Medieval Milan: Art, Literature and History

The course aims to show the interdisciplinary interactions between history, literature and art history through a case study, the Milan of the last medieval centuries. A lesson will introduce the fundamental historical coordinates. Two lessons will be dedicated to the Latin historiographic sources of the 13th-14th centuries (especially Bonvesin della Riva and Galvano Fiamma) and to the methods of analysis to be applied to literary writings in order to weigh the information from the point of view of historical reliability. A lesson will show how a literary source of the hagiographic-liturgical genre, the Liber notitiae sanctorum Mediolani, can be examined as a source for the history of cult buildings and artistic production. The last meeting will consist of a guided tour of historical places, monuments and art objects of the city, with the same attention to integration of the different disciplines involved in their interpretation.