Against the Day - page 255 - Mansueto

[alice malice]

With her study Beasts and Beauties, Juliana Schiesari makes a
significant contribution to the ongoing critical dialogues on
post-humanism; animal studies; and intersections of race, class,
gender, and species identity. Schiesari’s work picks up on the
scholarship of Erica Fudge, who focuses on animals and humans in early
modern English culture in several of her works. Schiesari shifts her
emphasis, however, from England to Italy. In her examination of
literature and painting, she uses feminist psychoanalysis as well as
animal studies to analyze developing concepts of domestic space that
serve as a meeting point for issues of both species and gender in
their construction of otherness. In this respect Schiesari’s book has
a dual focus; it is concerned with the representation of animals and
women. It seeks to foreground those hierarchies of being, with their
roots in both Aristotelian materialism and Platonic idealism, that
seem inevitably to have come into play in the project of articulating
what it means to be human during this early chapter in many
genealogies of modernity. The paradigm of domestic space under
discussion is the single-family domicile prioritized by classic
humanism, a microcosm of patriarchal structures. Schiesari focuses
specifically on Titian, Francesco Petrarca, Leon Battista Alberti,
Giovan Battista della Porta, and Ludovico Ariosto, with chapters on
the Diana myth and on Sigmund Freud’s much-discussed reading of
Leonardo da Vinci.

https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30341

Topsell also apparently had a bone to pick with small dogs:

These Dogs are little, pretty, proper and fine, and sought for to
satisfie the delicatness of dainty dames and wanton women’s wils,
instruments of folly for them to play and dally withal, to trifle away
the treasure of time, to withdraw their mindes from more commendable
exercises, and to content their corrupted concupiscence’s with vain
disport (a silly shift to shun irksome idleness).

Most of Topsell's animal entries have some basis in fact, but
occasionally he let imagination (and the hearsay of sailors and
travelers) get the better of him:

http://resobscura.blogspot.com/2010/05/first-post-history-of-four-footed.html


On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 11:19 AM, Michel <bulb at vheissu.net> wrote:
> AtD, page 255:
> "Pugnax arrived in the company of Mostruccio, a small, ill-humored Venetian
> dog, with an ancestral resemblance to those observed in works of Carpaccio,
> Mansueto, [...]
>
> Atd Wiki does not offer more on this Mansueto. Maybe is a fictitious artist?
> Could it be a pun of some sort? Anyone an idea?
> ---
> Michel.
>
> Sorry for the silly e-mail adress but Yahoo accounts are unsubscribed from
> pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l