'A Character Perhaps Too Much Delight'. The representation of the artist in Anna Banti's work

Abstract

During her whole life, Anna Banti wrote about the works and the biographies of real or fictional artists: as an art historian, as a narrator, as a literary and cinematographic critic, as an editor and cultural journalist. The essay aims to enquire the complexity of this wide and heterogeneous production, analysing Banti's representation of the artist through a critical journey divided into several thematic aspects: Anna Banti and the genre of the historical novel; her approach to the visual text; the dialogical relation between Banti's authorship and that of the artists she decides to represent; the feminist nature of her female characters. In order to better dwell Banti's poetics, the essay will also take into account her own concept of umanità, finally proposing a "humanitarian" reading of the connection between the author and her "personaggi forse troppo diletti".