Manfred Brauneck (The History of Theatre in All Its Aspects)Carlo Ginzburg (European History, 1400-1700)Jacob Palis (Mathematics, Pure and Applied)

Shinya Yamanaka (Stem Cells: Biology and Potential Applications)

Balzan PrizewinnersInterdisciplinary Forum

2010

Thursday, 18 November 2010 at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome

5

Contents

Alberto Quadrio Curzio, Chairman of the Joint Commissions established by the International Balzan Foundation “Prize” with the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and with the Swiss Academies of Arts and SciencesForeword ....................................................................................................... Pag. 9

Profiles:International Balzan Foundation ................................................................... » 12Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei .................................................................. » 13Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences ......................................................... » 13

Alberto Quadrio CurzioIntroduction ................................................................................................... » 14

Salvatore Veca, Chairman of the Balzan General Prize CommitteeOpening Remarks .......................................................................................... » 17

Session I

Chaired by Paolo Matthiae, Member of the International Balzan Founda-tion “Prize” and of the Balzan General Prize Committee ............................. » 19

Nicole Le Douarin, Member of the Balzan General Prize CommitteePresentation of Shinya Yamanaka, 2010 Balzan Prize for Stem Cells: Biolo-gy and Potential Applications ....................................................................... » 19

Shinya Yamanaka: Induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) Cells .......................... » 20

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion Mario Stefanini, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ..................................... » 26

6

Gottfried Scholz, Member of the Balzan General Prize CommitteePresentation of Manfred Brauneck, 2010 Balzan Prize for the History of Theatre in All Its Aspects .............................................................................. » 29

Manfred Brauneck: The History of the Theatre as the History of Society ... » 30

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion Pierluigi Petrobelli, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ................................ » 38

Session II

Chaired by Alberto Quadrio Curzio ........................................................... » 42

Etienne Ghys, Member of the Balzan General Prize CommitteePresentation of Jacob Palis, 2010 Balzan Prize for Mathematics, Pure andApplied ......................................................................................................... » 42

Jacob Palis: Dynamic Systems, Chaotic Behaviour – Uncertainty ............. » 44

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion Carlo Sbordone, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ..................................... » 54

Quentin Skinner, Member of the Balzan General Prize CommitteePresentation of Carlo Ginzburg, 2010 Balzan Prize for European History, 1400-1700 ..................................................................................................... » 56

Carlo Ginzburg: Some Queries Addressed to Myself ................................. » 58

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion Enrico Castelnuovo, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei ............................... » 66

7

Session III

Chaired by Paolo Matthiae and Alberto Quadrio Curzio ......................... » 70

The 2010 Prizewinners’ Panel: Manfred Brauneck, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacob Palis and Shinya YamanakaInterdisciplinary Perspectives ....................................................................... » 70

Bruno Bottai, Chairman of the International Balzan Foundation “Prize”Closing remarks ............................................................................................ » 79

The 2010 Prizewinners’ Research Projects ............................................... » 81

Organizational Structure of the International Balzan FoundationBoard of the “Prize” Foundation ................................................................... » 97General Prize Committee .............................................................................. » 98Board of the “Fund” Foundation .................................................................. » 101

List of Balzan PrizewinnersFor Literature, Moral Sciences and the Arts; For Physical, Mathematical andNatural Sciences, and Medicine .................................................................... » 103For Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood Among Peoples ............................... » 109

9

Foreword

Alberto Quadrio Curzio, Chairman of the Joint Commissions established by the Inter-national Balzan Foundation “Prize” with the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences and with the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.It is a great honour and a remarkable satisfaction for me to write the foreword to the Balzan Prizewinners Interdisciplinary Forum 2010 at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The Forum is in fact the fruit of the Agreements on Collaboration between the International Balzan Foundation “Prize”1 and two Academies: the Accademia Nazion-ale dei Lincei2 and the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences3 (hereafter referred to as the Lincei and the Swiss Academies, respectively), which became effective in 2009.As Chairman of the two joint commissions, established to make such collaboration flourish, I think it necessary to provide some basic background to the Agreements.Ever since becoming a member of the Balzan “Prize” Board, I have appreciated the fact that its Chairman, Ambassador Bruno Bottai, has stressed the fully international nature of the Balzan, while at the same time noting its strong historical roots in Italy and Switzerland. This sentiment – shared by the whole Balzan “Prize” Board, which includes Achille Casanova, who is also Chairman of the Balzan “Fund” Board in Zu-rich – expresses the wishes of the Foundress of the “Balzan” and is actively supported by the Governments of the two Countries.

The main points of the agreements with the Lincei and the Swiss Academies are: 1) The promotion of the Balzan Prize and the presentation of the Prizewinners through

the academies’ channels of communication, in Italy and Switzerland as well as abroad. By virtue of the relations of the Swiss Academies and the Lincei with acad-emies of other countries and with international academic organizations, the Balzan will be able to achieve a higher international profile.

2) On the occasion of the Balzan Prize Awards Ceremony, held in alternating years in Berne and Rome, each academy will contribute to the academic organization of an interdisciplinary Forum in the course of which the Prizewinners will present their academic work and discuss it with other scientists proposed by the academies. In the years when the ceremony is held in Rome, one of the Prizewinners will give a

1 s. profile page 122 s. profile page 133 s. profile page 13

10

Balzan Annual Lecture in Switzerland, and when the ceremony is held at the Fed-eral Palace in Berne, a Balzan Annual Lecture will be organized at the headquarters of the Lincei in Rome. This year we were particularly honoured since the ceremony was held in the Quirinal Palace in Rome where the President of the Italian Republic awarded the prizes.

3) The Agreements further provide for both academies to contribute to a series of publications in English (ideally with summaries in Italian, German and French), created by the Balzan, with the collaboration of the Balzan Prizewinners.

To promote and supervise all these initiatives, two Commissions have been set up, one between the Balzan and the Swiss Academies (composed of Professors Dr. René Dändliker and Peter Suter as well as Dr. Markus Zürcher) and another between the Balzan and the Lincei (composed of Professors Sergio Carrà, Carlo Ossola and Lellia Cracco Ruggini). Both commissions are chaired by myself as a representative of the Balzan, which is also represented by Professors Enrico Decleva and Paolo Matthiae, while the Balzan Secretary General, Dr. Suzanne Werder, has been appointed Secre-tary of both Commissions.Practical collaboration with the Academies was initiated with the 2009 Balzan Prize-winners Interdisciplinary Forum, held at the Swiss National Science Foundation in Bern in November 2009 which was a very rewarding academic encounter.This was followed by the inauguration of the Annual Balzan lecture series. The first lecture was delivered by Prizewinners Peter and Rosemary Grant and was entitled: The Evolution of Darwin’s Finches, Mockingbirds and Flies at the Accademia Nazio-nale dei Lincei on 13 May 2010. The proceedings have been published as the first volume in the series “The Annual Balzan Lecture”4. In Zurich, on 20 December 2010, Anthony Grafton delivered the second Annual Balzan lecture entitled Humanists with Inky Fingers at the Federal Institute of Tech-nology. The institutional activities of the Balzan Foundation will obviously remain untouched by the Agreements with the Academies. The authority of the General Prize Committee – composed of eminent European scholars and scientists – remains absolute. It must be stressed here that the selection of the Balzan Prizewinners is strictly reserved to the autonomous Balzan General Prize Committee which retains its own full statutory competence within the Balzan Foundation.

4 The Evolution of Darwin’s Finches, Mockingbirds and Flies, by Peter and Rosemary Grant, 2005 Balzan Prizewinners, Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 2010.

11

The tri-polar collaboration will certainly contribute in its own way to the spreading of the renown of the Balzan Foundation internationally, thus consolidating the Balzan Prize as one of the most prestigious forms of recognition in the sciences and the hu-manities.

This Forum brings together the four distinguished 2010 Balzan Prizewinners to pre-sent their work and participate in an interdisciplinary discussion of particular themes in relation to their work. We have taken this year as our themes, those of ‘memory’ and ‘continuity versus discontinuity’. This interaction produced a very enlighten-ing discourse on topics which are rarely touched upon in such a wide-ranging way. Collected here, these contributions serve as an important example of how the Balzan uniquely engages with and promotes intellectual debate across frontiers both aca-demic and physical.

12

International Balzan Foundation

The International Balzan Foundation was established in Lugano in 1956 thanks to the gen-erosity of Lina Balzan, who had come into a considerable inheritance on the death of her father, Eugenio. She decided to use this wealth to honour his memory. Eugenio Francesco Balzan was born in Badia Polesine, near Rovigo (Northern Italy), on 20 April 1874 into a family of landowners. He spent almost his entire working life at Milan’s leading daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera. After joining the paper in 1897, he quickly worked his way up from editorial assistant, to news editor and special correspond-ent1. In 1903 editor Luigi Albertini appointed him managing director of the paper’s publish-ing house; he then became a partner and shareholder in the company. He was not only a skilful manager but also a leading personality in Milanese society. In 1933 he left Italy due to opposition from certain quarters hostile to an independent Corriere. He then moved to Switzerland, living in Zurich and Lugano, where for years he had invested his fortune with success. He also continued his charitable activities in favour of institutions and individuals. He officially returned to Italy in 1950. Eugenio Balzan died in Lugano, Switzerland, on 15 July 19532.

The International E. Balzan Prize Foundation – “Prize” aims to promote, throughout the world, culture, science, and the most meritorious initiatives in the cause of humanity, peace and brotherhood among peoples, regardless of nationality, race or creed. This aim is attained through the annual award of prizes in two general fields: literature, the moral sciences and the arts; medicine and the physical, mathematical and natural sciences.Nominations for the prizes in the scientific and humanistic fields are received at the Foun-dation’s request from the world’s leading learned societies. Candidates are selected by the General Prize Committee, composed of eminent European scholars and scientists. Prizewin-ners must allocate half of the Prize to research work, preferably involving young researchers.At intervals of not less than three years, the Balzan Foundation also awards a prize of vary-ing amounts for humanity, peace and brotherhood among peoples.The International E. Balzan Prize Foundation – “Prize” attains its financial means from the International E. Balzan Prize Foundation – “Fund” which administers Eugenio Balzan’s estate.

1 Renata Broggini (ed.), Eugenio Balzan. L’emigrazione in Canada nell’inchiesta del “Corriere”, Fondazio-ne Corriere della Sera, Milan, 2009.2 Renata Broggini, Eugenio Balzan 1874-1953. Una vita per il “Corriere”, un progetto per l’umanità, RCS Libri, Milan, 2001. Renata Broggini, Eugenio Balzan 1874-1953. A Biography, Hoepli, Milan, 2007.

13

Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei

The Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, founded in 1603 by the Roman-Umbrian aristo-crat Federico Cesi and three other young scholars, Anastasio De Filiis, Johannes Eck and Francesco Stelluti, is the oldest scientific academy in the world. It promotes academic excellence through its Fellows whose earliest members included, among many other re-nowned names, Galileo Galilei. The Academy’s mission is “to promote, coordinate, integrate and disseminate scientific knowledge in its highest expressions in the context of cultural unity and universality”. The activities of the Academy are carried out according to two guiding principles that complement one another: to enrich academic knowledge and disseminate the fruits of this. To this end, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei organises national and international conferences, meetings and seminars and encourages academic cooperation and exchange between scientists and scholars at the national and international level. The Academy pro-motes research activities and missions, confers awards and grants, publishes the reports of its own sessions and the notes and records presented therein, as well as the proceedings of its own conferences, meetings and seminars. The Academy further provides – either upon request or on its own initiative – advice to public institutions and when appropriate drafts relevant reports. Since 1992, the Academy has served as an official adviser to the President of the Italian Republic in relation to schol-arly and scientific matters.

Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences

The Association of the “Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences” includes the Swiss Acade-my of Sciences (SCNAT), the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (SAHS), the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS), and the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences (SATW) as well as the two Centres for Excellence TA-SWISS and Science et Cité. Their collaboration is focused on methods of anticipating future trends, ethics and the dialogue between science and society. It is the aim of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences to develop an equal dialogue between academia and society and to advise Gov-ernment on scientifically based, socially relevant questions.

The academies stand for an open and pluralistic understanding of science and the arts. Over the long-term, they mutually commit to resolving interdisciplinary questions in the following fields:- They offer knowledge and expertise in relation to socially relevant subjects in the fields

of Education, Research and Technology.- They adhere to the concept of ethically-based responsibility in gaining and applying

scientific and humanistic knowledge.- They build bridges between Academia, Government and Society.

14

Introduction Alberto Quadrio Curzio

In my capacities both as President of the Class of Moral Sciences and Vice-President of the Accademia dei Lincei, I would first like to say that the Academy is most hon-oured to host this Balzan Interdisciplinary Forum. This is the first Interdisciplinary Forum held in Italy under the auspices of a new collaborative framework1.The readiness of the Balzan Foundation to promote academic debate within this in-terdisciplinary format represents a notable innovation being a unique occasion for an exchange of ideas among scholars and scientists both in the same field and across the natural and human sciences. These exchanges derive from the belief that the natural and human sciences have a common root which must be exploited for the progress of knowledge. Our Forum provides additional value in allowing the comparison of research from various parts of the world. This is potentially very useful for the formu-lation of public policy in the realms of science and the arts.I would now like to express my deep gratitude to the Prizewinners, Professors Man-fred Brauneck, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacob Palis and Shinya Yamanaka for their valued contributions. Furthermore, I would like to thank my Linceian colleagues who have agreed to take part in this Interdisciplinary Forum, namely Professors Enrico Castel-nuovo, Pierluigi Petrobelli, Carlo Sbordone and Mario Stefanini.The Balzan Foundation contributes to the progress of sciences and the arts; half of the prize-sum must be allocated by the Prizewinner to research involving young researchers under the guidance of the Prizewinner. This splendid model for intragen-erational transmission of the mission of science and the arts, one might hope would find an echo in public science policy. This model was publicly demonstrated this morning in an event chaired by Professor Salvatore Veca. Young scholars and re-searchers working on current Balzan Research Projects guided by previous Prizewin-ners, were able to present their work, creating a uniquely rich academic environment. I would like to thank specifically Professor Salvatore Veca and his colleagues on the Balzan General Prize Committee for the splendid work they do selecting the Balzan Prizewinners and following their research projects over the whole year.

1 s. Foreword page 10

15

I want to thank also Dr. Suzanne Werder, who coordinates the activities of the Balzan “Prize” Foundation in Milan, as well as the Chancellor of our own Accademia dei Lin-cei, Dr. Ada Baccari, who has worked diligently and most competently in arranging all the various complex meetings and encounters here at the Academy.

Last but not least, I have the pleasure to read the messages of Professor Lamberto Maffei, President of the Accademia dei Lincei, and Professor Peter Suter, President of the Swiss Academies, who unfortunately were not able to join us today.

Professor Lamberto Maffei conveyed the following:

“It is a pleasure and honour for the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei to host the 2010 Balzan Interdisciplinary Forum. My warmest congratulations to the recipients of the International Balzan Prize, Manfred Brauneck, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacob Palis and Shinya Yamanaka, for their valuable contributions in their re-spective fields. To the Balzan Foundation goes our deep gratitude for its continu-ing efforts to promote culture, science and world peace. As President of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, I take this opportunity to express my sincere appreciation to the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences; our Academy is proud to be part of a collaboration that fosters an environment conducive to knowledge exchange.I send my warmest welcome and greetings to all the participants of this Forum”.

Professor Peter Suter conveyed the following:

“As President of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences, I would like to congratulate the Balzan Foundation Prize Committee for their excellent choice of Prizewinners this year. Once again, outstanding personalities have been se-lected, and I would like to directly congratulate the Prizewinners on their scien-tific achievements and acknowledge their impressive contributions to academic knowledge.The Swiss Academies are honoured and proud to collaborate with both the Balzan Foundation and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in honouring the memory of Eugenio Francesco Balzan. By organizing the Balzan Interdisciplinary Forum last year in Bern, we wanted to contribute to the visibility and recognition of the Balzan Foundation and its outstanding 2009 Prizewinners in our own country, where Eugenio Balzan lived for almost 20 years. This year, we will expand the traditional ties between our

16

Academies and the Foundation by hosting the Annual Balzan Lecture 2010. Professor Anthony Grafton from Princeton University will give this lecture at the Technical University of Zürich, December 20th, 2010. Anthony Grafton re-ceived the Balzan Prize for History of the Humanities in 2002.In conclusion, let me thank again the International Balzan Foundation, and par-ticularly Ambassador Bruno Bottai and Professor Alberto Quadrio Curzio for giving the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences the opportunity of contribut-ing to the international recognition of exceptional academic achievement and new ways of thinking, with the ultimate goal to bring a brighter future to our societies”.

Before tying up my brief intervention, I would like to draw your attention to the iconographic representations surrounding us. We have here Federico Cesi, the founder of our Academy, and above him Galileo Galilei. On your left we have Guido Castel-nuovo and Vito Volterra, two esteemed mathematicians. On your right we have the lawyer Vittorio Scialoja and next to him the philosopher Benedetto Croce. Finally we have Enrico Fermi. These extraordinary figures whose faces look down upon us attest to the role of the Academy in the development of the intellectual and academic life of this country, and I am pleased to say this undertaking has always been acknowledged by the Presidents of the Italian Republic.

Let me now present Professor Salvatore Veca who will open the 2010 Interdiscipli-nary Forum.

17

Opening RemarksSalvatore Veca, Chairman of the Balzan General Prize Committee

I wish in the first instance to express my most heartfelt personal gratitude and to con-vey the same on behalf of the General Prize Committee to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. I extend as well a warm welcome to all present and in particular to the Balzan Prizewinners, Manfred Brauneck, Carlo Ginzburg, Jacob Palis and Shinya Yamanaka, to whom I am pleased again to express my sincerest congratulations.

As you all well know, since 2001, the Balzan Foundation has decided that half of the prize amount must be assigned to research projects proposed by the Prizewin-ner. These Balzan research projects prioritize the involvement in particular of young researchers. This aspect of the Balzan Prize was showcased this morning when a vol-ume describing Balzan research projects was presented. We had the chance to listen to a number of very able young researchers discussing aspects of their work on Balzan research projects. It is a fundamental axiom of the Foundation that it shall tirelessly endeavour to promote the recognition of the importance of research and that a future will be secured for research. We are very much aware that it can be exceedingly diffi-cult to pursue meaningful research in today’s world. The discussion this morning was, I believe, reassuring on this point, by virtue of the participation of young researchers and the quality of their research.

This Forum which we are about to open is not simply intended to be a presentation of the research and discoveries of the Prizewinners. It rather should be conceived as an active confrontation where the ideas central to the most important academic themes and questions are debated. These debates are relevant on the one hand to scientific research and controversy and on the other to analysis from a humanistic perspective. This is a point of great importance, something the General Prize Committee has de-liberated upon at length.

Such an interdisciplinary approach is guaranteed by the partnerships that Professor Quadrio Curzio has described where the Balzan has instituted agreements with the Ac-cademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. These partnerships are another profound factor enhancing the scope of our endeavours. I wish to again thank Professor Quadrio Curzio, who was the prime mover in getting

18

this project off the ground, and who showed exceptional tenacity in concluding these very laudable agreements. He is President of the commissions which established these relationships, creating a specific convention which involves them in the initiatives of the Forum.

