Acceso usuarios
Gianluca Valenti
In the first part of this paper, an overview of the commonly adopted approaches to the study of technical vocabularies in Old Italian is provided: in particular, it is confirmed that traditionally, researchers exploit documents such as treatises, translations, and practical texts – mostly composed from the 15th century to the present – to gather new information on the Italian lexicon of art. In the second section, the author argues that it is possible to expand the research beyond these chronological and typological borders, and find occurrences of technical words in literary texts from the 13th and 14th centuries. Since many of these terms are also part of everyday vocabulary, their artistic meaning is hard – but not impossible – to identify. Thus, the examples of terra bianca (‘white soil’) and marmo cotto (‘cooked marble’) are introduced in order to show an alternative method of verifying the presence of semantic technicisms in old literary texts.
