Resumen de The Color of rust. The "Rancor" of Ripa as a Source of Modern Resentment
The voice "Rancor", present in the first Roman edition without images of 1593 of the Cesare Ripa's Iconology, unexpectedly fails to appear in the subsequent editions supplied with images in the two following centuries in Italian, English and French language. However, that first description is so vivid that its visualization results immediately in the reader's mind.
Compared to the description contained in the sixteenth-century edition both this edition than the following allow to highlight the meaning of all the iconographic attributes mentioned by Ripa, searching for them in icons with similar meanings (Anger, Rage, Sloth), or whenever in another icon have been used the same iconographic attributes (the bear, the rust-red dress, the flames, the snake, the sword).
Ripa describes the causes and the outcomes of the rancor going through the description of the status of the rancorous subject (pallor, pain, thinness, plagued sole by fistulas and poisons that infects it), between the individual situation and the social back-falls of such feeling.
A biblical narration and a Roman history episode, somehow connected, are mentioned as examples of rancor, but not the Greek tragedy, full of figures animated by resentment, as you could expect.
A well-known precedent is the Rancor painted by Sandro Botticelli inside the Calunnia of 1496; there are no similarities between the iconologist's description and the painter's figure, except from the point of view of the contents, because Botticelli put the rancor personification before a judge willing to listen (some reference to the courts exists in the Ripa's Rancor).
The paper sounds out deeply the Ripa's icon of Rancor and after more than four hundred years supplies it of the representation made for the occasion of the workshop by a contemporary artist. This representation, which accompanies the text in the publication, is painted by Magda Milano, Professor of Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Lecce (Italy).