Returning to the programme, it now gives me great pleasure to present my colleague Professor Paolo Matthiae of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, member of the Gen-eral Prize Committee, to open the first session of the Forum. Again congratulations to the Prizewinners, to everyone here present and to our hosts, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

19

Session I

Paolo Matthiae:We proceed now to the contributions of this year’s prizewinners, who will be presented by members of the General Prize Committee. Each contribution will be followed by a response from a member of the Accademia dei Lincei. Thus, I would now like to invite Madame Nicole Le Douarin, Honorary Professor at the Collège de France, member of the Institut de France, Honorary Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Sciences and member of the Balzan General Prize Committee to present Professor Shinya Yamanaka, 2010 Balzan Prizewinner for Stem Cells: Biology and Potential Applications.

Presentation of Shinya Yamanaka, 2010 Balzan Prize for Stem Cells: Biology and Potential Applications

Nicole Le Douarin:It is a great pleasure for me to present Shinya Yamanaka, 2010 Balzan Prizewinner for Stem Cells: Biology and Potential Applications. He receives the Award for the discovery of a method to transform already differentiated cells into cells presenting the characteristics of embryonic stem cells.These cells, called induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS), were first generated by in-troducing four genes which are Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc, klf4 into mouse fibroblast cells in vitro, with the assistance of retroviral vectors. In an article that came out in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka showed how these genes, encoding transcription factors, can re-program the genome of these cells and thus make them revert to an embryonic state where they are capable of generating all cell types that are present in the same organ-ism. Shortly thereafter, Shinya Yamanaka and his colleagues demonstrated in a 2007 paper, that these iPS cells can also be obtained from human fibroblasts. These results caused a veritable tidal wave of research on stem cells, in particular on iPS cells, and major therapeutic applications are expected to be developed from these efforts. The remarkable, yet unexpected discovery of this iPS cell technology opens up hitherto unexpected prospects for regenerative medicine, the discovery of new drugs and new tools for the study of diseases.Moreover, the ethical problems raised by embryonic stem cells – stem cells derived from human embryos – have thus been circumvented by this technique; now we may foresee that customized cells specific to each patient and not subject to immunological rejection may be made available in clinics in the future, quite possibly in the near future.

20

Since his fundamental discovery in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka and his group have shown that different types of cells – not only fibroblasts, but different types of cells including, for example, those of the digestive tract, liver cells etc. – can be reprogrammed. The work accomplished since then tends to reduce or even eliminate the risk of tumorigenic-ity in iPS cells, thus demonstrating that cellular reprogramming can also be obtained in some circumstances in the absence of retroviral vectors and the oncogene c-Myc.Shinya Yamanaka’s experimental results, which have the virtue of being easily re-produced, have made it possible to take a giant step in research on stem cells and regenerative medicine. They are also of great importance in the field of fundamental research because they will help in understanding the mechanisms of cellular differ-entiation and associated abnormalities which can lead to cancer and other diseases.Shinya Yamanaka is Director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, Professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sci-ences (iCeMS), Kyoto University and Senior Investigator at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco, California, U.S.A. The CiRA laboratory in Kyoto indeed has been purpose built for him to develop his research.

Shinya Yamanaka: Induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) Cells

Thank you very much, Madame Le Douarin, for the kind introduction. Chairman of the Balzan Foundation, ladies and gentlemen, this is a distinct honour to receive this year’s Balzan Prize. I would like to thank the Balzan Foundation and the General Prize Committee for giving me this great opportunity. In order to describe my work, let me explain briefly what embryonic stem cells are. Embryonic stem (ES) cells are derived directly from embryos. In 1981 researchers in the UK removed mouse embryos just before implantation from the uterus and suc-ceeded in culturing the cells in vitro that were taken from the mouse embryos over an extended period of time. They designated these cells ES cells, embryonic stem cells. ES cells exhibit two definitive properties: proliferation and pluripotency. These cells have abilities to grow robustly and to differentiate into any of the lineages that give rise to the cells of the adult body, a capacity referred to as pluripotency, which enables ES cells to be differentiated into various types of cells, such as neurons and cardiac muscle cells. The expression of many genes that are expressed specifically in ES cells is neces-sary to maintaining their pluripotency. When I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Glad-stone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease in San Francisco, the U.S.A., in the mid 1990s, I discovered a gene called NAT1. Returning to Japan, I continued to study the functions

21

of this gene and found that NAT1 is essential to maintain pluripotency in ES cells. In 1998, Professor James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin in the U.S.A. announced that his research team had successfully generated human ES cells. This achievement, which came 17 years after the isolation of mouse ES cells was first re-ported, was heralded as opening up the possibility of cell transplantation therapies to treat otherwise intractable diseases. Human ES cells can theoretically be differentiated into any somatic cell type, such as neurons, cardiomyocytes, pancreatic beta cells, and hepatic cells. If ES derived functional cells are produced in large quantities, they may one day find uses in clinical applications. For instance, ES cell derived dopaminergic neurons may in the future be used for cell transplantation in patients with Parkinson’s disease, and neural stem cells made from ES cells may be transplanted into patients suffering spinal cord injuries to aid in the recovery of motor function. For these reasons, human ES cells are regarded as an attractive source for cell transplantation therapies.However, the clinical application of ES cells also faces two major hurdles. One is that immune rejection is likely to occur after functional cells derived from ES cells are transplanted; the second is due to the ethical issues surrounding the use of human em-bryos to generate ES cells. When I had my laboratory at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Nara, Japan, in 1999, I decided that my group’s research would be directed toward the generation of a new type of pluripotent stem cell capable of circumventing these two obstacles. My concept was to generate embryonic-like stem cells by reprogramming somatic cells from patients, in a sense turning back the clock on somatic cells to restore them to pluripotency.This research theme was challenging as, at that time, many laboratories around the world were engaged in the differentiation of ES cells into functional cells. The con-cept of cellular reprogramming was in fact established many years ago. In 1962, the year I was born, Sir John Gurdon reported the generation of frog offspring by transfer-ring tadpole intestinal cell nuclei into enucleated eggs from the African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. Dolly the sheep, reported in 1997, was another example, as was a 2001 report showing that thymocytes acquire pluripotency upon electrofusion with mouse ES cells. These experiments clearly showed that eggs and ES cells contain fac-tors that induce pluripotency in somatic cells.

I first hypothesized that those factors that maintain pluripotency in mouse ES cells might be used to induce pluripotency in somatic cells. So members of my laboratory started searching for factors that play important roles in the maintenance of ES cell identity – genes that are expressed specifically in mouse ES cells. By the time that I

22

moved to Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan, in 2004, along with some of the members of my NAIST lab, our group had identified 24 such factors and tried to narrow down which among them was capable of reprogramming. We had observed that when all 24 factors were introduced together into somatic cells, typical ES-like cell colonies ap-peared. To determine which of the 24 candidates are critical, we repeated the experi-ment by removing each factor from the 24-factor combination in a process of elimina-tion, and watching as more limited sets of factors were introduced into somatic cells to see if the factors removed were essential to the generation of ES-like cells. Finally, we found four transcription factors indispensable for inducing pluripotent cells. In 2006, we reported that embryonic-like stem cells could be induced by introducing the four factors – Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc – into mouse fibroblasts or skin cells via retroviral vectors. These ES-like cells showed rapid proliferation and differenti-ated into various somatic cell lineages. The cells also expressed several ES cell mark-er genes, such as Oct3/4, ERas, and Esg1. When injected subcutaneously into nude mice, they differentiated into various cell types characteristic of all three germ layers, such as gut-like epithelium, cartilage, skeletal muscle, and neural tissue, demonstrat-ing their pluripotency. We named the new cells “induced pluripotent stem cells,” or iPS cells. As our final goal is to make the cells usable in the clinic, we worked on development of protocols for inducing pluripotency in human cells. In 2007, we re-ported the generation of human iPS cells, simultaneously with an independent report by Dr. Thomson’s group. These first reports were followed in close succession by reports from other labs as well. Soon after the announcement of the human iPS cell generation, Kyoto University es-tablished the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) to advance iPS cell research. I have since served as the director, and a new research building was opened in February this year. This facility has five aboveground stories and one basement floor, and a cell processing center and animal research facility onsite. At CiRA, 19 laboratories work on research projects ranging from basic research to preclinical and clinical studies, utilizing the center’s state-of-the-art facilities. Our goal is to improve iPS cell technology and develop new drugs and therapies for patients with intractable diseases at the earliest possible stage.

Currently, we generate iPS cells from somatic cells provided by patients. Physicians conduct biopsies to obtain tiny amounts of skin cells, or fibroblasts. The fibroblasts are cultured in a petri dish for two to three weeks, and then the four genes are intro-duced into the fibroblasts. After culturing the cells for a few weeks, iPS cell colonies emerge. Each iPS cell colony comprises several hundred iPS cells. iPS cells grow

23

rapidly and, like ES cells, can be differentiated into any functional cell type in the body. iPS-cell derived cardiac muscle cells, for example, show the same synchronized pulsing as beating heart muscle in the body. iPS cells have enormous potential. As iPS cells can in principle be steered to differenti-ate into any kind of cell, the prospect of patient-specific iPS cells has raised great hope for future medical applications, such as understanding pathogenesis, drug screening, and toxicology, as well as the development of regenerative medical approaches, such as cell transplantation. In iPS-based cell therapies, various types of somatic cells derived from pluripotent stem cells may one day be used to repair tissues damaged through dis-ease or injury. Years of research and rigorously designed clinical studies will be required to determine whether these applications are safe and effective. Many scientists around the world are conducting research aimed at the development of clinical applications using iPS cells. The therapeutic effects of mouse iPS cells have so far been reported in animal models of sickle cell anemia, Parkinson’s disease, hemophilia A, and spinal cord injury. The Center for Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, Spain, reported in 2009 that human iPS cells were effective to treat animal models of Fanconi’s anemia. iPS cell technology can also be used for drug screening or toxicology testing in vitro and for creating disease models in culture, which are regarded as comparatively short-er-term goals than the development of applications in regenerative medicine. For ex-ample, liver cells generated from individuals with different cytochrome p450 enzymes would be of value for predicting the liver toxicity of new drugs. The disorder long QT syndrome (LQTS) is caused by mutations in genes involved in generating cardiac action potentials resulting in lethal arrhythmias. LQTS can also be induced by certain drugs in sensitive individuals. By generating beating cardiac myocytes from iPS cells derived from these sensitive individuals, drug candidates could be tested in vitro.Generating in vitro disease models using iPS cell technology may also prove use-ful in elucidating mechanisms of disease pathogenesis. Many groups have already generated iPS cells from patients with various neurodegenerative diseases including amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, a variety of genetic diseases with either Mendelian or complex inheritance, and spinal muscular atrophy (SMA).An important challenge is how to recapitulate disease in cells derived from patient-specific iPS cells. In genetically inherited diseases, specific pathologies may be easier to model. Indeed, motor neurons generated from iPS cells derived from a SMA patient exhibit selective deficits compared to those generated from iPS cells derived from the patient’s healthy mother. However, in many neurodegenerative diseases such as ALS, it takes years for symptoms to develop in patients. For instance, a professional base-ball player who played in major league baseball in the U.S.A. in the 1930s, Lou Gehrig,

24

was one of leading batters with a batting average of .350 in 1936 and 1937. When his average dropped in 1938, people thought he had fallen into a slump, and he was forced to retire. Only later was he diagnosed with ALS, and he died in 1941 at the age of 37.ALS is a progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disease caused by the degeneration of motor neurons that control muscle movement. About 70 years after Lou Gehrig died, no major progress has been made in finding effective therapies for the disease, due in part to the lack of good disease models. If researchers use iPS cell technology, iPS cells generated from patients with ALS are derived into motor neurons that have the same DNA as the patient’s. If the symptoms of the disease can be recapitulated in the cells, it may be possible to use them to elucidate the mechanism of ALS and screen drug compounds that may be effective to the disease.However, the development of clinical applications using iPS cells faces many ob-stacles, some similar to those facing ES cells, and others that are unique. Common obstacles to realize cell therapies are that we have to develop methods to differentiate ES/iPS cells into any functional cells we need and to transplant them into patients. The most challenging common hurdle is teratoma formation. Even a small number of undifferentiated cells can result in the formation of teratomas, a form of tumor. Another key goal is to induce differentiation of human ES/iPS cells into required cell types while leaving few undifferentiated cells behind. One unique hurdle to be overcome before iPS cells can be used in the clinic is primarily related to the induced reprogramming of somatic cells. We need a reliable evaluation of whether nuclear reprogramming for each iPS cell is complete. Aberrant reprogramming may result in impaired ability to differentiate, and may increase the risk of teratoma formation after directed differentiation. One of the most important challenges is to develop simple, yet sensitive and reliable methods to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of the many iPS cell clones and subclones generated by many different technologies. To use iPS cells for disease modeling and drug and toxicology screening in vitro, finding methods for recapitulating pathology in these cells is of the utmost importance. Despite all these obstacles and challenges, iPS cells offer enormous and unprece-dented potential for disease research, drug screening, toxicology, and regenerative medicine. An increasing number of laboratories worldwide working with this tech-nology have reported many new findings in the short time since the first report was published. I cannot emphasize strongly enough that it would not have been possible to generate iPS cells and advance the field at such rapid speed without the many studies using mouse and human ES cells that appeared since the isolation of mouse ES cells in 1981. I believe that the concerted efforts of researchers around the world will make the promise of iPS cells a reality in the not-too-distant future.

25

Finally, I would like to thank all members in my laboratory and CiRA for their valu-able discussions, technical support, and administrative assistance. Without their hard work, iPS cells would never have been made. I was lucky enough to have several tal-ented colleagues and students in my laboratory. In particular, Drs. Yoshimi Tokuzawa and Kazutoshi Takahashi, and the excellent technician Tomoko Ichisaka have greatly contributed to the development of iPS technology. Yoshimi identified the transcription factor Klf4, one of the four transcription factors used to generate iPS cells. Kazutoshi, who now works with me at CiRA, conducted the painstaking experiments needed to test 24 candidate factors, and identified the four indispensable factors. These two were the first students in my lab at the NAIST. Tomoko, who also works in my lab, has been an excellent technician, and without her skills, we could not have conducted the functional analysis of these factors. As Madame Le Douarin has recounted, I manage two laboratories – one in Kyoto and the other in San Francisco. With the students and colleagues working in my labs and many other researchers around the world, I hope to continue to make progress in iPS cell research. It may take many years to reach the goal, but I sincerely hope that iPS cell technology will contribute to the development of new cures for people suffering from various diseases and injuries.I just want to add one more thing. I would like to thank my wife and my family for their continuous support.

References

1. Nakagawa, M., Takizawa, N., Narita, M., Ichisaka, T., and Yamanaka, S. Promotion of direct reprogramming by transformation-deficient Myc. Proc Natl Acad Sci U.S.A. 107(32):14152-14157, 2010.

2. Yoshida, Y., Takahashi, K, Okita, K., Ichisaka, T., and Yamanaka, S. Hypoxia Enhances the Generation of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. Cell Stem Cell 5(3):237-241, 2009.

3. Hong, H., Takahashi, K., Ichisaka, T., Aoi, T., Kanagawa, O., Nakagawa, M., Okita, K., and Yamanaka, S. Suppression of induced pluripotent stem cell generation by the p53–p21 pathway. Nature 460: 1132-1135, 2009.

4. Miura, K., Okada, Y., Aoi, T., Okada, A., Takahashi, K., Okita, K., Nakagawa, M., Koyanagi, M., Tanabe, K., Ohnuki, M., Ogawa, D., Ikeda, E., Okano, H., and Yamanaka, S. Variation in the safety of induced pluripotent stem cell lines. Nature Biotechnology 27: 743-745, 2009.

5. Okita, K., Nakagawa, M., Hong, H., Ichisaka, T., and Yamanaka, S. Generation of mouse induced pluripotent stem cells without viral vectors. Science 322: 949-953, 2008.

6. Aoi, T., Yae, K., Nakagawa, M., Ichisaka, T., Okita, K., Takahashi, K., Chiba, T., and Yamanaka, S. Generation of pluripotent stem cells from adult mouse liver and stomach cells. Science 321:699-702, 2008.

26

7. Nakagawa, M., Koyanagi, M., Tanabe, K., Takahashi, K., Ichisaka, T., Aoi, T., Okita, K., Mochiduki, Y., Takizawa, N., and Yamanaka, S. Generation of induced pluripotent stem cells without Myc from mouse and human fibroblasts. Nat Biotechnol 26:101-106, 2008.

8. Takahashi, K., Tanabe, K., Ohnuki, M., Narita, M., Ichisaka, T., Tomoda, K., and Yamana-ka, S. Induction of pluripotent stem cells from adult human fibroblasts by defined factors. Cell 131:861-872, 2007.

9. Okita, K., Ichisaka, T., and Yamanaka, S. Generation of germline-competent induced pluri-potent stem cells. Nature 448:313-317, 2007.

10. Takahashi, K., and Yamanaka, S. Induction of pluripotent stem cells from mouse embryonic and adult fibroblast cultures by defined factors. Cell 126:663-676, 2006.

Paolo Matthiae:Thank you, Shinya Yamanaka, for this very interesting presentation. I have the pleas-ure to invite now Mario Stefanini, who is Professor of Histology at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and a member of the Lincei, to make some comments.

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion

Mario Stefanini:Shinya Yamanaka has helped pioneer a whole new field in Biology1-3. There are more than 40 major research laboratories around the world working on the production of safe iPS cells for clinical application, investigation concerning etiology of diseases, and drug screening. I would like to ask Dr. Yamanaka to elaborate on the recent data on iPS cell biology, produced by his own laboratories as well as by other research centres. The first issue regards iPS cells and tumorigenesis. As we just heard, iPS cells were made by using viruses to insert at least four key genes, Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf4, into their genome. This procedure, even in the absence of one gene c-Myc, carries the risk of turning the cell cancerous. A new method has just been published by Derrick Rossi and colleagues that claims not only to do away with genes, but also to be more efficient4. The authors chemically modified RNAs transcribed from the four genes, Klf4, c-Myc, Oct4 and Sox2, and introduced these into human fibroblast cells. The method proved more ef-ficient at generating iPS cells than the virus method. Furthermore, treating the iPS cells with an additional RNA transcript turned them into muscle cells.

1 Takahashi K and Yamanaka S. Cell 126: 663-676, 20062 Takahashi K et al. Cell 131: 861-872, 20073 Yamanaka S & Blau H M. Nature 465: 704-712, 20104 Warren L et al. Cell Stem Cell 7:1-13, November 5, 2010

27

In addition, many studies are currently involved in finding alternatives to using viral vectors carrying transcription factors for reprogramming cells. These include using plasmid transfection, the piggyback transposon system and the piggyback transposon system combined with a non-viral vector system5. I wonder whether Dr. Yamanaka could comment on this and provide us with the most recent evidence that might sug-gest ways to overcome this problem.

