Dipinti che cambiano nome. Pirandello e la cultura dell'attribuzionismo

In the novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904) by Luigi Pirandello, the protagonist, after escaping from his town and family, discovers that he has been by mistake declared dead. Blessed with the sudden chance to start a completely new life, he has assumed a new name (Adriano Meis) and settled down in Rome. A guest in the house where he lives notices that he frequently touchs his annular finger, as if he had a wedding ring: having to face her curiosity, Mattia Pascal/Adriano Meis invents an explanation. When he was twelve years old, he had visited Uffizi Gallery in Florence with his grandfather, an art expert. Looking at a Renaissance painting, the young boy had proposed that the author were not Perugino, as the label declared, but Raphael. Approving his “attribution”, the grandfather had rewarded him with a little ring, bought on one of the Ponte Vecchio shops. The essay Paintings that change their names proposes to connect this episode with the connoisseurship culture, diffused in Europe in the second half of 19th Century, and based on close observation of paintings’ details, such as noses, nails, fingers shapes, as involuntary marks and clues of artistic identity. One of the most important exponent of this method was Giovanni Morelli, whose new attributions of artworks changed the state of the art of European museums’ catalogues. The scene in The Late Mattia Pascal is compared with the first pages of art historian Giovanni Morelli volume on Italian Painting (a copy of it was in the library of Sigmund Freud), where an old Italian gentleman explains paintings to young visitors in Florence museums (a topos in the ékphrasis tradition since Filostrato) inviting to observe signs of the individual style of each painter.The connection is supported by the fact that Pirandello himself had been a painter, an art critic and an art historian, a close friend of Ugo Fleres (director of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome since 1908). Very interested in Renaissance painting, he had visited Perugia, observing Perugino and Raphael style. Attribution and change of identity, anagraphical documents, signature, baptism, close observation of details: these features are present both in Pirandello’s masterpiece as in art history of the period, suggesting affinity, relationship, a shape of time.

L'articolo "Dipinti che cambiano nome. Pirandello e la cultura dell'attribuzionismo", propone un confronto tra una pagina de Il fu Mattia Pascal – in discussione è se l'autore di un dipinto esposto agli Uffizi sia Perugino o Raffaello – e la diffusione del metodo attribuzionistico di Giovanni Morelli, sullo sfondo di una cultura in cui il tema, politico e istituzionale, della nuova registrazione anagrafica dei cittadini italiani si intreccia con il pensiero, letterario e filosofico, dell'identità e delle sue incertezze. Nello specifico, nell'articolo è proposto un rapporto fra l’episodio museale de Il fu Mattia Pascal e la cultura dell’attribuzionismo, diffusa in Europa nella seconda metà dell’Ottocento e di cui Pirandello poteva essere a conoscenza grazie al suo sodalizio con il critico e storico dell’arte Ugo Fleres. La pagina del romanzo pirandelliano è messa a confronto con alcuni passi dell’edizione italiana del volume Della pittura italiana. Studii storico-critici di Giovanni Morelli, figura di spicco della connoisseurship del secondo Ottocento.