materials in paintings by ultraviolet fluorescence (UVF) images was explored on mock-up painting samples of a wide series of pigments dispersed in oil or acrylic binder. Visible and infrared luminescence images obtained by irradiating with visible radiation (VIVF and VIL) were also collected. It was thus evidenced the possible advantage of the choice of a different excitation wavelength in discriminating between the contributions of pigment and binder. Finally, a recent oil painting on panel was also examined as case study.

X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and reflectance spectroscopy (RS) are commonly used for the characterization of painting materials. It is well known that the former provides the chemical fingerprint of the pictorial layers, while the latter returns the molecular description of the pigments constituting the uppermost layers. Even if these two techniques cannot unveil the stratigraphy, their synergetic application well describes the materials employed for realizing the panels and represents a key turn for non-invasive scientific analysis of works of art. However, the potential of the cross-comparison between XRF and RS is not fully exploited yet. The measurement points often barely match, and they are usually few isolated spots spread over the whole surface of the painting; these facts limit the mutual exchange of information between the data sets and can lead to losing details. In this scenario, XRF mapping (MA-XRF) and hyperspectral reflectance imaging (HRI) provide a connection channel that promises to be a decisive tool to strengthen the relationship between X-ray fluorescence and reflectance spectroscopy and, therefore, to deepen the knowledge about the case studies. Due to the spatial localization of the information they contain, the maps provide not only a straightforward reference for comparing the data but also a three-dimensional collection of elemental and molecular images. By applying computer vision and statistical methods such as spectral angle mapper (SAM), it is possible to implement an innovative approach that exploits the elemental features, obtained from XRF spectra, to improve the comprehension of the molecular aspects given by RS, and vice versa. Once we discussed the main issues behind our approach, we applied it to analyze the painting Chariot Race by Giorgio De Chirico (1928–1929, oil on canvas, Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Italy). The results reflect the complexity of the painting, and even if only some of the spectra identified by the method as peculiar are ascribable to recognizable pigments, the mutual correspondence between elemental distributions and SAM maps defines a mixture of materials that matches the description given by the artist in his “Small Treatise on Pictorial Technique” (De Chirico in Abscondita, 2019).