Shinya Yamanaka: The issue raised is very important. In our original method we use retroviruses, and as you mentioned retroviruses are inserted into the host genome. They will integrate with the genome. This may cause tumorigenity, which is very risky, but that issue has been almost solved already because we and other researchers have successfully reproduced iPS cells without retroviruses. For example, in my laboratory we have generated hu-man iPS cells with plasmids, with no DNA integration at all. Although the efficiency of iPS cell generation is slightly lower when we use the plasmid method, it is high enough from a single experiment. In an experiment without using retroviral vectors, we can obtain 10 to 20 independent iPS clones. So I don’t think that the retroviral vec-tor issue is the main problem in this field.

Mario Stefanini:The second issue I wish to touch upon is the epigenetic memory in iPS cells. Re-cently published evidence demonstrated that iPS cells retain an epigenetic memory of their previous differentiated state, which could compromise their suitability for use in genetic engineering and regenerative medicine. In other words, iPS cells derived from factor-based reprogramming of adult murine tissues would harbor residual DNA methylation signatures characteristic of their somatic tissue of origin, which could favor their differentiation along lineages related to the donor cell while restricting alternative cell fates6-7. I would be pleased to have your opinion, Dr. Yamanaka, on how this problem could be solved.

Shinya Yamanaka: That is also a very important issue. It is true that iPS cells may retain the memory of their origins. However they cannot remember forever, so after culturing iPS cells for 20 days, 30 days, to even 100 days, I think they keep losing their epigenetic memories. So in our

5 Patel M and Yang S, Stem Cell Rev and Rep 2010 6:367–3806 Kim K at al.. Nature 467, 285-292, 20107 Polo, J. M. et al. 2010. Nature Biotechnol. 28, 848–855

28

hands, from skin-derived iPS cells we can induce murine cardiac myocytes, glutamater-gic neurons, retinal or pigment cells with efficiencies comparable to those from human ES cells. I think therefore that issue of epigenetic memory is no longer a major issue.

Mario Stefanini: My last question is related to the use of human ES for clinical application. Recently, it has been demonstrated that new cell lines can be derived from the mouse epiblast, a tissue of the post-implantation embryo, and that these cell lines share patterns of gene expression and signalling responses with human ES, thus suggesting that human ES are more advanced stem cells than mouse ES8. What I would like to ask is: following your recent work and that also of Ron McKay, what do you think are the prospects for the use of human ES? This is of particular interest in Italy.

Shinya Yamanaka: As you mentioned it has been shown that mouse ES cells and human ES cells, although they are both called ES cells, are not identical. They are different, and I have to point out that human iPS cells are very similar to human ES cells, not mouse ES cells. So human ES cells and human iPS cells are very similar to each other. However, many scientists around the world are trying to generate human iPS cells or human ES cells, which are more similar to mouse ES cells. There is a fierce competition among many laboratories in the U.S.A., Europe and Japan. Mouse ES cells are much easier to handle and they are more stable, so this is why many researchers all over the world are now trying to make human iPS cells or ES cells, which are like mouse ES cells. This answers part of your question, but your question has another aspect, which is: whether we still need human ES cells or not? Well, my hope is that in the near future we can replace human ES cells with human iPS cells, but we do not know exactly when. For the moment, I use human ES cells. It would be a very positive thing if we could avoid the use of human embryos or human ES cells. But in order to achieve that goal we really need to further study human ES cells because without human ES cells we would never have been able to generate human iPS cells.

Paolo Matthiae:Thank you again, Shinya Yamanaka and Mario Stefanini. To introduce the next Prizewinner I have the pleasure to invite Gottfried Scholz, Pro-fessor Emeritus of Music Analysis at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, and member of the Balzan General Prize Committee.

8 Tesar, P. J. et al. Nature 448, 196–199, 2007

29

Presentation of Manfred Brauneck, 2010 Balzan Prize for the History of Theatre in All Its Aspects

Gottfried Scholz:Manfred Brauneck, born in 1934, has taught Modern German Literature and Theatre Studies at the University of Hamburg. He began teaching there in 1973. He was Direc-tor of the Centre for Theatre Research from 1986 to 2003. In 1988 he established a de-gree course in Theatre Directing and the Dramatic Arts which he directed until 2005. Whoever undertakes research on any aspect concerning the History of Theatre cannot but be impressed by his comprehensive six-volume work Die Welt als Bühne (The World as a Stage). In this work, Manfred Brauneck describes over 2,500 years of Eu-ropean theatre culture and relates it to the contexts of the social and intellectual struc-tures of various periods and regions. He also explains the many different national de-velopments that impacted the very essence of theatre, eventually encompassing even stage setting and theatre architecture. This encyclopedic work documents the multi-faceted nature and richness of a continuous innovative artistic development, contain-ing exemplary analyses of individual works covering the whole theatrical universe.At the beginning of his academic career at the University of Regensburg he estab-lished two significant publication projects, thanks to which new horizons in German drama and theatre have been opened up. One of these works was on the German and Latin Drama of Sixtus Birck, a leading humanist active in Augsburg and Basel, who made Roman dramaturgy accessible to German-speaking school and bourgeoi-sie audiences. The multi-volume publication of Spieltexte der Wanderbühne des 17. Jahrhunderts (17th Century Travelling Theatre Playtexts) documents the adaptation of works by English and French playwrights for the world of popular theatre entertain-ment. There then followed studies on early Baroque Jesuit theatre, which showed how the dramaturgy of these pieces is oriented towards the techniques of prayers and meditation. An extensive report on international Baroque research from 1945 to 1970 lead to the Revision eines Epochenbildes (Revision of an Epochal Image).Manfred Brauneck’s interests concentrate on the theatre of the twentieth century, on the many styles and approaches that at the beginning of that period broke with tradi-tion in various places, giving rise to experiments that, when amplified on the stage, stimulated and very often shocked people. He has a particular interest in develop-ments on the frontier between theatre and the fine arts, specifically that of Futurism and the performing arts of the 1970s including the context of their positions vis-à-vis debates on post modernity. In these historical milieus, Manfred Brauneck enriches the state of specialized knowl-edge with anthologies of texts that show, with various comments, the positions taken

30

by directors, playwrights and stage designers. This profound lexicographical body of work offers the latest generation of researchers a proven factual foundation to build upon in their own work. In both volumes of his Dictionary of the Theatre, beyond presenting a general vision of European theatre, he also deals with the forms of theatre found in non-European cultures, thus expanding the concept of “theatre” beyond the traditional boundaries of a pure art form located solely on the stage.In these volumes, Manfred Brauneck’s wide-ranging knowledge enables him to allow us to engage with various historical developments, people, styles and concepts that are closely connected with the theatre. He thus places a grandiose corpus of work at the reader’s disposal, without making arbitrary judgments. In this way, his work exposes both traditionalist-conservative and alternative-progressive intellectuals to elements which may cause them to reconsider their positions.The detailed account of the theory and history of the theatre which Manfred Brauneck has presented, giving us and future generations access to this particularly important cultural phenomenon, has led the International Balzan Foundation to award him the Balzan Prize for “The History of Theatre in All Its Aspects”.

Manfred Brauneck:The History of the Theatre as the History of Society

For over four decades I have been concerned with the theatre, with its theory and his-tory as well as with current artistic practice, above all, of course, in my research work and in my capacity as a professor at the University of Hamburg. There, one of my main tasks was also the training of young directors at the Institute for Theatre Direc-tion that I founded in 1988. As an academic, I was often involved in heated debates with budding young artists, over concepts, evaluations and points of view on the pos-sibilities and limits of the theatre. Admittedly, by that time no one any longer believed that the world could be changed by the theatre. However, it was a question of the topics that these young people were concerned with. In these discussions, academic discourse was weighed upon time and time again by its resistance to the practical stag-ing of productions. It was a learning process on both sides. I have also been curator of a few theatrical exhibitions, and have put a few productions on the stage.The remarkable honour that is bestowed upon my work through the Balzan Prize gives me an occasion to meditate upon my dealings with the theatre, also upon my view of its history, which has always guided my work. I am grateful to have the op-portunity to talk about this subject at this Forum.

31

When I recall my larger, and perhaps more important works, such as my Habilitation-sschrift on the reception of naturalistic theatre by an extremely polarized public at the end of the nineteenth century, my works on twentieth century theatre and of course, Die Welt als Bühne (The World as a Stage) – the History of European Theatre, I can ascertain that my attachment to the theatre was also essentially shaped by my studies in art history and philosophy, as well as by my interest in the cultural and social his-tory of Europe.What constitutes Europe today, still a controversial matter in the political sphere, has always been grasped and dealt with by the theatre in its own way. There have been no national borders for theatre, nor have there been for actors, choreographers or directors, for theatre architects or set designers, nor for scenographic inventions, for ideas or even theatrical works themselves. At one time in Germany, Shakespeare’s Hamlet was seen as the essence of German being, and was virtually incorporated into German theatre. In the 1980s and 1990s, Dario Fo was “the world’s most performed living playwright”, or so it was worded in the citation of the Nobel Prize Committee in Oslo in 1997.For theatre, the ‘National’ and the ‘European’ were never opposites. Often both na-tional and regional traditions contributed to creative exchange across all borders, so as to further artistic developments in theatre in Europe. Successful pieces or techni-cal discoveries on the stage were well-received across borders shortly after their first production. Theatre has always been addicted to the new.The best examples demonstrate developments that originated in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and that influenced, promoted and, one must really say dominat-ed, modern European theatre for two centuries. Italian architects were the first to build freestanding, covered theatre buildings since the time of classical antiquity, such as the Teatro Olimpico, an icon of European theatre construction. Andrea Palladio began build-ing it in Vicenza for a humanist organization of theatre enthusiasts; Vincenzo Scamozzi finished it. Scamozzi’s stage construction marked the final break with the principle of simultaneity, which had reigned throughout the Middle Ages, maintaining that every event on the stage had to be perceived as part of the sacral, as it were, sub specie aeter-nitatis. Italian stage architects showed man’s earthly life on stage, which is typical of the modern theatre’s way of seeing things. From then on, the spectator saw events portrayed on stage as if through a “window”, as if they were really part of his own world, or indeed as if faced with his own experience. The idea of the Italian Renaissance, the new assess-ment of the world that could be felt and experienced without transcending boundaries, was also formative for the modern understanding of the theatre. The eye of the beholder structured the stage space as his “visual space”. The further development of stage setting – again from Italy – and its mathematical improvement, the theories and scenographic

32

discoveries of Baldassare Peruzzi, Sabbatini, Torelli, Andrea Pozzo and many others laid the foundations for almost every form of illusionism on the stage, which then be-came the aesthetic standard for European theatre, at least until the end of the nineteenth century. Almost all discoveries in stage machinery and scene decoration came from the workshops of Italian theatre engineers. Bernardo Buontalenti was one of the greatest “magicians” with scenery at the Medici court. His spectacular stage sets were circulated in copper plate engravings and caused a stir all over Europe. Earlier, Leonardo da Vinci had already made sketches for similar “stage pieces” for the French court. The creation of stage setting, which influenced European theatre for so long, found its origins in these developments, which came from Italy and crossed all national borders.Likewise, the theatre festivities of the Habsburgs in Vienna would not have been pos-sible without the Italian theatre architects who were closely bound up with the court, the Burnaccinis in the seventeenth century and the Galli-Bibienas in the eighteenth century. The splendid interior decoration of Germany’s most beautiful Rococo thea-tre, the Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth, is the work of Giuseppe and Carlo Galli-Bibiena. Giuseppe, who was hired at the court in Dresden as Saxon theatre architect, was released from his responsibilities in order to work in Bayreuth. The theatres at most European courts were then largely in Italian hands.How a local theatre tradition, whose origins were certainly derived from the Carne- vale in Venice, became triumphant all over Europe can convincingly be documented in the history of the Commedia dell’arte. Gallant, mannered masques once again of-fered the courts of Europe – whose decline was already foreshadowed in the eight-eenth century – the spectacle of the fascinating world of the theatre with its lightness, gallantry and affectation; and all this at a time when reason and the imperatives of utilitarianism were already heralding the spirit of a new age. The end of the Comme-dia was the virtuoso finale of a splendid concept of drama that made people temporar-ily forget the myth of the origin of European theatre, the dark ecstasy of the cult of Dionysus. When it comes to theatre in the sixteenth, the seventeenth and also in the eighteenth century, one must inevitably pay homage to Italy.The total interconnection of European theatre on the artistic level, which today is no less effective than in the past, not least through a truly sprawling international festival business, is undoubtedly one of the essential characteristics of theatre as a cultural phenomenon. In my history of the theatre, Die Welt als Bühne, this aspect is presented as a general principle. The virulent idea of the national theatre movement in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries never really succeeded in prevailing as a cultural project. It was a reflex of the citizens’ longing for a nation state. This movement could never compensate for theatre’s international nature, which was obvious to courtly

33

society and was one of the essential components of its creative power. The smaller nations on the fringes of Europe occasionally occupy a special place with respect to a national orientation of theatre culture. There, the appearance of indigenous theatre companies using the local language – even if only amateur – was enthusiastically ac-claimed as an expression of the nation. The much more professional Italian, French or German ensembles were entirely dismissed. These nations also operated costly programmes to promote indigenous authors. Once national independence was gained, the fixation on the national was once again abandoned.The history of the theatre is, however, intimately linked with the development of the history of society and the history of thought, and with the rules and conditions of eco-nomics, law and politics. Theatre as an institution is a place where men must work; artists must take orders, woo their audience and make a living with their art. At the same time the social history of the actor has attained a special position in the overall history of the artist. Over the centuries, this profession has been discriminated against in society and subject to special restrictive labour law-related stipulations. I have dealt with this theme in my history of the theatre.As an institution, the theatre is a constituent element of the cultural life of a society. It reflects the image of a society. A visit to the theatre is an indicator of social and cultural status and has developed its own conventions. To this end, theatre architecture has fashioned a differentiated spatial framework, in which valid, socially applicable hier-archies can be expressed. In this way, theatre architecture defines the possibilities for the individual to participate in stage events. As an architectural monument, the theatre forges an image of the city, often in a prominent position, comparable to churches or government buildings. Ancient theatre constructions stood in direct relation to temples and ritual sacrificial altars. The position of the theatre was originally the same as that of the Agora, where all important communal public events in Athens were held: markets, legal proceedings and public assemblies. This identity was the most powerful sign that theatre was located at the centre of public life. It created images of man, both tragic and comic. Moreover, every age and every society has its own way of laughing or weeping in the theatre, of affirming itself or expressing anger. Theatre has preserved its celebra-tory nature throughout the entire period of its history. The time that people spend at the theatre is free time. They spend this time together with others. Shakespeare truly meant theatre to be a place for dreams, unsettling as well as pleasant.Theatre is a joyful, social medium that presents its essence by the dialectic of acting and observing. In this dialectic, theatre must hold its ground and for that reason en-counters restrictions and contradictions. However, it must preserve its liberty, respect conventions and limits, yet supersede its own limits.

34

In the early twentieth century, avant-garde movements broke with all of these conven-tions and proclaimed their violation of limits and non-compliance with conventions according to the principle of “anti-art”. Geared up for revolt and scandal, they voiced their words of cultural criticism from the stage. At the apex of the movement were the Italian Futurists, and they provocatively celebrated instead of the Nike of Samothrace, the automobile, speed and the cinema. From their point of view, the institutions of civilized culture, museums and the theatre, ossified through convention, were out of touch with modern man’s way of life.Especially characteristic of European theatre is its relationship to the sphere of poli-tics, to the representation of governmental power, to the mise-en-scène of dominance as well as the articulation of political interests. This proximity to politics has been present throughout its entire history. From the very beginning, theatre was admittedly an artistic endeavour, but above all it was a political project. European theatre has a founding date: the year 534 B.C., when in Athens the reigning clan of the tyrant Peisitratos expanded the long-standing Dionysus festival into a larger celebration and national holiday lasting several days. The political, or better, the religious-political purpose of this undertaking was to integrate the rival social groups and aristocratic clans of the region into a common body politic. Only if united in a single community might the country survive against its enemies. The Persian Wars confirmed this politi-cal strategy. The arrival of theatre also marks the entrance of a new stage of develop-ment in the model of Greek civilization. In this further development there emerged the democratic constitution of the Athenian Polis.At the beginning of the modern era, theatre galas like the fifteenth century trionfi and the sixteenth century intermezzi were obvious tools in the political strategies of the dukes in the northern Italian states. Trionfi were staged processions as show pieces, which in allegorical scenarios laced with innuendo and with great theatrical panto-mime extravagance served as propaganda for military campaigns, political alliances and marriages of the ducal family or state visits. The political purpose of the trionfi was to impart a higher meaning to a particular series of events through allusion to myth and history, and was ultimately aimed at political legitimation. At the same time, they celebrated the wisdom of the ruler.In the sixteenth century, the courts of Ferrara and Urbino were noted centres of theatre production; higher up in the pecking order was the Florence of the Medici, whose political intentions were also equally explicit. At these courts, the intermezzo, which was at first merely an interlude within a theatrical performance, developed into a refined, fully devel-oped virtuoso theatre genre in its own right. It had all the features of mannerist artistic ex-pertise, but was a genre of theatrical entertainment apart, the greatest attraction of which

35

were the stunning special effects. Rulers pursued political aims through the intermezzi. In Florence, for example, it was part of the Medici’s political strategy to thwart the independ-ent political ambitions of groups of young aristocrats through the organization of exceed-ingly expensive intermezzi that demanded a great deal of effort and financial resources. The absolutism of the seventeenth century is unthinkable without the employment of the theatre for representations of absolute rule. The theatrical representation of the ab-solute sovereign was an essential component of the political system, its most powerful form of legitimation in the face of the outside world. Louis XIV, his consultants and court artists did the work of representing his absolute rule with hitherto unknown per-fection. The king, who himself was a gifted dancer, appeared on the stage during such theatre and ballet performances, thus acting out his real-life role, the Sun King. At these theatrical performances, representation and divertissement were a total staged unity, when all of the arts worked in tandem. It was, however, precisely this connec-tion with the political aims of the theatre and a rather insubstantial, lavish inclination for pleasure which was one of the enlightened bourgeoisie’s points of criticism of the lifestyle of courtly society. The notion that theatre should be a school for virtue and proper behaviour was entirely extraneous to courtly theatre. Instead these were both fundamental values which the self-assured bourgeoisie expected from the stage. The German idealist Friedrich Schiller spoke of theatre as a “moral institution”. In these differing concepts of the meaning and purpose of theatre, two fundamentally opposite images of society clashed. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, court life was characterized by the absence of productive work and morals. Both these values, how-ever, were central to the image that the bourgeoisie had of itself. Theatre as the most prominent public institution was the focal point of the controversy over this image of society before the French Revolution forcibly resolved this conflict through violence.The use of the theatre by state authority working through the political systems with the aim of advantageous representation and propaganda is one of the aspects of the multi-layered relationship between theatre and politics. For many centuries, however, the theatre also gained benefit from this situation. Artistic innovations were in many cases only possible through the financial resources of the court. The flip side of this relation-ship, however, is that theatre was continually subject to specific controls, including economic regulations and censorship laws. Even in the sixteenth century, incipient pri-vate theatre enterprises were subject to strict rules in terms of the granting of licences, to the point of actually checking the background of the theatre entrepreneur. Theatre management as a profession was long an exception within trade regulation acts. No other art form attracted the attention of the state and ecclesiastical authorities in comparable measure. The reason for this was obvious. It has been alleged that theatre

