Fondazione Giorgio Cini – Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Religiographies vol.3 n.2

Open-access and peer-reviewed journal, curated by the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

With an interdisciplinary approach, Religiographies fosters dialogue between historians, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists on three main themes: mysticism, esotericism, and spirituality.

This special issue of Religiographies aims to explore and analyse contemporary cases of the use of Muḥyiddīn Ibn ʿArabi’s (d. 1240) thought and to shed light on the motivations, dynamics and methods behind his interpretations. In order to improve the understanding and variety of the claims and to distinguish between the common links and the peculiarities of those cases, we would like to answer several questions, including: Which concepts of Ibn ʿArabi are most commonly used to address contemporary issues? How have they changed over the centuries? What aspects of Ibn ʿArabi’s paradoxical thought are emphasised or, on the contrary, downplayed by new exegetes? How is Ibn ʿArabi’s thought integrated or not into the broader spectrum of the Islamic intellectual tradition?

Ethnography of Recording Studios

This volume, the fourth in a series of online publications that the Intercultural Institute of Comparative Music Studies promotes from its international ethnomusicology seminars, stems from the three-year work of a research group funded by the Ernst von Siemens-Musikstiftung and consists of a series of monographic studies on the conception of harmony in Béla Bartók, Claude Debussy, Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schönberg, Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Edgar Varèse and Anton Webern. The authors focus their attention on one or more works by the composer of reference, relating the harmonic processes to the theoretical issues debated at the time or that emerged in subsequent decades. The approach takes particular account of current developments in international musicology, the gaps in Italian studies and the needs of higher education in AFAM and university venues. At the same time, it aims to make a contribution to the reflection and methodology of music theory in our times.

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Martha Jungwirth “Herz der Finsternis”

The catalogue of Martha Jungwirth’s solo exhibition at Palazzo Cini – curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute of Art History, and made possible with the support of the Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery – features new works by the Austrian artist. Over the course of her six-decade career, Jungwirth has forged a singular approach to abstraction that is rooted in the body and close observation of the world around her. The artist draws inspiration from ‘pretexts’ to create her vivid and expressive paintings. In the case of Herz der Finsternis, Jungwirth borrows the title of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness as the starting point for her recent body of work.

Religiographies vol.2 no.2

Open-access and peer-reviewed journal, curated by the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

“Multa renascentur”. Tammaro De Marinis studioso, bibliofilo, antiquario, collezionista.

This volume provides an account of the conference held at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and organised by the Institute of Art History to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Tammaro De Marinis (1878–1969), Neapolitan by birth and Florentine by adoption.

The publication brings together the contributions of over twenty speakers who have studied the figure of De Marinis: an early and tireless scholar of bindings, manuscripts and illustrated books, a bibliophile and collector of refined taste, not to mention a very active and cultured antiquarian. Both as a result of his research work and his own antiquarian activity, there is evidence of his passage through the most prestigious Italian and European cultural institutions, with some traces left even overseas. His close ties with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, given by the presence at San Giorgio of his working library, a significant portion of his antique book collection and numerous archival and study documents form the basis of new research promoted by the Foundation.

ARCHiPub 01/001

Interdisciplinary series edited by the Digital Centre – ARCHiVe of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, dedicated to contemporary research in the Digital Humanities.

In the first contribution to this new publishing series, Chiara Casarin pays homage to the illustrious research precedents, conditions, needs and urgencies that led to the birth of ARCHiPub. On Cultural and Digital Matters as part of ARCHiVe at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Rivisitazioni e innovazioni

Around the mid-20th century there was a signiﬁcant change of perspective among Italian composers interested in the production of Claudio Monteverdi. The preceding phase, dominated by the figure of Gian Francesco Malipiero, had been characterised by a gradual approach to Monteverdi’s music through transcriptions and productions of the works that pursued to varying degrees the ideal of reconstructing the original, with a strong tendency to historical accuracy, but which nevertheless did show some reworkings in the instrumentation. From the 1950s onwards, the approach became much more “creative” and took the form of structural reinterpretations of some of the Cremonese composer’s masterpieces and the updating of the original instrumentation. Monteverdi is no longer revived with the overarching nationalistic intentions of the immediately preceding generations, who saw him as the father of Italian opera, but for the modernity of his thought and his compositional technique.

The essays in this book, which focus on compositions that have not been investigated in musicological literature to date or on repertoire pieces that are now approached from a new perspective, show how, from Luigi Dallapiccola’s transcription of Ritorno di Ulisse in patria in 1942 up to the dawn of the new millennium, we have witnessed a varied process of both inte-gration and transcription of Monteverdi’s works making use of traditional instruments (Luciano Berio, Fausto Razzi) and of rewriting, also with the aid of new technologies (Bruno Maderna, Giorgio Battistelli, Ivan Fedele). In all cases, the work of “readapting” the music is underpinned by a careful analysis of Monteverdi’s production, also with a view to transferring features of his craft into works that are completely independent from it in terms of content and poetics (Luigi Nono). Composers who have directed Monteverdi’s operas have achieved equally diverse results (Sylvano Bussotti, Egisto Macchi) as have those who have enhanced the original model with prequels and sequels (Domenico Guaccero, Claudio Ambrosini).

