Carolina B. Garcia-Estévez
Rilke's 'Das Florenzer Tagebuch' in Reappraisal (1898): Global Exchanges, Dissidences and the Hereafter of Things

On the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Rainer Maria Rilke’s first stay in Florence, this lecture presents a reappraisal of Das Florenzer Tagebuch (1898) to broaden its historiographical scope by means of three new enquiries: How did transnational networks influence the reception of Renaissance in the young poet? What dissidences took place in the city with the official culture, the crisis of i moti, and some of his contemporaries? And how Rilke’s reception of early Renaissance defines an origin, a pathos as a symbolic image, to unravel most of the subjects that his poetry will henceforth work on?

The archival researches in the Bibliothek and the Photothek of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, along with the Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G.P. Vieusseux, the Archivio Comunale Storico, the Archivio di Stato, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and the Berenson Library in Villa I Tatti, allow to unfold some key questions to fathom if Rilke’s diary should be interpreted solely as a youthful ex voto to Lou Andreas-Salomé, or as the birth of a fertile visual experience for an acute soliloquy around the fiction of an early modern tradition in the city.

Carolina B. García-Estévez is Dr. Architect and Serra Húnter Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC-Barcelona Tech). This subject of interest forms part of an ongoing global project, Reassembled for Completeness: Rainer Maria Rilke and the Transnational Exchanges in Art and Architecture, pursuing two main hypotheses: the connections between architecture, art and literature toward nonlinear temporalities in the metropolitan culture of the European avant-garde; and the circulation and reception of artwork in the media, with special attention to new enquiries to archives. A narrative in motion to spur on the survival life of images from Rilke’s poetry. One example is the recent collective monograph edited by the author, Las ciudades de Rilke = The Cities of Rilke (Madrid: Publicaciones de la Residencia de Estudiantes, 2022).