36

exerted an exceptionally suggestive impact on its audience, not only through stage performances but also in the context of the gathering of a large, like-minded crowd of people. Thus, especially since the nineteenth century, there seemed to be a potential threat to public order. I investigated this connection in my Habilitationsschrift on the reception of naturalistic theatre in the decades before and after 1900. I was astonished at the importance that was given to the contemporary historical view of the cultural status of theatre as an institution in the assessment of this process of reception. It ap-peared that the higher the social-cultural rank of theatre, the looser the rules of censor-ship. The reason for this was that these theatres were dominated by an audience from which no political heckling was to be expected. In the prohibition enacted against Die Weber, Gerhart Hauptmann’s milieudrama, the performance was given permission only if theatre directors promised to raise the admission charge, so that a working class audience would be barred from attending. It was the most sensational censorship trial in the history of European theatre. The reaction it provoked resulted in a world-wide wave of legal proceedings against the performance of this work.How the theatre functioned under the dictatorships of the twentieth century is alto-gether another story. During the era of the Soviet Union and in Germany under the Nazi regime, authors who refused to conform politically and ideologically were rigor-ously pursued and their works forbidden, whereas under the Fascist regimes in Spain and Italy measures were far less systematic. In these countries there was no tradition of political theatre comparable to Germany or the Soviet Union. Those who exerted power across the political spectrum in the twentieth century nevertheless used theatre as an instrument of propaganda. In reality, film played a more important role, as it was considered a more versatile tool for propaganda purposes.If one wants to follow the long path through the many centuries of theatre history, as I have done in my writings on the history of European theatre, one’s view of contem-porary theatre will change. Many things that seem to be new become relatively less so when viewed in terms of their alleged originality. Identity and economic crises are apparently part of the world of theatre, just as spreading fire was in the past before the advent of electrical lighting.The break with previous epochs that theatre experienced on many levels in the twentieth century is significant. No other era displayed so many theatrical-cultural facets or had at the same time as many different artistic strands as this century. Social consensus such as those created for educational conventions have been largely lost. The century be-gan with an extraordinarily experimental dynamic, which virtually sacrificed the whole traditional normative structure of theatrical works. The rules and practice of artistic production were newly defined. In the last third of the century, a new international

37

movement, Free Theatre, sprung up, which not only experimented with new aesthetic concepts, but also constructed a system of decentralized structures. Most importantly, in the twentieth century, a form of politicizing the theatre was practiced which did not occur in previous periods. The essential innovation in the theatre of the last century in every sphere is the new importance that has been given to the director as a creative, conceptual centre of theatrical endeavour. Almost all of the innovative developments in twentieth century theatre were brought about by directors, not playwrights. However, it was playwrights who for a long time ensured a practical continuity with tradition in a historical context. The consequences of the superior position of the director and his virtually unrestricted monopoly on the interpretation of the play remain an open issue, especially with regard to the classics in the context of the role of theatre in society.At present, I am researching a book in which I intend to investigate – in a historical context – what part the theatre has played in the discharge of old and in the creation of new images of society, what images of society it stabilizes or, on the other hand, calls into question. The work will also deal with the issue of to what extent theatre can still be taken as an indicator of Europe’s cultural identity.The Balzan Prize has given me the possibility to fulfil a long-standing ambition to create a unique research project. The purpose of this research project on which I hope to work in conjunction with the International Theatre Institute and other organizations will be to investigate the development that has led to significant change in European theatre culture in the latter part of the twentieth century. This will involve the exami-nation of its aesthetic foundations, the expansion of its social structures, as well as how theatre has opened up to other performance cultures. Such development was ini-tiated primarily by an international movement of independent theatre groups, through their investigations and experimentation in the artistic as well as the social realm. It will also deal with the importance the theatre has in all its manifestations, for Europe’s rapidly changing societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Paolo Matthiae:Thank you, Manfred Brauneck, for this most thorough presentation. I would like to invite Pierluigi Petrobelli, Professor Emeritus of the History of Music at the Univer-sity of Rome “La Sapienza” and a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei to contribute some comments.

38

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion

Pierluigi Petrobelli:As a discussant versed more in the genre of musical theatre and granted only a brief interval of time, it would be quite impossible to adequately respond to the numerous and important stimuli that Professor Brauneck has elicited with his forum speech. Thus, I will choose only a few of these stimuli, those that spark an appropriate parallel in my field of study.As Manfred Brauneck emphasized, theatre is basically an international event. His is the world of the spoken word, that of Shakespeare and Beckett, what is defined as “teatro di prosa” in Italian. His statement is every bit as true – for the past as well as for the present – when concerned with musical theatre, especially the Italian. Already in the seventeenth century, and above all in the eighteenth century, Italian opera was predominant throughout Europe, from Lisbon and Madrid all the way to St. Peters-burg, from London to Vienna, Dresden and Prague, with the exception of France, per-haps. This diffusion assumed truly global dimensions in the nineteenth century: Ital-ian opera was performed in places like New York and Cuba, just as it was in Odessa. Nowadays, it is performed in Sydney as well as Tokyo, Shanghai and Buenos Aires. I am tempted to say that Manfred Brauneck’s definition “Die Welt als Bühne” could easily be transformed into “Die Welt als Oper”.In talking about the social function of theatre, Professor Brauneck makes an important reference to the relevance of the theatre building in the city’s space. However, the very structure of the theatre building – and here I am thinking of the eighteenth-nineteenth century Italian model – perfectly mirrors the structure of the society for which it was created. The boxes that belonged to the noble families were placed next to each other and were superimposed in different rows vertically up to the gallery and balcony, spaces for the bourgeoisie and, in a very small measure, for the less well-off classes. The building where musical theatre is performed is hence a perfect reproduction of the organization of the society it was designed for. But the stage, too, and what was repre-sented on the stage, continually repeats the passions, aspirations and myths that under-lie the society for whom the performance was intended. The stage is like a great mirror that reflects the image of the audience attending the performance. In this perspective, the singer performing the opera – unlike the actor who is, as Manfred Brauneck states, socially discriminated against – assumes a relevance that is also social. At the begin-ning of the eighteenth century, in fact, the castrato Farinelli held a key position at the court of Philip V of Spain. This same singer is also portrayed in a medallion within an engraving of the series ‘The Rakes Progress’ by William Hogarth. He is depicted

39

sitting on a sort of throne, with a woman kneeling at his feet exclaiming: “One God and one Farinelli!!” It was the miracle of singing, of its continuous variegations that created situations, reactions – and caricatures – of this genre. But opera also has an important political function, in the sense that it can become an active tool for raising awareness, and hence arousing emotions of revolt and of insurrection. The “patriotic” choruses in the operas of the young Verdi had a definite function in creating a sense of belonging within Italian society across all social levels. However, Verdi’s theatre is at the same time an important tool in expanding cultural awareness, in the sense that, unlike almost all contemporary composers, Verdi chose “high” literary models for his operas from the very beginning of his career. It was from the dramas of Victor Hugo, Schiller, Byron and Shakespeare that the poetic texts for his operas were drawn. From this point of view, Verdi is at the same time patriotic and European. His works undoubtedly expanded the cultural horizons of the audi-ences to whom they were addressed.Another point in Manfred Brauneck’s speech that certainly touches on a theme of great interest and current relevance is his reference to the predominance of the direc-tor in today’s theatrical activity. This is equally relevant for contemporary musical theatre. In comparison with the cautious, albeit clear stance of the speaker, I would like to add another consideration. That is, I would like to stress the fact that, in put-ting forward his interpretation – his “Konzeption” – of the theatrical or operatic text, today’s director assumes – whether he is aware of it or not – a great responsibility: that of setting his identity against the author’s, against the identity of the composer who created the opera performed. In musical theatre there is a complex code of communi-cation that is fundamental in the original conception of the composer, given that this code concerns and is relevant not only to the dramatic structure of the work but also to the language of the music, in all of its components. The discrepancy that is often noted between what one hears and what one sees in a contemporary opera performance is caused precisely by the absence of this sense of responsibility in terms of the score that is being performed. And only an appeal to such responsibility could help solve a problem which is acutely felt in the contemporary productions of opera. I would love to comment on and discuss many other themes that were brought up in the speech, but I think I have already used up my time limit. I would just hope that in the fu-ture I will have the opportunity to continue this exciting dialogue with Manfred Brauneck.

Paolo Matthiae:Thank you very much Pierluigi Petrobelli. There is a question from the audience. Please.

40

Question from the audience(Seamus Taggart):I have a question for Professor Brauneck: Dario Fo and Brian Friel are among the few remaining European playwrights, for example, who incorporate a significant amount of classical European cultural references into their work. Do you think the passing of this generation of playwrights will impact theatre as a European wide cultural identity, where shared tropes are easily identified and understood?

Manfred Brauneck: Pasolini once called Dario Fo the “plague of the Italian theatre” because Fo believed he could stir up society with his political theatre, mobilise people to rise up against social oppression – and this in a very entertaining manner. The Irish playwright, Brian Friel, also believed in the power and subversive humour of theatre. Friel is a passion-ate patriot, whose work derives from the Northern Irish Nationalist experience. Both playwrights share this political vision of social change brought about by the power of theatre. And this is also an essential aspect of European theatre culture. I suppose it is this belief in the power of theatre which emanates from the work of both play-wrights. It seems to me to be the reason why Dario Fo is the playwright whose works are performed most often all over the world and the plays of Brian Friel are translated into more languages than those of any other playwright. Both playwrights are also examples of the fact that worldwide reception need in no way conflict with strong ties to national traditions. For the Italian, Dario Fo, this is the tradition of the “giullari”, the Late Medieval minstrels and jugglers, who saw the church and state, as it were, as their “natural” enemies. Brian Friel continues the tradition of the Irish realistic theatre of Yeats, Synge and O’Casey. Whether a new generation of playwrights will carry on this vision, this belief in the power of theatre, remains to be seen. However, there is a tendency that indicates that social or even political commitments are becoming less and less important compared to private ones. To what extent, for future generations of playwrights and also for the public, ref-erences to the classical European tradition will still play a role and whether such references will be understood by the audience, should be considered sceptically. The changes in our educational system leave little room for optimism. Brecht’s alienation effects, for instance, often no longer function as they should because the classics or classical tropes on which he bases these effects are hardly known today. In the future, the stories of the classics and ancient mythology will have to be told anew in the theatre.

41

Paolo Matthiae:With his presentation Manfred Brauneck has raised a number of very relevant ques-tions on the historical aspects of theatre, particularly in respect to Europe. It would be most interesting to have the opportunity to widen this discourse so as to deal with literature as a whole in this context. Thus, we could compare the roles of theatre, novels and poetry. Such a discourse might be very usefully pursued through future Balzan colloquia.

Thank you for these presentations and comments. The next session will be chaired by my colleague Alberto Quadrio Curzio.

42

Session II

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:Let us open the second session of this panel which I have the honour to chair. We have as participants two Balzan Prizewinners who happen also to be members of the Ac-cademia Nazionale dei Lincei. The Academy is very gratified when any of its members are honoured through the awarding of a Balzan Prize. It is to be noted that the Balzan awards prizes in many academic fields worthy of recognition which the Nobel Prize neglects. Furthermore, the General Prize Committee of the Balzan Foundation is a truly independent interdisciplinary entity whose selection procedure is both protracted and exhaustive. This selection procedure totally relies upon the Committee members, who are renowned academics in diverse fields of knowledge. The results have always been admirable, as Balzan Prizewinners are not only eminent specialists, but scientists and scholars recognized the world over.The first Prizewinner to speak will be Jacob Palis, who will be introduced by a mem-ber of the General Prize Committee, Etienne Ghys, CNRS Research Director at the Pure and Applied Mathematics Unit of the École normale supérieure in Lyon and member of the French Academy of Sciences. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Jacob Palis on his recent appointment as President of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World.

Presentation of Jacob Palis, 2010 Balzan Prize for Mathematics (Pure and Applied)

Etienne Ghys:Four hundred years ago, quite possibly actually in this very academy, Galileo Galilei discovered one of the fundamental principles in science, determinism, essentially that the present determines the future. Even though our modern understanding of determinism has changed to an extent over the 20th century due among other things to the discovery of quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, determinism remains one of the main pillars of science. When I say that tomorrow can be determined as a consequence of today, I do not mean that it is easy, though, to do so; otherwise meteorologists would be more efficient and life would be less interesting. Let me quote the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell, speaking in 1876: “There is a maxim which is often quoted that the same causes will always produce the same effects. To make this maxim intelligible, we must define what we mean by the same causes and the same effects, since it is manifest that no event happens more than once, so that the cause and effects cannot be the same in all respects”.

43

There is another maxim which must not be confused with this, which asserts that like causes produce like effects. This is only true if small variations in the initial circum-stances produce small variations in the final state of the system. In a great many physi-cal phenomena this condition is satisfied, but there are many other cases in which a small initial variation may produce a great change in the final state of the system, as when the displacement of the points causes a railway track to run into another instead of keeping its original course. Many years later Henri Poincare and then Edward Lorenz would express the same kind of ideas, with different words. You all know of the famous butterfly effect: the wings of a small single butterfly in Brazil may generate a hurricane in Texas. Every day very small events might drastically change your life. You might, for example, miss the bus and who knows, meet the love of your life on the next bus. This area of mathematics which deals with these kinds of things is called dynamical systems. The butterfly effect seems to exclude any possibility of predicting the future. The question remains, however: can mathematicians say anything about the future? Yes, we can. It is my pleasure to introduce Jacob Palis, a master of dynamical systems. For the last forty years Jacob Palis has made outstanding contributions to this area of mathemat-ics and is the leader of the Brazilian School of Dynamics. In the 1970s, following in the wake of Stephen Smale, he was one of the major figures in developing the Theory of Hyperbolic Dynamics and Structural Stability. At the beginning of the 1980s, he initiated, with Newhouse and Takens, what has become one of the most active fields in dynamics: the interplay between homoclinic or heteroclinic bifurcations and chaos. One of his most important contributions was to reveal, in this context, the fundamen-tal role played by fractal dimensions in connection with the frequency of dynamical bifurcations. Beyond these remarkable achievements, Jacob Palis recently proposed a comprehensive set of conjectures, which together form an ambitious programme to un-derstand the typical behaviour of dynamical systems and, in particular, chaotic systems. This programme is currently generating immense scientific activity. Very recently, in conjunction with Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, Jacob Palis has been studying the formation of “non-hyperbolic horseshoes” in the unfolding of homoclinic and heteroclinic tangen-cies. Their recent paper – Publications Mathématiques de l’Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, 2009 – brings the theory of strange chaotic dynamics to a new level of comprehensiveness and precision, and is bound to become another landmark in the field. Jacob Palis will now speak about fundamental concepts such as chaos and structural stability. He will share with us his dreams for a deeper understanding of these theories. I am convinced that one day his dreams will come true. As you might just imagine, a single butterfly in a poor country like Brazil can be responsible for large disasters in

44

wonderful places such as Texas. I am really happy to see that a single mathematician in Brazil can generate gigantic waves all around the world, significantly expanding our philosophical and mathematical view of the world around us.

Jacob Palis: Dynamical Systems. Chaotic Behaviour – Uncertainty

Thank you, Etienne Ghys for such kind words. I would also like to thank the Balzan Foundation and the General Prize Committee for bestowing upon me this great hon-our and at the same time the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei for recently conferring upon me membership.I am very happy to be here with my family, including my wife, my children and my 6-year-old grandson.Despite the fact that I will deal with Chaos and Uncertainty, my lecture will contain a positive message.Although the theory of dynamics can be traced back to the Greeks or even beyond, we attribute to the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré the creation, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of the modern theory of dynamical systems. Here we understand dynamical systems as flows or transformations in a space of events, or phase space, that we take to be a compact surface of any dimension without boundary. We shall assume that the flows and the transformations are at least C1, that is, continuously differentiable and that the transformations are inverse with the same such property, that is, they are diffeomorphisms. In general, we say that the dynamical system, diffeomorphism or flow, is of class Cr, r a positive integer, if it is r-continuous-ly differentiable. Such systems represent one of the main mathematical instruments used to model the evolution of many phenomena in nature and, more broadly, in other areas of science, through transformations of a space of events into itself or through differential equations that generate flows on the phase space. Classical examples are population growth of species and weather and climate predic-tion; perhaps the same theory can be applied to understand certain aspects of turbu-lence and other important phenomena. From a set of initial data, or a point in the space of events, we apply the model many times in the case of transformations or for a long time when using differential equations: in both cases, we name trajectories the set of iterates from an initial point. If, starting at two very close initial points, behaviour of the trajectories over a long timeframe vary substantially, we call this system chaotic. This is the case for many systems, and in fact uncertainty is very common in phenom-ena in nature and beyond.

45

The well-known 1963 Lorenz model for weather prediction consists of a flow in three dimensions displaying an invariant butterfly-like figure that attracts all trajectories starting at points near it – the so called Lorenz butterfly-like attractor. Moreover, if we consider very close initial points, it is, very likely that, after a long period of time, the trajectories will be further apart as much as the maximum distance between any two points in the butterfly figure, that is, the diameter of the butterfly figure. Thus, we have uncertainty about the future behaviour of the trajectories, which in this case is measured by the diameter of the butterfly. Dynamical systems with similar behaviour are called chaotic.

Moreover, the Lorenz model is robust from a mathematical point of view: if we change slightly the numbers (coefficients) that appear in the equations of the model, we still have a similar butterfly-like figure attracting the future trajectories starting at nearby points. See reference [BDV]. To be chaotic is not such a rare phenomenon among dynamical systems: the exception is when the attracting figures for the future trajectories consist of a finite number of points or periodic trajectories. Concerning attractors other than hyperbolic ones, two of them have been most re-markable and they have influenced the development of dynamics from the 1970s on.

46

The first one is the Lorenz attractor, that we have just briefly commented on, the other one is due to Hénon. It should be added that, like Hénon, Jakobson exhibited new at-tractors for parametrized families of unimodal maps of the interval that are probability persistent, but not robust, under a small perturbation of the parameter. Benedicks and Carleson showed the existence of Hénon-like attractors. Making use of their results, Mora and Viana proved that they appear in homoclinic bifurcations.

