| dc.description.abstract | During the sixteenth century, six public sculptures distributed throughout the urban fabric of Rome acquired a radically new purpose. The so-called ‘talking statues’ operated as customary sites for the affixion of anonymous satires, giving a voice to those aiming to express political and religious criticism freely. The phenomenon was initiated at the statue of Pasquino. The popularity of this statue and the writings affixed to it, termed pasquinades, spread this communicative practice to other statues in Rome and across the Italian Peninsula. Pasquino has also played an important role as a news source for informants to collect and disseminate pasquinades in emerging communication mediums.
Pasquino has been extensively studied since the end of the nineteenth century. The approach to the phenomenon has been analysing a particular talking statue and its role in a particular period. Conversely, this thesis offers holistic and cross-chronological approaches to the phenomenon to investigate the actual impact of Pasquino in public and media spaces. The first part of the thesis focuses on space. First, it contributes to previous research focusing on the significance that the space surrounding Pasquino had for its activation and continuation as a talking statue. Then, the analysis extends this spatial approach to investigate the space of the remaining Roman talking statues in the sixteenth century. In turn, it examines how the talking statues have pervaded the Roman urban fabric as toponyms over the centuries. Additionally, the thesis delves into the continuous spatial spread of the phenomenon with additional statues activated across the Italian Peninsula, regarding them as a unique network and considering mobility as the main agent triggering this expansion. The second part of the thesis examines the role of Pasquino as a medium. It investigates the dissemination of pasquinades in the diplomatic correspondence of the Medici grand dukes (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and subsequently in the British press (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), where Pasquino and Marforio were used as anonymous identities, and Pasquino was used more specifically as both as title and image in two London newspapers. The study concludes in this century by questioning the anachronistic usage of Pasquino online, both as a hybrid or a virtual space of communication. A case
study delves into how the anonymous identity of Pasquino is being adopted by Twitter users, revealing analogies with its traditional operation and presence in previous communication mediums. By investigating the continuous impact of Pasquino in public and media spaces over the centuries, the thesis contributes a better understanding of talking statue spaces, their spatial spread, and the usage of Pasquino as a medium, foreseeing its permanence and continuous evolution in the context of an increasingly digital society. | en_GB |
