The concept of otherness and pictorial representation the story of Ulysses since the Renaissance

This lecture will examine the reception and treatment of the myth of Ulysses and the story of the Odyssey in Italian and Flemish painting of the ^16th and ^17th centuries. It will show that a comic interpretation of this story went hand in hand with the idea of Ulysses as a discoverer, a symbol of the intellectual and moral greatness that knowledge of others could provide to men engaged in building the modern world. The detailed study of the frescoes painted by Pellegrino Tibaldi around 1551 in the Palazzo Poggi in Bologna will be the focus of this conference, which will consider the iconographic interpretations of the story between Pinturicchio's decoration of the great hall of the Palazzo Petrucci in Siena in 1509 and the tapestries of the Ulysses cycle designed by Jacob Jordaens around 1640.