Curiously, many dynamicists were not aware of Lorenz’s work when I first came to the University of California at Berkeley, in 1964, after graduating from the School of Engineering of the University of Brazil, now known as the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The main focus was on hyperbolic systems, as I will discuss in the follow-ing text, and they did not include the robust case of the Lorenz attractor.My first contribution to the area started precisely with dynamical systems displaying a discrete set of fixed or periodic orbits, or more precisely with the so-called Morse-Smale systems. Smale was my adviser at the University of California at Berkeley. At the time, much emphasis was given to the set of hyperbolic systems, and the Morse-Smale systems were part of such a set. In simple terms, a system is hyperbolic if along its tra-jectories distances increase and decrease exponentially in complementary dimensions,

47

or in complementary dimensions transversally to flow trajectories. More formally, let M be the phase space and f a transformation on it. A point x in M is called nonwander-ing if in any neighbourhood V of x, we can find a point y such that fn(y) is in V for some interger n. The union of all nonwandering points is called the nonwandering set of f, Ω(f). Similarly for flows. Indeed, we say that f or the flow Xt, t a real number, is hyper-bolic if Ω(f), or Ω(Xt), is hyperbolic. Weaker, but still very relevant, are the concepts of partial hyperbolicity and dominated splitting that again describes the relative growth of distances along trajectories in complementary or sub-complementary dimensions.It is suggested that the reader consult (BDV) for a comprehensive presentation of basic concepts and definitions that appear here.Under the hyperbolicity hypothesis, through each point x in Ω, we have a stable line or plane formed by points whose trajectories follow and approach the trajectory of x, which is called the stable manifold of x. There is a dual concept of unstable manifold. Also for flows we can give similar definitions. If Ω(f) is hyperbolic and the periodic points of f are dense in Ω(f), we say that f satisfies Axiom A. Finally, we can impose the transversality condition: for every pair x, y of points in Ω(f) the stable manifold of x is transversal to the unstable manifold of y. In the particular case that Ω(f) is made of a finite number of fixed or periodic orbits, we call f a Morse-Smale diffeomorphism. Similarly for a Morse-Smale flow.In my PhD thesis in 1967, I proved that Morse-Smale systems, diffeomorphisms or flows, are structurally stable in low dimensions, up to and including three. That is, given a Morse-Smale diffeomorphism f, for any g r-differentiably close to f (Cr close, r ≥ 1), there is a continuous one to one transformation h of M, such that h(f(x)) = g(h(x)). From that, it follows that h(fn(x)) = gn(h(x)), that is, h sends orbits of f into orbits of g. In other words, the orbit structure of Morse-Smale diffeomorphisms or flows are unchanged by small perturbations of the systems: they are structurally stable.Earlier work by Andronov-Pontryagin and Peixoto considered the case of flows on a disc and on surfaces, respectively.I had to go beyond that to treat the case of diffeomorphisms in two and three di-mensions and flows in this latter case. To do so, I have created the notion of stable foliations being partially subfoliated to include the ones of fixed or periodic points of higher indices where they accumulate upon. This notion has fundamentally influenced the subsequent development in this line of research.Right after that, in a joint work with Smale, the results of my thesis were extended to all dimensions.We also formulated conjectures that became quite famous, namely the Stability Con-jectures, that proposed precise conditions for a dynamical system to be structurally

48

stable or stable restricted to the nonwandering set. These conjectures were a major topic of research in the area for more than two decades.To formulate them, we note that when f satisfies Axiom A, Ω(f) splits into a finite number of disjoint (compact) pieces Ωi, 1 ≤ i ≤ n, each of them displaying a dense orbit, i.e., it is transitive, as proved by Smale. They are called basic sets for f. A k-cycle on Ω = Ω (f), k ≥ 1, is a sequence of basic sets Ω0, Ω1, …, Ωk+1 = Ω0 (re-ordering indices if necessary) and points x1, x2, …, xk outside Ω, such that the negative orbit of xi accumulates on Ωi−1 and its positive orbit on Ωi.The Stability Conjectures state that a Cr diffeomorphisms f is structurally stable if and only if Ω(f) is hyperbolic and the transversality condition holds, and f is Ω-stable if and only if Ω(f) is hyperbolic with no cycles.I proved that the non-cycle condition was necessary for Ω-stability of f, if Ω(f) is hy-perbolic. This helped motivating the conjectures on stability. Besides the case of Morse-Smale systems dealt with by Palis-Smale, other fundamental contributions were given by Anosov in the 1960s and in the early 1970s by Robbin, Robinson and de Melo in his PhD thesis, the first one under my supervision at IMPA. A final solution in the C1 category for diffeomorphisms was brilliantly obtained by Mañé, also my former PhD student in the early 1970s. I have completed the work of Mañé in the case of the stability restricted to the nonwandering set. The case of flows was later treated by Hayashi following Mañé’s work.I should say that I still remember with some emotion my first encounter with René Thom, a great French mathematician and a Fields Medalist like Steve Smale. It was in a meeting in Seattle in August of 1967. He was very interested in the proof of the structural stability of Morse-Smale systems, including the new ideas used to do so.All the works above were published in outstanding journals such as the Annals of Mathematics, Publications Mathématiques de l’Institut des Hautes Etudes Scienti-fiques, Inventiones Mathematicae, Global Analysis - American Mathematical Society.After the conclusion of my PhD degree in September 1967, I visited a number of institutions on the East Coast of the United States, especially Brown University, and also MIT, for about six months. Then I returned to Berkeley for another period of six months as an Assistant Professor. At this point, I started shifting somewhat my inter-est in dynamics in terms of strategy, motivated by reading more intensively the work of Poincaré.A strong motivation to go back to Berkeley was to once again enjoy its scientific at-mosphere, although I had already decided to soon return to Brazil. Also, I wanted to participate in an important meeting to take place there in July 1968 on Global Analy-sis, including Dynamical Systems. S.S. Chern, a famous geometer, and Steve Smale would be the scientific coordinators.

49

I was invited to speak twice on my joint work with Smale, which I took as a special and very stimulating sign of appreciation. And I had a chance to become acquainted with many outstanding mathematicians, among them Jürgen Moser, with whom I would interact for the next three decades, most particularly at ETH-Zurich.On the one hand, I continued to work on the hyperbolic theory of dynamics, as in my joint work with Hirsch, Pugh and Shub on stable manifolds of basic sets, published in Inventiones Mathematicae in 1971 and with Newhouse, published by Academic Press, a volume edited by Peixoto, in 1973.On the other, I kept in mind the major challenge of providing a description of the “typical” behaviour of trajectories of a “typical” dynamical system.Let me say that Poincaré was perhaps the first to set out in this direction. A serious attempt was made by Smale in the early sixties, when he introduced and proposed the hyperbolic systems as “typical”. However, a few years later himself and Abraham provided a counter-example, followed by many others.I was particularly impressed in 1968 with Newhouse’s demonstration that hyperbolic-ity is not dense even on the two dimensional sphere for twice differentiable dynamical systems. He discovered it through a bifurcation of a Poincaré cycle, in this case of a homoclinic tangency, which we shall again discuss later.Some twenty-five years later Newhouse’s result was remarkably generalized to all dimensions by Viana and myself. I shall go back to this point later.While I maintained significant interest in stability of orbit structure (structural sta-bility), I moved to bifurcation theory, which concerns changes in orbit structure of systems depending on one or more parameters.Following this line of research, I published, with Newhouse, “Bifurcations of Morse-Smale Systems” in 1973 in the volume by Academic Press mentioned above and “Cycles and Bifurcation Theory” in 1976 in Astérisque, vol. 31. We have shown the existence of simple bifurcations, as well as the ones leading to infinitely many differ-ent types of orbit structure related to the creation and unfolding of cycles. We have considerably extended Sotomayor’s work for flows on two-dimensional surfaces.To top all this off, Newhouse, myself and Takens published a long article in Publica-tions Mathématiques de l’IHES, vol. 57. It may be considered a classic in this line of research. We have characterized stable arcs of dynamical systems whose limit sets consist of finitely many orbits. Models for the unfolding of the bifurcating periodic orbits were established, as well as moduli of stability related to saddle-connections and several results on the dynamical structure of the bifurcating diffeomorphisms.I had a brief, but very interesting, incursion into holomorphic dynamics in a paper writ-ten jointly with Camacho and Kuiper, which appeared in Publications Mathématiques

50

de l’IHES, vol. 48. It started with some differentiable invariants of topological conjuga-cies that I exposed during my invited discussion at the International Congress of Math-ematicians in Helsinki, 1978. It helped the authors to classify linear holomorphic flows.The International Congresses of Mathematicians are held every four years by the In-ternational Mathematical Union. It is an important distinction to be invited to speak at one of them. The title of my talk was “Moduli of Stability and Bifurcation Theory”. By the end of 1970s, Wellington de Melo and myself wrote an introductory book called Geometric Theory of Dynamical Systems. It first appeared in Portuguese as Notes of the Brazilian Mathematical Colloquium and then in the collection Projeto Euclides of the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics - IMPA. It was translated into English by A. Manning and published by Springer Verlag. It was translated into Russian under the direction of D. Anosov and later also into Chinese. These became standard university texts worldwide and we are constantly inundated with requests for new editions. Continuing with my research contribution to Dynamical Systems, I still pursued with Takens and later Dias Carneiro a classic question by René Thom, on the stability and bi-furcation of parametrized families of gradient vector fields for one or more parameters. This was a charming question but a very difficult one, with a complicated interplay between dynamics and singularity theory. Thom had in mind applications to Biology.Takens and myself proved that the stable one-parameter families of gradients are open and dense. The work was published in the Annals of Mathematics, vol. 118.It was very rewarding to see the power of the geometric method, which I introduced in my PhD thesis some fifteen years before, as a main ingredient in this much more sophisticated question.Some years later, in a work mixing techniques of my previous work with Takens and singularity theory, Dias Carneiro and myself proved the same result for two-parameter families of gradients: the stable ones are open and dense. It was a long paper published in Publications Mathématiques de l’IHES, vol. 70, one of the finest journals in mathematics.In the middle of the 1980s, I started my collaboration with Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, a very talented young mathematician. In a series of articles that appeared in the An-nales Scientifiques de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, vol. 116, and the Bulletin of the Brazilian Mathematical Society, vol. 2, new series, we solved the centralizer problem for open and dense subsets of many classes of hyperbolic dynamical systems, that is, they commute only with their own powers.Yoccoz was awarded the Fields Medal in 1994. In the laudation ceremony where he was presented with the award, our joint work on centralizers was explicitly men-tioned, as well as our work on homoclinic bifurcations, to be briefly described below.I turn now to another fundamental phenomenon for parametrized families of dynam-

51

ics: the unfolding of homoclinic tangencies. As Poincaré predicted, this is at the heart of the difficult problems in dynamics. In recent decades, after the remarkable work of Newhouse on the existence of infinitely many simultaneous sinks, we have improved our knowledge very much of what such a bifurcation may impose on the dynamics.I believe that I have substantially contributed to that, either directly or by asking the right questions to be considered. In particular, I explicitly put homoclinic tangencies as well as heterodimensional cycles at the centre of a global understanding of dynam-ics: the description of the typical orbit of a typical dynamical system.In a sense, I have not forgotten Poincaré’s sentence that I have quoted above.

In fact, in my previously mentioned works with Newhouse or Takens or both, we have dealt with homoclinic bifurcations. Now, I wish to focus on how often a hyperbolic system undergoing a homoclinic bifurcation remains hyperbolic very near the unfold-ing parameter value, at least on surfaces. (Here, to simplify the language, I am calling hyperbolic a system whose nonwandering set is hyperbolic, with a dense subset of periodic orbits, and satisfying the strong transversality condition.)The answer depends on the Hausdorff dimension of the system, which is the sum of the Hausdorff dimensions (fractal dimensions) of the stable and unstable foliations. If it is smaller than one, we have total prevalence of hyperbolicity. A weak version of this fact appeared in a previous work with Newhouse. The final version, including

52

how a homoclinic tangency can be created, appeared in two works by myself and Tak-ens. The first one in Inventiones Mathematicae, vol. 82, and the second in the Annals of Mathematics, vol. 125.In fact, I have conjectured that this result would not be true if the Hausdorff dimension as above is bigger than one. So, one side of the conjecture was still missing. A strong indication that my conjecture was true was provided in my long paper with Yoc-coz, “Homoclinic Tangencies for Hyperbolic Sets of Large Hausdorff Dimension”, pub-lished in the famous journal Acta Mathematica, vol. 172. An even stronger indication was produced by Yoccoz and myself in the paper “On the Arithmetic Sum of Regular Cantor Sets”, published in the Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré, Analyse Non Linéaire, vol. 14.The question was finally solved by Moreira, one of my former students, and Yoccoz, for hyperbolic systems on surfaces, in a wonderful work published in the Annals of Mathematics, vol. 154. Moreira, Viana and myself are now proving that the conjecture is indeed true in gen-eral, that is, in all dimensions.At this point, as promised before, we shall mention the work by Newhouse on the unfolding of homoclinic tangencies on surfaces to show that, among C2 diffeomor-phisms, the hyperbolic ones are not dense. So, in other words, the hyperbolic dif-feomorphisms are not typical, once again disproving Smale’s global conjecture. He had done so, showing that close to the bifurcating parameter value, there are, in the parameter line, small intervals with the following property: in any of them there is a dense set of points for which the corresponding diffeomorphisms display infinitely many simultaneous attractors (sinks). This fact contradicts hyperbolicity.Viana and myself proved that the same is true in all dimensions. This work “High Dimension Diffeomorphisms Displaying Infinitely Many Periodic Attractors” was published in the Annals of Mathematics, vol. 140.The work we carried out on the unfolding of homoclinic tangencies, as well as Smale’s on horseshoes arising from transversal homoclinic orbits, up to 1993, appeared in a book by myself and Takens, published by Cambridge University Press, called Hyperbolicity and Sensitive Chaotic Dynamics at Homoclinic Bifurcations. Again, this book had large repercussions. Indeed, it was at the time considered the definitive work on the subject.I must say that this was not to be the last word, since just a few months ago the very prestigious journal Publications Mathématiques de l’IHES dedicated a whole issue, 217 pages, volume 110, to a work done by Yoccoz and myself [PY], entitled “Non-Uniformly Hyperbolic Horseshoes Arising from Bifurcations of Poincaré Heteroclinic Cycles”. In it, we deal with one-parameter families of surface diffeomorphisms that are initially hyperbolic and then go through a heteroclinic tangency. We expected all the

53

results in the paper to also be true, substituting heteroclinic by homoclinic tangency.Moreover, we believe that the several mathematical structures created and developed in the paper should be of much use in the solution of other, perhaps many, questions in dynamics.We show, among other facts, that even if the Hausdorff dimension of the diffeomor-phisms in the family just prior to the bifurcating parameter is bigger than one, but not much bigger, then, we have prevalence of no-attractor, although we have no prevalence of hyperbolicity. Indeed, I have conjectured that the set of parameter values correspond-ing to infinitely many coexisting attractors shall have zero measure (Lebesgue).That was a key point in my proposal, often referred to as the Palis global conjecture or programme: a description of the “typical” behaviour of trajectories for “typical” dynamical systems. This I will now present [PI], [PII]:

Main Conjecture

(A1) Every system can be Cr, r ≥ 1, approximated by one displaying only finitely many attractors. Such attractors should support a Sinai-Ruelle-Bowen (SRB) invari-ant measure and the union of their basins of attraction should be of total probability (Lebesgue) in the phase space.

(A2) The attractors are stochastically stable.

(A3) For generic (non-degenerate) parametrized families with fi-nitely many parameters, the sys-tems with the properties presented above have total probability (Leb-esgue) in the parameter space.

We notice that, if the Main Con-jecture is true, it would be possi-ble to convey a precise sense of uncertainty for a typical dynam-ics. Indeed, a typical dynamics would display only a finite num-ber of attractors and the uncer-tainty of the future behaviour of its trajectories would be meas-ured by the maximal value of the diameters of the attractors.

54

A Supporting ConjectureAny dynamical system can be Cr, r ≥ 1, approximated by a hyperbolic one with the no-cycle property or by one exhibiting homoclinic tangencies or heterodimensional cycles.There is a similar Main Conjecture for flows. The corresponding supporting conjec-ture requires the notion of singular cycles: they are cycles involving at least one sin-gularity. Then the supporting conjecture would state:

Supporting Conjecture for FlowsIn any dimension, every flow can be Cr, r ≥ 1, can be approximated by a hyperbolic one or by one displaying a homoclinic tangency or a singular cycle or a heterodimen-sional cycle.

Some Basic References:[BDV] C. Bonatti, L. Díaz and M. Viana, “Dynamics Beyond Uniform Hyperbolicity. A Global Geometric and Probabilistic Perspective”, Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences, vol. 102, Springer Verlag, 2004.[PI] J. Palis, A global view of dynamics and a conjecture on the denseness of finitude of attrac-tors, Astérisque No. 261, 335–347, 2000.[PII] J. Palis, A global perspective for non-conservative dynamics, Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré, vol. 22, 485–507, 2005.[PY] J. Palis and J.-C. Yoccoz, Non-uniformly hyperbolic horseshoes arising from bifurcations of Poincaré heteroclinic cycles, Publications Mathématiques de l’IHES No. 110, 1–217, 2009.

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:Thank you, Jacob Palis, for your precise presentation. I would now like to invite Carlo Sbordone, Professor of Analytical Mathematics at the University of Naples Federico II and a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, to respond to Professor Palis’s presentation.

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion

Carlo Sbordone:I am honoured to be here, but it is not easy to be a discussant on a mathematical subject when there is a general audience and not a specialist one. However, I will try to adequately simplify the most difficult concepts. First I would like to say that we mathematicians are all impressed by your recently proposed comprehensive set of

55

conjectures, which together form an ambitious programme to understand the typical behaviour of dynamical systems and in particular chaotic systems. This programme is currently generating immense scientific activity and your personal commitment has to be applauded.I would like to start with a technical question: In your Lecture you described the properties of attractors, by mentioning the fact that “almost all trajectories go to at-tractors”. This means that there is a zero measure set of trajectories that do not go to attractors. My question is: What happens to those trajectories, the exceptional trajec-tories?Then secondly, what about the Abel Prize in Mathematics?Mathematicians do not have their own Nobel Prize category, though some of them have instead received the Nobel Prize in Economics. During your term as President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU), the Norwegian Government created the Abel Prize for Mathematics as a parallel to the Swedish Nobel Prizes for Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, etc. We mathematicians think that this puts Mathematics back in the first rank and much credit is due to your efforts! Could you please tell us the story of this remarkable achievement?

Jacob Palis: Thank you for raising these topics. The first one concerns my lecture and my global conjecture on uncertainty of future prediction for dynamical models of natural phe-nomena and otherwise. What I have said in terms of future prediction of events is that the information we look for is concentrated in the attractors, where almost all trajectories aggregate upon in the future. Indeed, many trajectories go in the future to each attractor: the union of such trajectories form a set of positive volume in the space of events called the basin of the attractor. There are trajectories that do not go to the attractors in the future, but there are not so many of them and, in fact, they play the role of separating the basins of different attractors from one another. All together, the trajectories that do not go to attractors in the future occupy a very small set in the space of events.Concerning the Abel Prize, I was President of the International Mathematical Union at the turn of the millennium when a couple of colleagues from Norway approached me saying that they wished to propose to the Norwegian government a prize similar to the Nobel Prize for our noble science. You may ask yourself why Nobel had not instituted a Mathematics Prize. He was well aware of the field of Mathematics, yet he did not propose a Nobel Prize for it. There are many interpretations of this, including one that would involve a woman who was much loved by Nobel and at the same time by the

56

excellent Norwegian mathematician Gosta Mittag-Leffler. Both he and Nobel were important figures in the Royal Court during the reign of Oscar II. Anyhow, apparently they did not like each other at all, and, perhaps, Nobel could not stand the idea that one day Mittag-Leffler would possibly win the Prize he was creating. Back to the creation of the Abel Prize, I went to Norway and together with other col-leagues we were able to get the Mathematical Union to strongly support the idea of creating such a prize for mathematics. It was approved whilst I was still President in 2002. The Prize was first awarded in 2003 and I must say that outstanding mathemati-cians have won this Prize since then. Now, to be frank, I think we will have to wait a few more years before this might become equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Still, since the 1930s we have another Prize called the Fields Medal, which is given for achievements by mathematicians who are less than 40 years old, which is very prestigious.

