Hannah Arendt and The Genius of Italy

On a recent trip to the Hannah Arendt Collection housed in Bard College's Stevenson Library, we came across this copy of Leonardo Olschki's The Genius of Italy:

As you can see below, the author wrote Hannah Arendt a personal message on the book's inside cover. This message reads as follows:

"For Mrs. Hannah Arendt. With the author's compliments and best wishes. Leonardo Olschki (signed). Berkeley, Calif. May 1955"

Arendt repaid Olschki's message with a number of different annotations. (See right.) On page 300 alone, she marked four separate passages with vertical lines in the margins.

The first passage she annotated with two vertical lines and underlining. This passage reads in part:

"...rhythm in movement and of balance in action is the aesthetic expression of the same spirit that in politics suggested Lorenzo de Medici's idea of the balance of power and in practical life inspired the general endeavor toward a social equilibrium."

Arendt annotates the remainder of the paragraph with a single vertical line in the margin:

"The growing authority of Platonism represents the intellectual manifestation of that general solicitude for order and symmetry. The geometrical concerns of the leading masters from Brunelleschi to Leonardo da Vinci embody an evident Platonic trend. It consists in the general conviction that surfaces and figures, which are determined by rule and square, are not relatively, but absolutely, beautiful and reflect in their structural proportions the beauty and perfection of the universe."

Later down the page, Arendt marks another passage with a single vertical line:

"Thus, the interdependence of truth and beauty was established in the field of the arts both in empirical practice and in its theoretical foundations."

Finally, she annotates one more passage with a vertical line in the margin and underlining:

"Leonardo da Vinci is the greatest and universal representative of this scientific realism, not only because of his artistic mastery and intellectual versatility, but mainly because he extended the aesthetic synthesis of truth and beauty to everything in nature and life."

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The Hannah Arendt Collection at Bard College is maintained by staff members at the Bard College Stevenson Library. To peruse the collection's digital entries, please click here.

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