The seven essays are by Rodolfo Baroncini, Angela Carone, Michele Chiappini, Paolo Dal Molin, Mila De Santis, Alessandro Maras and Federica Marsico.

Religiographies

Open-access and peer-reviewed journal, curated by the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini.

Religiographies is dedicated to the study of religious phenomena, fostering an interdisciplinary dialogue among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and psychologists. Mysticism, esotericism, and spirituality are the three main themes of the journal, which are explored within their historical and cultural contexts, challenging traditional categories of religion. The heterographie section, dedicated to artistic and visual works, expands the understanding of the phenomena discussed.
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Religiographies is an open-access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal dedicated to the field of religious studies and published under the auspices of the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities of the Giorgio Cini Foundation. Since 2025, it has been recognised by ANVUR (the agency of the Ministry of Education) as a scientific journal for Area 11 (Historical, Philosophical, Pedagogical and Psychological Studies); Religiographies wishes to foster an interdisciplinary approach to religious phenomena, promoting dialogue between historians, sociologists, anthropologists, literary scholars, philosophers, and psychologists.
We aim at promoting an anthropological history and at the same time a socio-anthropology with a strong historical emphasis, intending to avoid both socio-anthropological presentism and history only focused on ideas and institutions, while ignoring materiality, emotions, everyday lives.
We encourage at deconstructing and challenging categories (including the very word “religion”) not as a theoretical exercise, a proof of concept, but as a practice, showing with fieldwork data, the porosity and frailty of our categories.
We aim at discussing those topics that are often neglected by social and human sciences – such as mysticism, esotericism, spirituality – which, in the words of Michel de Certeau, “haunt scientific epistemology”. Our aim is not to create another journal on alternative spiritualities, but to bring these themes back into mainstream discussions of religious and cultural phenomena.
Finally, with the concept of heterographies– we intend to give space to other forms of representations, such as photography, comics, video, and artwork. These other languages will allow contributors – scholars and artists – to explore dimensions beyond the social sciences frame of objectiveness and coherence. This section, called heterographies, is not strictly scientific: it will not be peer-reviewed, but will receive feedback from the editors and invited commentators.

We invite submission on all religious phenomena, with a special focus on:

comparative approaches;
cultural transfers: acculturation, appropriation, imagination;
continuities and discontinuities between religious discourses and everyday life practices;
transhistorical perspective, stressing the connections between old and new trends;
liminal phenomena between the secular and the religious;
the relationship with alterity, understood not only as religious, but also in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity;
phenomenology of the religious body: perceptions, emotions, sensations and construction of the body;
epistemological and methodological debates about the transferability and translatability of religious studies categories.

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Editor-in-chief
Francesco Piraino, Fondazione Giorgio Cini / Harvard Divinity School

Editors
Mark Sedgwick , University of Aarhus
Dionigi Albera, CNRS-IDEMEC

Assistant editors
Elena Bernardinello, Fondazione Giorgio Cini
Eva Salviato, Fondazione Giorgio Cini

Copy editor and proofreader
Anna Fitzgerald

Book Reviews
Valentina Gaddi, Université de Montréal

Editorial board
Stefano Allievi, University of Padua
Egil Asprem, University of Stockholm
Katell Berthelot, CNRS–Aix-Marseille University
Francesco Cerchiaro, Radboud University
Andrea De Antoni, University of Kyoto
John Eade, University of Roehampton
Diana Espírito Santo, Universidad Catholica de Chile
Fabrizio Ferrari, University of Padua
Mattia Fumanti , University of St. Andrews
Giuseppe Giordan, University of Padua
Alberta Giorgi, University of Bergamo
Boaz Huss, Ben Gurion University
Salvatore La Mendola, University of Padua
Marco Pasi, University of Amsterdam
Enzo Pace, University of Padua
Stefania Palmisano, University of Turin
Vadim Putzu, Missouri State University
Khalid Razzhali, University of Padua
Antonio Rigopoulos, University of Ca’ Foscari
Armando Salvatore, University of McGill
Chiara Tommasi, University of Pisa
Fabio Vicini, University of Verona
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Religiographies vol.3 n.2 (2024)
Religiographies vol.3 n.1 (2024)
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Religiographies vol.2 n.2 (2023)
Religiographies vol.2 n.1 (2023)
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Religiographies vol.1 n.1 (2022)
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