Carlo Sbordone: Thank you very much, Jacob Palis.

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:Thank you both, Jacob Palis and Carlo Sbordone. I would like to invite Quentin Skin-ner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, Queen Mary University of Lon-don, Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of Christ’s College Cambridge, Foreign Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei as well as member of the Balzan Gen-eral Prize Committee, to introduce Carlo Ginzburg.

Presentation of Carlo Ginzburg, 2010 Balzan Prize for European History, 1400-1700

Quentin Skinner:Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, mi dispiace, but I will speak in English, which will be better for me and undoubtedly also for you. One of the awards made by the Balzan Foundation this year in the studia humanitatis was in the specific field of Euro-pean History 1400-1700, and the Prize was awarded to Carlo Ginzburg of the Scuola Normale, Pisa. Carlo Ginzburg is one of the most original and influential historians of our time. He has ranged very widely in his scholarly work, and he has also written in a more abstract manner about questions of historical method. But his main and major contributions have all been made as an historian of early-modern Europe.Professor Ginzburg’s oeuvre is impressively large and various, and includes at least six major works on early-modern European social, cultural and intellectual history. But his

57

scholarship has at the same time always displayed an exceptional coherence of subject matter. One topic in which he has been interested throughout his career has been the ex-planation and appraisal of witchcraft beliefs and practices. This concern was first reflected in his early book I benandanti (1966), and recurs in Storia notturna (1989). More gener-ally, he has always been interested – and I suppose this is the core of it all – in recovering the beliefs and attitudes of ordinary people whose lives and whose outlooks would other-wise have fallen out of the historical record. It was this concern that gave rise to his most celebrated book, Il formaggio e i vermi (1976), in which he succeeded in reconstructing, from Inquisitorial records, the entire world-view of Menocchio, a sixteenth-century mill-er, whom Carlo has made posthumously world famous, although no one had heard of him before. This was a pioneering work of micro-history and it remains the most successful in the genre, although it has also shown that Carlo’s work is really inimitable.More recently Professor Ginzburg has turned his attention to the high culture of early-modern Europe. He has written in Indagini su Piero (1981) about the iconography of Piero della Francesca’s great fresco cycle in Arezzo, and in No Island is an Island (2000) has ventured into the area of English intellectual history, showing how par-ticular themes in major English classic texts – including for example Thomas More’s Utopia – require an international perspective in order to be understood. Hence the very elegant title. And most recently of all, an act of trespassing if I may say so, Carlo has written about the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. At the same time, he has con-tinued to contrast the elite culture of the early-modern period with the more everyday beliefs on which he initially concentrated. I think indeed that by now it is possible to see another thread that binds together his work: the question of how elite and popular cultures reciprocally relate and to some degree explain each other.In addition to being a highly imaginative and productive historian, Professor Ginzburg has always liked, in the manner of major historians, ‘to reflect on the task in hand’ as Marc Bloch put it, and has been a methodological innovator of wide influence. He has written about the nature of historical evidence in Miti emblemi spie (1986), and about the idea, more recently, of historical proof in History, Rhetoric and Proof (1999). He has also re-flected on his own practice continuously. His historical writings are meta-historical works as well, especially The Cheese and the Worms, which contains a fascinating series of re-flections about this kind of historical reconstruction and how it can be convincingly made. The impact of all of this work has been immense. The book on Menocchio is every-where recognised as a classic. It is available in twenty-four languages, while the book on myths and clues has been translated almost as widely. Professor Ginzburg’s intel-lectual energies and the intensity of his commitment clearly remain undimmed, and no doubt more major works of historical scholarship will follow. But his achievement

58

to date is already sufficient to make him not merely a worthy but an exceptionally distinguished recipient of the Balzan Prize. I want to end by noting the Prize citation this year. It reads as follows: …to Professor Carlo Ginzburg ‘for the exceptional combination of imagination, scholarly precision and literary skill with which he has recovered and illuminated the beliefs of ordinary people in early-modern Europe’. I now present to you the prizewinner, and I do so in the language I most associate with Roma, the urbs aeterna: auctoritate mihi com-missa, vobis hunc historicum praeclarum, virum eximium, offero: Carlo Ginzburg.

Carlo Ginzburg:Some Queries Addressed to Myself

1. I am deeply honoured by the prestigious prize that has been awarded to me. I thank the jury and in particular, Quentin Skinner for his generous words, and especially for mentioning the coherence in the subjects and approach which are detectable in my research. I feel flattered – but then I immediately hear the voice of the devil’s advocate (a voice which accompanies me, like a basso continuo): “You dealt with witches and Piero della Francesca, with a miller put on trial by the Inquisition and with questions of method: where is the unity in all this? What is the thread that ties such strikingly heterogeneous themes together?” It is an insidious objection, because it hides an invitation to teleology: a vice that everyone – especially historians – ought to beware of. To go back and search for an underlying theme in a research trajectory that has gone on for over fifty years is pos-sible, of course – but on the condition of tacitly eliminating chance, unawareness, the alternatives that were rejected or simply ignored as they gradually emerged. In order not to fall into the trap that the devil’s advocate is setting for me, I will avoid the run-ning thread metaphor and will try to use a different one.

2. On 12 July 1934, Walter Benjamin, in exile in Denmark, where he took refuge after escaping from the Nazis, wrote in his diary: “Yesterday, after a game of chess, Brecht said: So, if Korsch comes [Karl Korsch, the Marxist theorist], we will have to think up a new game for him. A game where the positions are not always the same: where the function of every piece changes after it has stood in the same square for a while: it should either become stronger or weaker. This way the game doesn’t develop, it stays the same for too long.1

1 W. Benjamin, Avanguardia e rivoluzione. Saggi sulla letteratura, introduction notes by C. Cases, transl. A. Marietti, Turin 1973, p. 221.

59

Brecht wanted to change the rules of chess so that they would be closer to reality, which is in perpetual movement. I will reformulate his proposal by applying it (with an eye to Il cavallo e la torre [The Horse and the Tower] by Vittorio Foa) to an infini-tesimal fragment of reality: a research itinerary which is the one I have followed. I will try to describe it as a game of chess in which the pieces, instead of being arranged at the beginning, are introduced as the game goes on. The game commenced one day in the autumn of 1959. I was twenty. I was in the library of the Scuola Normale di Pisa, where I had been studying for two years. All of a sudden I decided three things: that I wanted to be a historian; that I wanted to study witchcraft trials; that what I wanted to study was not the persecution of witchcraft, but the victims of persecution – the women and men accused of being witches and sorcerers. This nebulous project, for-mulated with great conviction and in the most complete ignorance imaginable, would not have been born without the powerful impression aroused by my reading Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and Ernesto De Martino’s Il mondo magico (The Magic World). But there was a third element, which I did not realize until many years later: in the emotional identification with the victims of persecution, and in the impulse to study them, there was an unconscious projection of my Jewish identity, which the persecution had reinforced.2

3. At the end of the 1950s, beliefs and practices linked to witchcraft were themes reserved for anthropologists. Scholars of European history tended to be concerned with the so-called witch hunts (a theme that in any event was considered marginal). The situation was in part to change shortly thereafter. In 1977 Arnaldo Momigliano wrote that “the most pervasive characteristic” of the fifteen years between 1961 and 1976 was perhaps “the attention to oppressed and/or minority groups within more advanced civilizations: women, children, slaves, men of colour, or more simply her-etics, farmers and workers”.3 Momigliano observed that in the course of those fifteen years, anthropologists or ethnographers had acquired “unprecedented prestige” from historians. However, he did not dwell on an obstacle that the historians who wanted to study “oppressed and/or minority groups within more advanced civilizations” had been forced to come to terms with. In any society, power relationships condition ac-

2 C. Ginzburg, “Streghe e sciamani” [1993] in Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto, Milan 2006, pp. 281-293 (Witches and Shamans, «New Left Review», 200, July-August 1993, pp. 75-85).3 A. Momigliano, “Linee per una valutazione della storiografia del quindicennio 1961-1976” [1977], reprinted in ID, Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, I, Rome 1980, pp. 377-394, in particular p. 377.

60

cess to documentation, and its characteristics. The voices of those who belong to those oppressed and/or minority groups are usually filtered down to us by extraneous, if not hostile figures: chroniclers, notaries, bureaucrats, judges and so on. In the case of the witch trials that I wanted to study, the psychological and cultural violence used by judges, at times accompanied by torture, tended to distort the voices of the accused men and women in a pre-established direction. (It is not a matter of chance that the po-litical trials carried out in the course of the twentieth century have often been defined, polemically, as “witch hunts”). How can this obstacle be overcome?This was the situation that I could reasonably have expected, and that I in fact encoun-tered in the first years of my explorations in the lay and ecclesiastical archives in Italy, where Delio Cantimori directed me. Then I had a stroke of luck: “by pure chance, or” as Carlo Dionisotti once wrote “by the norm that governs research on the unknown”, I discovered the witch trials held by the Inquisition in Friuli in the sixteenth and sev-enteenth centuries against the benandanti (literally, “those who go doing good”).4 The inquisitors repeatedly asked the meaning of this incomprehensible word from the men and women who said they were, in fact, “benandanti”. This was invariably the answer: since they had been born wrapped in a caul, they were forced to fight in spirit against witches and sorcerers four times a year for the fertility of the fields. For the inquisi-tors these were either absurdities or lies: in their eyes, the benandanti were obviously witches and sorcerers. But in order for this identification to become reality, it took fifty years. Harassed by the questions and threats of the inquisitors, the benandanti incorporated the traits of the model that had been shown to them (or better, forced upon them) little by little: and the detailed descriptions of the battles they fought in spirit for the fertility of the fields, armed with fennel branches, left room for the more or less stereotype image of the witches’ sabbath.5 The difference between the expectations of the inquisitors and the answers of the benandanti indicated that the latter emerged from a deep stratum of peasant culture – whence the exceptional value of that Friulian evidence. The attempt to grasp the voic-es of the victims of persecution was crowned (I thought) by initial success, which opened unexplored terrain. In retrospect, I am led to think that all of my research sprang from that first book, even if it happened in an unpredictable, and above all

4 C. Dionisotti, “Resoconto di una ricerca interrotta”, in Id., Scritti di storia della letteratura italiana, II, 1963-1971, Rome 2009, ed. T. Basile, V. Fera, S. Villari, p. 325.5 I benandanti. Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Turin 1966 (The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, translated by Anne and John Tedeschi, Baltimore, 1983).

61

non-linear way. (That is why I am fond of the metaphor of chess: in the course of the game, the different pieces are moved on the chess board according to their own logic, obeying specific rules; but there is only one game).

4. To try to reconstruct the beliefs and attitudes of the accused through the distorted trials and the expectations of the judges seemed, and was indeed, paradoxical. All my problems sprang from that preliminary choice. I had to learn to read between the lines, to gather the tiniest clues, to find ripples under the surface of the text that signalled the presence of profound tensions, that could not be reduced to stereotype. Without realising it, I was trying to work on archival documents by applying the lessons of hermeneutics carried out on literary texts that I had learned from Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach and Gianfranco Contini. The impulse to reflect on method (today I would say: to sterilize the tools of analysis) emerged from concrete research – even if at a certain point I gave in to the temptation to suggest a genealogy and a justification of the method I identified with and was practising. But when I published that paper – Spie (Clues) – my research in the Udine Archbishopric Archive had already taken another direction. In the preface to I benandanti (1966 – translated as The Night Battles) I had written: “This Friulian testimony reveals a continuous criss-crossing of trends enduring for decades and even centuries, and of individual, private, and frequently wholly uncon-scious, reactions. It is apparently impossible to make history from such reactions, and yet without them, the history of ‘collective mentalities’ becomes nothing more than a series of disembodied and abstract tendencies and forces”.6 Today, in this distantiation from the Annales of the second generation (from which I also learned a great deal) I read a potential opening towards a further reduction of scale: research concentrated on a single individual.7 But this further move needed time. At the beginning of the 1960s, going through the 18th century index of the first thousand Inquisition trials preserved in the Udine Archbishopric Archive, I had fallen upon a summary, condensed in a few lines, of two trials against a peasant, guilty of maintaining that the world was born from rotten matter. That peasant was the miller Domenico Scandella, called Menoc-chio. But seven years went by before I decided to take up his case, and another seven, understandably, before The Cheese and the Worms, the book dedicated to him, was published. In that hesitation, and even more in the polemical, aggressive and at the

6 I benandanti, p. XI (The Night Battles, p. XVII). 7 See also A. Bensa’s entry “Anthropologie et histoire”, in Historiographies, eds. C. Delacroix, F. Dosse, P. Garcia, and N. Offenstadt, Paris 2010, I, pp. 49-50.

62

same time defensive tone of my introduction, I experienced again the element of risk that the success of that book cancelled out. To dedicate a book – not a footnote or a paper – but a book, to a sixteenth century miller was at the time (not anymore today, I guess) anything but an obvious choice.

5. I have spoken about “reduction of scale”: a typical term of microhistory, the histo-riographic current introduced by a group of Italian historians who coalesced around the journal Quaderni storici in the second half of the 1970s. I, too, was part of that group; and both The Cheese and the Worms and the essay Spie (Clues) have been often con-nected to microhistory, or at least to one of its versions. Labels do not interest me, but the impulse that generated microhistory does. I am convinced that the reduction of scale in observation (not of the object of investigation, let’s be clear about this) is a precious cognitive tool. As Marcel Mauss writes, one intensely studied case can be the starting point for a generalization.8 I would add: yes, above all if it is an anomalous case, because anomaly implies the norm (whereas the opposite is not true).9 And I would go on by dis-tinguishing between the generalization of answers and the generalization of questions. It seems to me that the potential wealth of case studies is mainly linked to the latter.10 The Cheese and the Worms is a book that was born in the atmosphere of the political and social struggles in Italy in the 1970s, but it has continued to live thanks to readers born in other places and periods of time. Its unexpected success is first of all to be attributed to the extraordinary personality of Menocchio, the protagonist of the book. His challenge of the political and religious authorities, nourished by culture born of the interaction between oral and written culture, was capable of reaching individuals who were far from his world – and, I might add, from mine. Among those who reacted – often in an understandably polemical way – there were also professional historians. If I am not mistaken, the book has shown the unexpected complexity that is hidden behind expressions historians often take for granted: from “popular classes” to “peas-ants”, from “learning to read and write” to “reading”. More generally speaking, the book rebutted once and for all the thesis that had been formulated by an authoritative historian, according to whom the less privileged classes of Europe of the early modern era were only accessible through statistics.11

8 M. Mauss, “Essai sur les variations saisonnières des sociétés Eskimos”, in Sociologie et Anthropologie, Paris 1966, pp. 389-477. 9 Cfr. C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie, 2nd ed., München und Leipzig 1934, p. 22, who cites a passage by an unnamed “Protestant theologian” (Kierkegaard). 10 Penser par cas, eds. J.-Cl. Passeron and J. Revel, Paris 2005. 11 Il formaggio e i vermi, introduction, p. XIX (the reference is to François Furet).

63

6. I mentioned generalizations which start from one case. After the publication of The Cheese and the Worms I decided to develop a hypothesis that seemed to strongly emerge from the case of Menocchio: the circularity between élite and subaltern cul-tures (to use Gramsci’s term). An attempt in this direction led me to the traces of a Jewish convert, Costantino Saccardino, tried by the Holy Office, first in Venice and then in Bologna, and ultimately burnt at the stake in 1621 because he was involved in a conspiracy that smacked of heresy. Since a copy of the Venetian trial had been sent to Rome, I assumed that it might have been preserved in the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (at the time inaccessible). This led me to write a letter to Pope Wojtyla, in which I asked for the archive to be opened to scholars. From the Pope’s secretary, I received a reply that took note (perhaps with a touch of benevolent irony) of my enthusiasm for research, but informed me that the Saccardino trial was untraceable – probably destroyed. Twenty years later, as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger spoke at the conference that was held in 1998 at this Accademia dei Lincei to celebrate the open-ing of the archives of the Holy Office in Rome as decided by Pope Wojtyla. On that occasion Ratzinger read an excerpt from my letter, stating that it was the scholar who had defined himself as “born Jewish and atheist” to “inspire a moment of reflection that constituted the contemporary history of the opening of the Archives”.12 A gener-ous, too generous acknowledgement. But in the meantime, my research had taken a different direction.

7. Once more I will use the model of the chess board, because it is compatible with zig-zagging, non-rectilinear movement, and nonetheless is conditioned by an initial opening move – which in my case, was related to the benandanti. Once again, there was a chance discovery: a trial, published in a journal of Baltic history, against an old werewolf named Thiess, which I came across before sending the final version of the manuscript of The Night Battles to the publisher. The trial, which took place in Jür-gensburg (today’s Zaube) around the end of the seventeenth century, was altogether anomalous: Thiess stated that, since he was born with a caul, he had to go “to the end of the sea” three times a year with the other werewolves to fight against the devils to ensure the fertility of the fields. The analogies with the benandanti were evident, but they required comparative research that I did not feel capable of doing: in the preface, I stated that I had not “dealt with the question of the relationship which undoubtedly

12 Card. J. Ratzinger, Le ragioni di un’apertura”, L’apertura degli Archivi del Sant’Uffizio Romano (Roma, 22 gennaio 1998), Rome 1998, p 185.

