Immagini, motivi, reperti. Prospettive di iconologia letteraria in Lea Ritter Santini

The aim of this contribution is to account for the specific methodology of literary re-search used by the well-known Germanist and comparatist Lea Ritter Santini; a meth-odology characterised by its insertion in the path of the interdisciplinary approach – be-tween the figurative arts and literature – that was opened up in the German context by Aby Warburg and Ernst Robert Curtius, and that in Ritter Santini took on the specific form of a ‘literary iconology’. In trying to paint a theoretical picture of literary iconolo-gy, an attempt will also be made to convey the sense of survey and historical reconstruc-tion that her comparative work on texts and images has taken on; finally shedding light on a research whose primary objective was to reconstruct, by inventorying and record-ing affinities, a common morphology of imagery that was to characterise the European cultural tradition, understood, with Curtius, as continuous and unitary, albeit in the ruptures of its history.