Cristoforo Castelli’s narration: between the word and image

The Seventeenth century’s seven albums with thousand illuminated papers and handwritten reports have been forgotten, until the priest Gioacchino di Marzo founded them in 1878 in the Libreria Comunale of Palermo, referred to as the formerly House of Theatins, and saved them. The albums, which narrate the history of Georgia in the seventeenth century and the twenty-five-year story of Sicilian Missionaries in Georgia, are regarded as precious and priceless treasure for the Georgian nation. Georgian public learnt about the albums only at the beginning of twentieth century when Georgian catholic Mikhail Tamarati found the albums in Palermo, photographed half of the photos and sent them to Georgia (1910), where they are actually kept at the National Centre of Manuscripts. The albums revealed not only the faces of Georgian kings which were unknown before, but also the type of costumes of that time and a lot of information in different fields such as art, history, geography, ethnography, etc. Soon after the discovery of the albums by Georgians, Georgia became part of Soviet Union, which denuded the right to Georgian scientist of the time to go to West Europe and study the albums. Consequently, they based their research on the photos but not the original albums and the researches at the time did not offered accurate information about the albums. Several Georgian and Italian scholars studied the albums from 1970 to 1990 and published only a part of albums, however, the studies were not without inaccuracies. The main difficulty of the Castelli’s albums is his narration style, which is full of gaps, as in his text as in his drawing works. My present speech is focused on the analysis of Castelli’s Albums narration style between the words and the images, which are complementary to each other and which gives the key to his works.