64

must exist between benandanti and shamans” – a statement that was both audacious and prudent.13 Before I decided to commit myself to this task almost twenty years elapsed. I started to collect a great deal of material, without understanding what I was doing; but before long, I stopped, and threw myself into a completely different kind of project – research on Piero della Francesca, which I condensed in a small book entitled Indagini su Piero (1981; translated as The Enigma of Piero). I realize that the itinerary that I am describing seems to be dominated by caprice, if not by frivolity. Actually, a few years later, I realized that my seeming diversion towards Piero della Francesca was obscurely trying to reckon with the main obstacle I had been facing in an entirely different domain, in my attempt to insert the case of the benandanti into a comparative perspective. This obstacle can be connected to two terms: morphology and history, and how they relate to each other. In my research on a group of works by Piero, I examined non-stylistic data linked to iconography and to patronage, thus constructing a pictorial itinerary and a chronology that I compared with the one that had been proposed authoritatively on the basis of stylistic data. Be-hind this experiment, born of an old passion of mine for Piero and for painting, lay the pages of Roberto Longhi on Palma il Vecchio in the Precisioni on the Galleria Borghese, and the book by Federico Zeri on the Master of the Barberini Panels, Two Paintings, Philology and a Name.14 From them I had learned that a configuration of formal data trace out the itinerary, often imperfectly known, of a stylistic personality that might correspond to a recorded individual name. Likewise, I thought, a configura-tion made up of myths morphologically similar to the one centred on the benandanti must be related to specific historical connections – unless those morphological affini-ties lead back to human nature. I struggled over this alternative and its implications (which I will not talk about here) for over fifteen years. The book that I finally wrote – Storia notturna. Una decifrazio- ne del sabba (1989, translated as Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches Sabbath) – in-serts the beliefs of the benandanti into a much larger picture based on evidence that covers a span of millennia, collected by demonologists, bishops, anthropologists, folklorists across the Eurasian continent. Unlike the evidence on the benandanti, these documents almost never give the names of the actors. In the abovementioned paper on the characteristics of historiography in the fifteen years from 1961 to 1976, Momiglia-

13 I benandanti, pp. 37-40, XV-XVI (The Night Battles, p. XXI). 14 R. Longhi, “Precisioni nelle Gallerie italiane. La Galleria Borghese” [1926-1928], in Opere complete, II, Florence 1967, pp. 283-287; F. Zeri, Due dipinti, la filologia e un nome:il Maestro delle Tavole Barberini, Turin 1961.

65

no had referred to the “spread of a-chronic structuralist interpretations in addition to the traditional diachronic historiography”.15 From this intellectual climate descends the prolonged dialogue with structuralism (a version of the dialogue with the devil’s advocate), which inspired the project for Ecstasies: to put an anonymous, a-chronic morphology at the service of history, in order to make conjectures about buried his-torical connections.

8. “The sources must be read between the lines (in controluce)” Arsenio Frugoni used to say in his lessons at Pisa. I think that these words vaccinated me against ingenu-ous positivism. I could not have imagined that one day those same words would have helped me to reject the neo-skeptic positions of those who upheld the impossibility of tracing a rigorous distinction between historical and fictional narratives. I was in-volved in this discussion for twenty years, in large part coinciding with the period I taught at UCLA. Among the papers that I dedicated to this theme, there is one enti-tled Le voci dell’altro (Alien Voices) that analyzes a page from a book by the Jesuit Charles Le Gobien, the Histoire des îles Marianes, which appeared in the year 1700: a harangue pronounced by the indigenous chief Hurao exhorting his people to revolt against the Spanish invaders. A close reading of the text shows that the harangue cleverly reworks, as one might predict, a series of classical citations: first and fore-most, the speech delivered by the indigenous chief Calgacus in Tacitus’ Agricola, denouncing the misdeeds of the Roman Empire. Hurao’s harangue is the fruit of the imagination – but not completely.16 Among the accusations that he makes against the Europeans, there is that of having brought to the Marianne Islands flies and other insects that did not exist there before. In a footnote, Le Gobien mocks the passage, calling it absurd: a residue incrusted on the smooth, rhetorically impeccable surface of Hurao’s harangue.

The trials against the benandanti are a formally dialogical document, articulated in questions and answers. In the Histoire des îles Marianes, the dialogical dimension suddenly flares up in a passage in Le Gobien’s footnote. But the hermeneutic strategy that I used in the two cases is essentially the same: to grasp the tensions and disso-nances within a text. In the second, the author looks at what he just wrote without un-

15 A. Momigliano, “Linee”, p. 377. 16 C. Ginzburg, “Le voci dell’altro. Una rivolta indigena nelle Isole Marianne”, in Rapporti di forza. Storia retorica prova, Milan 2000, pp. 87-108 (History, Rhetoric, and Proof, Hanover 1999). In Guampedia: The Encyclopedia of Guam, Le Gobien’s page is reproduced as the “transcription” of a speech that was really delivered: cfr. guampedia.com/chiefs-hurao/.

66

derstanding it. From that note at the bottom of the page, there creeps in, as if through a crack, something uncontrolled: an extraneous voice, a fragment of that extra-textual reality that the neo-skeptics present as unattainable.

9. No text is immune to cracks: not even the poem that a supreme artificer has con-trolled down to the last detail. Even in the Commedia there is a blind spot, an element of the reality that Dante’s conscious “I” did not manage to master. But to talk about this research in progress would be premature.17 The game is still on.

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:I would like to thank our fellow member Carlo Ginzburg for his splendid lesson. We now have Enrico Castelnuovo, Professor Emeritus of History of Mediaeval Art at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa and member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, to respond. I would like to draw attention to the fact that we have here represented above us the grandfather of Enrico Castelnuovo who I should remind you was not a historian, but belonged to the Lincei’s Class of Physical Sciences.

Comments, Questions and Preliminary Discussion

Enrico Castelnuovo:Carlo Ginzburg’s lecture was crystal clear – a lecture that followed the turning points in his career, caused by repeated discoveries coming from “norms that preside over re-search into the unknown”. In looking for the end of the skein, we go from what might be called the metaphor of the “thread” to the more complex one of a chess game. A very particular chess game that Brecht suggested to Benjamin, where the pieces are to be introduced gradually as the game goes on, and that to me, precisely because of its unpredictable nature, is highly reminiscent of Through the Looking Glass.It is a lecture that needs to be absorbed slowly, and from various perspectives.I do appreciate that, if one wants to, one can find unity everywhere, just like the “Ger-man professor” described by Heinrich Heine who, if he happened to dig out some hole in the cosmic edifice he was constructing, plugged it up again with his nightcap and dressing gown. But without using a nightcap or dressing gown, I see unity in Carlo Ginzburg’s research, at least on the level of the methods and tools used.

17 A preview in C. Ginzburg, “Dante’s Blind Spot (Inferno XVI-XVII)”, in Dante’s Pluringualism. Authority, Knowledge, Subjectivity, ed. S. Fortuna, M. Gragnolati, J. Trabant, Oxford 2010, pp.

67

A point of departure could be note 10 of his essay, Spie, Radici di un paradigma indiziario, 1979 (Clues – Roots of an investigative paradigm), later collected in the volume Miti. Emblemi Spie. Morfologia e Storia, published by Einaudi in 1986 (Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). In the discussions between Ginzburg and Vittorio Foa that took place between 2002 and 2003, and published by Feltrinelli in 2003, that essay is mentioned at a certain point. Ginzburg says to Foa: “I remember that after reading it, you told me: the point is to show that Conan Doyle’s uncle was the Director of the National Gallery in Dublin.”A nice quip, and something more too, in that he intended to clarify how, in Sherlock Holmes’s modus operandi, there was something “Morellian”, and how the uncle of Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, had known Giovanni Morelli person-ally. By Morellian, we mean the way of observing and reading details that are appar-ently the most insignificant, or that reveal a custom more than a precise intention, and here the démarche of the detective was analogous to that of the famous art histo-rian who revolutionized the history of attributions and connoisseurship, and in whom Freud saw a sort of precursor of psychoanalysis. Through the case of Conan Doyle’s uncle, Ginzburg attempted, to use his words, to construct argumentation based on precise relationships and not on simple parallelisms. And to indisputably clear up an important stage in the “clue method”. No trifling matter.This demand for methodological rigour combined with intense attention in reading sources is a constant concern underlined by Ginzburg in various ways in different situations. In his studies on witchcraft, more than on the phenomenon in general and on the accusers as individuals, Ginzburg shows a special interest in the attitudes and behaviour of the victims of persecution, behaviour that was for the most part passed over in silence. In his work the Benandanti (1966), a constant concern is the reading and understand-ing of the testimonials of the accused through the interrogation carried out by the inquisitors, taking into account the distortions that occurred in transcription, due to the intention of the questioners to reduce them to a recognized model and steer them in that direction. It is a question of understanding their truth and their meaning.This concern is present and accentuated in Il Formaggio e i vermi (1976; The Cheese and the Worms, 1980). Here it is not only a question of reading the testimonials, look-ing for hidden meanings, but also of understanding as far as one can what the culture of the miller Menocchio was. This involves a proper understanding of a peasant’s level of culture, his education, his individual relationships and absorbed readings to locate where his statements emerged from.

68

Carlo Ginzburg moved on from an investigation of a group – the Benandanti – to an investigation of one case, that of a certain Menocchio from Friuli. The scale was thus reduced without changing the subject of the investigation. This gave rise to ar-ticulated, precise research. Taking into account the actual persona of the miller who could read and write, the books that he had read or managed to get his hands on and his relationships, it was possible to see new connections and relationships between the cultures of the élite and that of the subaltern. Thus, Carlo Ginzburg interacted with the “history of collective mentalities”, which after its brilliant exordium in Marc Bloch’s Les Rois Thaumaturges (1924) (The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England, 1990) and the long standing success in the Annales appeared to be the only way to approach popular culture, but successfully avoided the risk of falling into the evasive genericness that threatened the discipline.A certain article appeared in a historical bulletin of a Baltic country and was taken up again in the appendix of a book by an important scholar of folklore, Otto Höfler, who had recounted to Carlo Ginzburg the story of a man who said he was a werewolf. This resembled the initiatives and the battles carried out by the Benandanti in a striking way. There was no way that there could have been a connection between an event in Livonia at the end of the seventeenth century and what had happened in Friuli in the sixteenth. Well then?One possible way of treating the problem was morphology, but not morphology as understood by structuralist anthropologists. A first experiment was attempted with Piero della Francesca, in a volume that inaugurated Einaudi’s Micro-history series (Indagini su Piero, 1981; The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca, 1985). It was a matter of reconstructing, through an analysis incorporating iconography and patron-age, and through a careful comparison of what the formal data suggested, the career of an artist whose work offered very few fixed temporal points and whose chronology oscillated dangerously from one exegete to another. In light of the very vast investi-gation whose idea obsessed him ever since he had discovered those unexplainable correspondences between the cases in Friuli and the Baltic werewolf, was this merely a sampler? Originally this was not the case. In principle, I imagine, it was a case of measuring oneself up against a painter who Carlo Ginzburg had always admired, us-ing the modus operandi of another art historian, apparently very far from Morelli, that of Roberto Longhi, the prince of Italian art historiography in the twentieth century. One evening in Spoleto, after a tiring day touring the minor centres of Central Italy with Giulio Einaudi and Federico Zeri as guides – it must have been 1979 – Carlo told me and other friends about his thesis and his discoveries. I fell asleep, I was actually quite tired. Later, when I read the book, I was fascinated. This was not the case with

69

some art historians who did not understand its significance. The storm passed and the modus operandi used proved very useful, years later, when Ginzburg tried a more au-dacious and dangerous undertaking, deciphering the witches’ Sabbath in an extremely vast spatial and temporal framework (Storia Notturna, 1989; Ecstasies. Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, New York, 1991).In 1988 Ginzburg had begun to teach in Los Angeles, and there he found he had to confront postmodernism and the great influence that Hayden White’s book (Metahis-tory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, 1973) had had, not to mention the nouvelle vague of French deconstructionism.None other than Ginzburg, whose books had fascinated so many readers all over the world for their intelligence, knowledge and extraordinary narrative ability, found he had to defend history and its fundamental task, which is the search for the truth against whoever might try to equate history with rhetoric.The search for truth is characterized in Ginzburg in many ways, but his fundamental source remains, whether it is a case of Conan Doyle’s uncle or of the continuous, insistent search for what is hidden in a wrinkle, a dissonance, a crack or a blind spot, that might turn out to reveal something. In his search for the truth, is there a residue of positivism with respect to postmodern relativism? In what could be termed a ‘manifesto’ in 1903, the positivist historian François Simiand wrote: “If the study of human events intends to be constituted as a positive science, it must maintain a distance from unique facts in order to be concerned with facts that are repeated, thus discarding the accidental in order to be concerned with the regular”. Today we have heard Carlo Ginzburg affirm the importance and the signifi-cance of anomalous cases, “because anomaly contains the norm, whereas the opposite is not true”. We should reflect upon this.

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:Thank you, Enrico Castelnuovo, for such an acute yet multifaceted commentary.

70

Session III

The 2010 Prizewinners’ Panel Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:We hereby open this Interdisciplinary Panel Discussion which is also chaired by my colleague Paolo Matthiae. The floor is now open for questions. I would like to start with a question myself. As coordinator I apologize for getting in first, but I would like to address a fundamental issue which all the speakers, in one way or another, have touched upon: that of memory. Memory in mathematics, memory in history, memory in the theatre, memory in the biological sciences. I would like to paraphrase something uttered by a friend of mine, a mathematician, which affords us an excellent starting point. He says that we appre-hend the increasing separation between the various branches of science mostly due to the separation between different methodologies and vocabularies and even acronyms which are becoming too specialized. This separation contributes to diversity. How-ever, mathematics through its application in so many branches of science promotes globalization and in a sense counteracts diversification. Thus, my first question to all our Prizewinners is: What is the role of memory in your field of research? Is memory fundamental and if so in what way is it fundamental? Professor Brauneck would you like to respond first?

Manfred Brauneck:In connection with my field of research, the theory and history of theatre, the question regarding the importance of memory leads to a central point in the theory of acting as presented by Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski. His theory was the source of direc-tion for European theatre for almost a century. Stanislavski referred to the memory re-search of the French psychologist, Théodule Ribot and coined the term, “affective” or “emotional memory”. He encouraged his actors, when studying a role, to try to recall emotions and behaviours which the actors themselves had experienced in a situation similar to that of the character. This subjective memory material should then be used when creating the character. Only then, said Stanislavski, would the actor on the stage seem credible; only then could he truly empathise with the character he was playing. Stanislavski systematically trained this “remembering” of experienced emotions with

71

his students. This method was influenced by the belief, popular around 1900, that, by applying scientific insights, artistic creativity could be promoted and objectified.In the 1930s the Surrealists experimented with a very different manner of activating suppressed emotions. There the “memory of the body” played a much more important role than a conscious attempt at remembering. Whether consciously or unconsciously inscribed in our life experience – memory indisputably plays a crucial role in the complex process of artistic creativity.

Shinya Yamanaka:For us biologists, especially biologists working on iPS cells, memory is fundamen-tally important in two ways. First of all, our science, biology, is based on the results produced by scientists before me, so we have to both understand and register the results obtained by all other scientists in the field. Without the findings of other scien-tists we would be unable to achieve any goals. In my case I was very lucky to be able to generate iPS cells, but I have to tell you that it was thanks to the findings of many other researchers in the field. So in a sense I do have access to the memories of those other scientists before me. It is very important to maintain a good memory regarding those other studies. However, as for iPS cells memory has a different significance. It is essential to eliminate the memory of the original cells. Thus, memory is important in two very different ways in my field.

Jacob Palis:Professor Quadrio Curzio, that is a remarkable description. I don’t know who your friend is, but this is a very important statement. In relation to my own presentation, memory is certainly fundamental. We are dealing with deterministic systems. Memory is essential to predict the future. On the other hand, there are other instances where for exceptional cases it is necessary to change the model to try to make a better prediction of the future. Then we have to restructure our thought process. This is like creating a new memory. So in brief, memory is fundamental to mathematics, unless I use another model to predict the future behaviour of the same phenomenon.

Carlo Ginzburg:The relationship between history and memory has become the object of an extensive and intensive reflection. There is no doubt that historians should rely upon evidence provided by both individual memories and social memories. We may also look at the other side of the relationship, meaning how memories, both individual and social, are nourished by history. However – and here I am saying something that many historians

72

would not agree with – I think that the two spheres should be kept independent. There has been a sort of inflation of memory, an over-emphasis on memory. What is specific in our intellectual tradition – and I am saying this in a very broad sense – is the fact that our relationship with the past is not only mediated by memory, but also by his-tory: an approach to the past which implies specific techniques, such as the possibility of making a distinction between false memories and true memories. Some years ago Krzysztof Pomian argued (very convincingly, in my view) that the current inflation of memory and memory studies has become a form of attack against history, comparable to the tendency to blur the difference between fictional and historical narratives.

Paolo Matthiae:I am convinced that the concept of interdisciplinarity in humanistic studies and in the natural sciences has a very different value and importance. I would like to take this occa-sion to ask this year’s prizewinners their opinions concerning this problem. For myself, rooted as I am in the humanities, I have a clear idea from my own perspective what inter-disciplinarity means, but in relation to the natural sciences the concept is less clear to me.

Carlo Ginzburg:As far as the humanities are concerned, the emphasis on interdisciplinarity seems to me quite obvious. There is no reason why a specific case which we might be dealing with should fit perfectly within a given discipline; therefore, we are immediately driven in different directions. Obviously, interdisciplinarity has limitations, due often to our own background. For instance, the risky but promising domain placed at the intersec-tion between biology and culture should be addressed by scholars who are conversant with both disciplines.

Jacob Palis:Poincaré, whom I and indeed Professor Etienne Ghys have mentioned several times, also made the philosophical point that mathematics should be useful to answer prob-lems in other areas of science. A contemporary of Jules Henri Poincaré, another great mathematician, David Hilbert, seemed to defend another point of view: mathematics should evolve by itself and our discoveries should be archived. Scientists from other areas should have the opportunity of accessing these archives if they wished to choose what would be appropriate for them to develop their own research. I would tend to agree with Poincaré, that mathematics should not only be dealt with in isolation, but should be motivated by important questions in other areas, and for that some degree of interdisciplinary study is necessary.

73

Shinya Yamanaka:In biology, we have to handle large volumns of data. For example we have to handle millions of individual pieces of sequencing data which make up the human genome. Initially it took twenty years to determine the full genome sequence of one person. It took the cooperation of many countries, including the US, the UK and Japan, with many scientists working fulltime over 20-30 years to obtain the full genome sequence of one individual, but now we can do the same thing in 10 days. It now costs only $5,000 to determine the full genome sequence of an individual human. We now handle such a huge amount of data that biologists really have to understand mathematics. The fusion between biology and mathematics is essential. Without that fusion we could not cope with this new era of genome data. I think it is extremely important for us biologists to understand mathematics.

Manfred Brauneck:I believe that explanatory models used in the natural sciences have minimal applica-tion in the field of artistic production and have little or no place in the research of the theory and history of the arts or the theatre. Of course, the technological applications acquired through scientific research have had enormous impact on virtually all areas of our lives, and, thus, on the theatre as well. For example, the introduction of gas lighting and later electricity in the 19th century led to a “revolutionalisation” in scenography. In general, though, the natural sciences ask different questions than the humanities, even though discourses, which traditionally were the concern of philosophers and theologians, are now being taken over by the natural sciences. When working in the arts, I think, it is probably more productive to be open to the contrast of questions and answers from both the natural sciences and the hu-manities. This zone between the different fields of science is where the arts are at home. It is in this rather undefined area that important physicists have pondered the elementary questions of life. But here the questions are often more interesting than the answers.Another point is, that, independent of the question regarding the possibilities of in-terdisciplinary cooperation, the relationship between the natural sciences and the hu-manities is encumbered today by a different aspect. In the political arena decisions concerning the allocation of government funds are almost always made in favour of the natural sciences, to the detriment of cultural institutions, like theatres and muse-ums, and cultural scientific research projects. It seems that an important balance in cultural understanding, to which both the natural sciences as well as the humanities

74

belong, has been lost. This prioritisation, in my opinion, has led to fatal imbalances in educational policies. The marginalisation of Europe in a globalised world, suspected by some contemporary critics, is surely not only a problem of economics and techno-logical advancement.

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:Now I would like to invite some questions from the floor. At this stage I think it better to group all the questions together and the Prizewinners can then respond to all the issues raised.

Question from the audience(Etienne Ghys):In the presentation of Jacob Palis, he described a balance between stability and chaos. I would like to address the biologist and the historian. Do you look at, or think of life more as a stable system or a chaotic system? And what about history, do you think of it as something stable or as something chaotic?

Question from the audience(Claudio Procesi): My question is completely different. I find it very strange to hear the word “culture” associated with the humanities and not the sciences. So my question is this: It often happens that even educated people say they are proud to understand nothing of math-ematics and indeed do not know anything about mathematics. I am a mathematician, and perhaps I may be ignorant in other fields, but I never feel proud of being ignorant, so I would like to ask the Prizewinners to comment because this is a crucial, interdis-ciplinary question.

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:Are there any other questions? I would like to encourage the young researchers who made such an impression this morning to contribute something. I recall that someone did discuss memory and another talked about the interaction between the arts and the sciences. Is there anyone who would like to comment or to ask a question?

Question from the audience(Natascha Fabbri):I would like to ask Professor Brauneck a question. In the twentieth century, did theatre deal with topics crucial to contemporary science?

75

Question from the audience(Matteo Borri):Just to continue the discussion about memory, scientists have raised a question pro-posing the need to remove certain memories (at least those concerning wrong or falsi-fied theories). Memory is integral to historical research but it is also selective. How important is this process of choosing what to remember or choosing what not to re-member in the writing of History?

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:I think Professor Rossi Monti could range quite profoundly on this subject, explaining how there is a unique meaning of arts and science without any kind of distinction. I have guarding over me Galileo Galilei and Federico Cesi, and they could not agree upon a distinction between arts and science. Arts and science are a whole and they have mutual interconnections. We have not yet touched upon the problem of continuity and discontinuity, even if it has been implicit throughout our discussions this afternoon. The problem of continuity and discontinuity is fundamental, obviously, to all kinds of research. For instance in the field of economics, the recent crisis was partly due to the fact that we relied upon continuity too much, without having the prudence to remember that this continuity could suddenly evaporate. Thus, situations as described in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, are always likely to occur. Could the Prizewinners also comment on this?

Carlo Ginzburg:I would like to provide a short answer to the provocative question about history put by Professor Ghys. Is history stable or chaotic? Not stable, of course. But chaotic – from which point of view? Notwithstanding its venerable tradition, history as a form of knowl-edge is still in its infancy. But we may say that developments like the growing fragility of the environment do not imply chaos but a sustained worsening of humankind’s situation. In response to Mr. Borri: memory plays many roles in history, but frankly I am not sure that the absence of memory can be equated with what is left unsaid.

Jacob Palis:Etienne Ghys was referring to history perhaps in a different way. Well, my view is dif-ferent to yours (Carlo Ginzburg). I think that in relation to history, it really depends on whether your perspective is looking back or whether you are looking in a dynamical way. If you are looking back, of course you can say whether it looks somewhat chaotic

76

or not. I believe Etienne was rather enquiring in terms of developing a kind of history where you are seeing moments which look very similar and yet the events and results emanating from these moments are very different. So in this sense I would vote for chaoticity, not rigid structure as the essence of history. I hope I put my hypothesis in the right place. Concerning discontinuity again, I think that if you interpret discontinuity as a new mo-ment in economics, you are in effect changing the prevalent model substantially. Then of course this will develop in a different way, but again if you think of discontinuity as a phenomenon that through small changes results in quite a repercussion, chaoticity pre-vails. So, I am for Chaos if you can control or at least estimate the uncertainty involved.

Shinya Yamanaka:Life is very stable but also life can be chaotic. We have shown that cell fate is very stable. Skin cells continue to be skin cells in normal situations. ES cells and iPS cells continue to be ES cells and iPS cells under normal conditions. So they are very stable in one sense, but at the same time we have shown that cells can become chaotic. For example by introducing only four factors, skin cells become chaotic. They become confused and some of them become iPS cells. So from that phenomenon we have learned that cells, i.e., life, can be very chaotic. We tended to believe that life is either stable or chaotic, but now we believe that life or indeed particular cells can be both chaotic and stable. As for the question about memory, with other biologists we try to memorize what is true and we try to forget what is not true, but it is very difficult.

Manfred Brauneck:In the end every theatre production is about the relationship between stability/order/form and a controlled chaos, about allowing spontaneous creativity and coincidence. It is the difficult task of the stage director to create a relationship which reflects the ten-sion between a stable structure developed from a literary text and an open room for play. The actor needs this openness in order to bring in his own creativity. The specta-tor also needs this openness in order to be able to continue the creative process with his own imagination. Kandinsky called this “audience contribution”. The reception of a theatre production takes place in this dialectic. If the term chaos is used in art, then it should “occur” in a prescribed, formal framework, permitted, yet, controllable. In some contemporary developments in the area of performances and also of happenings in the 1960s and 1970s, I think, this relationship often shifted in favour of “chaotic” scenarios. Regarding Natascha Fabbri’s question dealing with the relationship between the natural sciences and the theatre in the 20th century, one needs to look at plays such as Brecht’s

77

Galileo, Kipphardt’s In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Dürrenmatt’s The Physicists, which gave scientists cause to consider their social responsibility.

Paolo Matthiae:I would like to stay with the theme of “continuity” in concluding our panel discussion. Therefore I would like to ask our Prizewinners how their work might be influenced by what has been said during today’s discussion and what impact the Balzan Award will have on their research.

Shinya Yamanaka:Well my proposed Balzan Research Project (see p. 88) dealing with molecular mecha-nisms where work will concentrate on the mechanisms underlying iPS cell generation and the analysis of pathogenesis by disease-specific iPS cells certainly stresses conti-nuity. I found the discussion of chaos very illuminating, and in the context of what we will be doing, chaos is best expressed in the threat of tumerocity in generated cells. I will endeavour to follow Professor Palis’ recommendation that it be kept under control.

Manfred Brauneck:As I have already outlined, my proposed Balzan Research Project (see p. 83) will fo-cus on the role of independent theatres in holistic systems within theatre culture. De-tailed studies will be devoted to specific topics: a comparison of the interrelationship between independent and city/state theatres, migrant theatre, theatre for children and young people, artistic work methods in contemporary dance and the role of education.

Jacob Palis:This has been a very interesting discussion. In regard to my proposed Balzan Research Project (see p. 86), we plan to deal with Dynamical Systems and Chaotic Behaviour, concentrating on Uncertainty, Linear Cocycles and Lyapunov Exponents. I think what I have heard from Professor Ginzburg and Professor Brauneck will help me in con-ceptualizing some contexts for these phenomena in society. Indeed Professor Ghys’ very useful question in regard to chaoticity in a historical cultural perspective pro-duced a valuable debate. Professor Quadrio Curzio’s reference to unexpected events as described in The Black Swan is also a useful contextual thread.

Carlo Ginzburg:The present we live in is full of black swans, of unexpected events large and small, which raise all kind of questions to the past. This is the way historical research is gen-

78

erated – including my own. My proposed Balzan Research Project (see p. 85) on “A Comparative Approach to Religions” is a response to September 11, 2001. To under-stand the role (unexpected to many, including myself) played by religions in the world of today we have to go beyond the event, re-orientating it within a long, fragmented, partially forgotten trajectory.

Alberto Quadrio Curzio:I believe that we can bring our panel discussion to a close. I would like to thank the Prizewinners for having participated enthusiastically in a very enlightening discus-sion and, as of a sign of acknowledgement on the part of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, I would like to present them with the Linceografo - Lynceographum quo norma studiosae vitae Lynceorum philosophorum exponitur as a gift. These are basi-cally the Articles of Constitution of the Accademia drawn up by Federico Cesi, which he further elaborated through a dialogue with Galileo Galilei, where he explained how knowledge must be unitary, though at the same time recognizing everyone’s specific competences. I will now ask Ambassador Bruno Bottai, Chairman of the Board of the International Balzan Foundation “Prize”, to officially close today’s proceedings.

79

Closing RemarksBruno Bottai, Chairman of the International Balzan Foundation “Prize”

As President of the International Balzan Foundation “Prize”, I congratulate the 2010 Prizewinners and thank them for their contributions.The prestige of the Foundation is entirely due to the calibre of the Balzan Prizewin-ners. Thus I congratulate the General Prize Committee and its Chairman Salvatore Veca for the excellent choices again made this year. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Alberto Quadrio Curzio for his unstinting efforts in developing the Balzan Foundation’s external links. The authoritativeness of the Foundation also derives from the value of the research the Prizewinners carry out through their Balzan research projects and the consequent development of concepts and experiences which when diffused, promote learning and erudition, in the arts and sciences throughout the world. I would like to draw attention to the Balzan Foundations’ Italian and Swiss nexus. The Balzan Foundation acts jointly through two Foundations: one with headquarters in Milan, the “Prize” Foundation – which I chair – which through its General Prize Com-mittee chooses the Balzan Prizewinners, and the second the “Fund” Foundation, with headquarters in Zurich – chaired by Achille Casanova – which administers Eugenio Balzan’s estate. When, 50 years ago, Lina Balzan decided to honour the memory of her father Eugenio and to continue his charitable activities by devoting the patrimony he had left her, she ushered in a new model of cultural and academic patronage. Since the establishment of the Balzan Foundation we have awarded 130 luminaries and 4 in-stitutions throughout the world. Over the last 10 years our Prizewinners have involved over 450 researchers in research projects financed by the second half of their Prizes, many of which have produced groundbreaking results. Thank you to all those who have attended the 2010 Balzan Prizes Interdisciplinary Forum, particularly to those who through their interventions have ensured a lively and most engaging discussion on the themes of memory and continuity. I look forward to seeing most of you in Berne next year.

The 2010 Prizewinners’ Research Projects

83

Structural Changes in European Theatre

Manfred Brauneck, Professor Emeritus of Modern German Literature and Theatre Studies at the University of Hamburg, former Director of the Centre for Theatre Re-search and Founder of the Institute for Theatre Direction at the University of Ham-burg, was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize for the History of Theatre in All Its Aspects for his wide-ranging account of two and a half millennia in the history of European theatre, as well as his research on currents and events of an international nature in the world of theatre.

He will designate half of his Balzan Prize to a research and documentation project which investigates the interaction between changes within social and legal conditions for performing artists, changing methods of production and distribution of theatre art and the shifting dialectics of content versus form in European contemporary theatre. The role of independent theatres in holistic systems of theatre culture will be the cen-tre of focus.The different theatre systems in Europe are going through fundamental change. Shifting prerequisites, new production methods and structures of organisation have changed theatre’s content as well as its reception. Studying this context is the core of the project. The most important factor driving these changes is the increasing pace of globalisation since the 1990s. In 2005 the UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions was passed, which allows some space beyond the commercial marketplace to cultural expression. These vec-tors have brought about more flexible and decentralised production structures, new cooperative relationships and new technologies to the planning and the direct crea-tion of theatrical forms of expression and changes in the distribution processes (e.g., increased orientation towards target audiences, PR/marketing, internationalisation, event orientation etc.). All of these change the nature of the work and the living conditions of theatre artists in a lasting way. However, independent analyses and studies on the status of artists hardly exist. Thus an overview will be created that compares the data of selected Eu-ropean countries. The analysis will include early research work and locally available material in different European institutions in producing a current status report that, in comparison to earlier studies, more accurately demarcates trends, changes and up-heavals. This will represent an essential contribution to the UNESCO Observatory for the Status of the Artist, a major instrument for monitoring the realisation of the con-vention in nation states’ civil society. In addition, the analysis will be the foundation

84

for a representation of essential shifts in production methods and content of theatre work over the last twenty years. After an overview, detailed studies will be devoted to specific topics: a comparison of the interrelationship between independent and city/state theatres, migrant theatre, theatre for children and young people, amateur theatre, artistic work methods in contemporary dance and the role of education.

85

A Comparative Approach to Religions(A Historical Perspective – from the 16th to the 18th Century)

Carlo Ginzburg, since 2006 Professor of History of European Cultures at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, formerly Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renais-sance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize in European History, 1400-1700, for the exceptional combination of imagination, scholarly precision and literary skill with which he has recovered and illuminated the beliefs of ordinary people in Early-modern Europe.

He will dedicate the second half of his Balzan Prize to a three year research pro-gramme where he intends to scrutinize the emergence of a comparative approach to religions. This will involve a number of young scholars.The Research Project will go back to the 1500s, exploring the emergence of a com-parative approach to religions, focusing on the connection between antiquarianism and early ethnology, in the framework of European colonial expansion. It is envisaged that a series of analytical studies will emanate from this research.The launch of the project will be constituted by a number of works by Carlo Ginzburg which are shortly forthcoming: Machiavelli e gli antiquari; Ancora sui riti cinesi: docu- menti vecchi e nuovi; Provincializing the World: Europeans, Indians, Jews (1704). Researchers will also take account of the questions raised in the following works: A New Science. The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason, Guy Stroumsa, Harvard University Press, 2010; Ancient History and the Antiquarian, Arnaldo Momigliano, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, 1950; Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca, Arnaldo Momigliano, Rivista Storica Italiana 80, 1969. Positions for two researchers will be advertised internationally and it is expected that the positions will be filled by the end of December 2011. They will be supported by scholarships of one year’s duration. Two workshops and an international conference will also be organized. It is expected that the papers from the international conference will later be published.

86

Dynamical Systems, Chaotic Behaviour – Uncertainty,Linear Cocycles and Lyapunov Exponents

Jacob Palis, Professor at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada, IMPA in Rio de Janeiro, currently President of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World and of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize for Pure and Applied Mathematics for his lasting contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Dynamical Systems.

He will coordinate his Balzan Research Project together with Jean-Christophe Yoccoz at the National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil.The creation of the modern theory of dynamical systems, towards the end of the nineteenth century, is attributed to Henri Poincaré. It is the principal mathematical approach to model the evolution of many phenomena in nature. Classical examples are population growth of species, weather and climate prediction. Perhaps the same theory can be applied to understand certain aspects of turbulence in physics. Since Poincaré we have been wondering if it is possible to understand the typical behaviour of a typical dynamical system, where typical should be understood in a probabilistic sense to cover almost all possibilities.Starting from a selected initial position of the system, one tries to describe the behav-iour of its future trajectory, defined by its successive positions as time evolves. For example, the motion of the atmosphere is governed by a very complicated evolution equation, which cannot be solved explicitly. In 1963, Edward Norton Lorenz, a theo-retical meteorologist, proposed a “toy” weather model, involving only three dimen-sions and intended to be much easier to understand. The question of knowing whether this oversimplified model still captures the main properties of the actual atmospheric motion is controversial among physicists and meteorologists. However, Lorenz was able to observe “chaotic behaviour” in his “toy” model. Minute changes in the initial data used were shown to produce extremely radical changes in the outcome. This was very surprising at the time. Jacob Palis’ research project proposes to tackle several con-jectures which would imply that the phenomenon witnessed by Lorenz is not an excep-tion but, on the contrary, may capture some fundamental features of general dynamics. The research project will study (and hopefully prove) a set of conjectures for dynami-cal systems that leads to a global perspective in this important branch of Mathematics. The Research Project will take place in the period 2011-2015. Part of the funds of the project will support the activities of young researchers at the National Institute for

87

Pure and Applied Mathematics in Dynamical Systems, Chaotic Behaviour and Uncer-tainty. Also, as part of the project, three Balzan Symposia will take place, two of them at IMPA and one at the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, in subsequent years, starting in 2012. They are designed to review advances and to stimulate further progress along the lines of the research project. There will be a number of fellowships (3-12 months).

Some Basic References:[BDV] C. Bonatti, L. Díaz and M. Viana, “Dynamics Beyond Uniform Hyperbolicity. A Global Geometric and Probabilistic Perspective”, Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences, vol. 102, Springer Verlag, 2004.[PI] J. Palis, A global view of dynamics and a conjecture on the denseness of finitude of attrac-tors, Astérisque No. 261, 335–347, 2000.[PII] J. Palis, A global perspective for non-conservative dynamics, Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré, vol. 22, 485–507, 2005.[PY] J. Palis and J.-C. Yoccoz, Non-uniformly hyperbolic horseshoes arising from bifurcations of Poincaré heteroclinic cycles, Publications Mathématiques de l’IHES No. 110, 1–217, 2009.

88

Molecular Basis during iPS Cell Generation and Its Application

Shinya Yamanaka, Director of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, Professor at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sci-ences (iCeMS), Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan and Senior Investigator at the Glad-stone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, San Francisco, California, U.S.A., was awarded the 2010 Balzan Prize for Stem Cells: Biology and Potential Applications for the discovery of a method to transform already differentiated cells into cells present-ing the characteristics of embryonic stem cells.

He will use half of his prize to support a research project on molecular mechanisms at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA), Kyoto University, lasting 5-6 years. Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells were originally generated from mouse and hu-man fibroblasts by retroviral introduction of four factors, Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf41,2. iPS cells are similar to embryonic stem (ES) cells in morphology, prolifera-tion, gene expression, and most importantly, pluripotency. To date, a large number of reports have described reprogramming of many somatic cell types into iPS cells, us-ing different sets of transcription factors and devising alternate methods of introduc-ing the transcription factor genes or proteins into the somatic cells. Recently Dr. Yamanaka’s group showed that the p53-p21 pathway serves as a safe-guard against not only tumorigenicity but also iPS cell generation3, and that another Myc family member gene, L-Myc, can promote human iPS cell generation more ef-ficiently and specifically4. In addition, recent reports of the important roles of tumor suppressor genes and apoptotic caspases shed some light on the iPS cell induction process. However, most of the molecular mechanisms still remain unclear. On the other hand, patient specific iPS cells are strongly expected to provide unprecedented opportunities in pathology, drug screening, and toxicology.Shinya Yamanaka’s laboratory at the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application (CiRA) will hire in April 2011 one young and talented post doctoral fellow to promote the research on the mechanisms underlying iPS cell generation and the analysis of pathogenesis by disease-specific iPS cells.

1 Takahashi, K., and Yamanaka, S. (2006) Induction of pluripotent stem cells from mouse embryonic and adult fibroblast cultures by defined factors, Cell 126, 663-676.2 Takahashi, K., Tanabe, K., Ohnuki, M., Narita, M., Ichisaka, T., Tomoda, K., and Yamanaka, S. (2007) Induction of pluripotent stem cells from adult human fibroblasts by defined factors, Cell 131, 861-872.3 Hong, H., Takahashi, K., Ichisaka, T., Aoi, T., Kanagawa, O., Nakagawa, M., Okita, K., and Yamanaka, S. (2009) Suppression of induced pluripotent stem cell generation by the p53-p21 pathway, Nature 460, 1132-1135.4 Nakagawa, M., Takizawa, N., Narita, M., Ichisaka, T., and Yamanaka, S. (2010) Promotion of direct repro-gramming by transformation-deficient Myc, Proc Natl Acad Sci U.S.A. 107, 14152-14157.