Visualità e scrittura

PART I Historical-Theoretical Excursus Ekphrasis between Visuality and Writing. Genealogy of a Conception Alessandro Stavru Over the centuries Ekphrasis has been variously described by critics according to the different points of view adopted by each of them. It was first defined in the 1st century B.C. by the Alexandrian sophist Aelius Theon as a “descriptive discourse” or logos periegematikos. This definition helped the reader understand that Ekphrasis is a dynamic discourse in which descriptions reveal the enargeia belonging to the object. Later interpretations describe Ekphrasis as the way in which an object is seen, with its narration creating a realism that is superior to reality itself. This perception generates phantasia, a unique faculty that allows the projection of the object into the poet’s mind, and which is influenced both by the images one sees and by the words one hears. In this sense, the Greek author Philostratus in his Images highlights the importance of images and words in the ekphrastic creation process. Image and Discourse: the Two Times of Allegory Francesco Muzzioli Allegory may be said to articulate in “two times”: a first kind of temporality in allegory is described by its meaning shifting from a literal level to a conceptual one. Then, the history of allegory develops according to “two times”: the concept of allegory shifts from a Classical to a Modern perception. The first one has a moral aim and is open to clear interpretation, as shown by Giotto’s decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel. Modern allegory, on the other hand, “has lost the key.” Its “second time” does not convey a firm meaning anymore, something that can be seen in De Chirico’s Chant d’Amour or in Rauschenberg’s Allegory; in this case such rhetorical device does not stand for something else, but it is allegory tout court. Modern allegory is hindered by the symbol, which has a more immediate effect. Benjamin brings allegory back to its original level of importance, underlining that its fragmentary nature suits modern necessities better than the symbols itself. Critical Dilation: How Hazlitt Judged Paintings (Hazlitt’s Aesthetic Theory) Paul Hamilton Hazlitt’s writings about art typically expand on the meaning he finds in paintings. Discussion of Hazlitt’s aesthetics must begin with the apparent contradiction between his radical politics and his opposition to the mass appreciation of art and its popular dissemination. But paintings still remain politically charged for Hazlitt when their self-contained worlds make us aware of our creative potential for renewing our own. He thought they did this fundamentally through a synaesthetic effect which the critic continued when he or she dilated on paintings in their own terms. In each case, as Marx later claimed, we have to decide whether or not to accept the humanity defined by aesthetic experience. Finally the focus is on his enigmatic remark about the paintings of Turner. This is unpacked to show that Hazlitt thought Turner painted his ‘medium’, and so gave us an especial awareness of what paintings can do. PART II Sister Arts The “Analogue Curse” and the “Pictorial Eye” Goethe Between Art and Nature Mauro Ponzi The different emphasis on either the represented object or the applied method has never abandoned the history of art in the Western cultures, whose referent, indeed, has always remained nature or reality. Nevertheless, the fantastic expressions of the artistic language is significantly the object of a second minor current, and the boom of the cinema has liberated the arts from their binding reference to nature, as several authors and critics like Barthes, Bazin or Merleau-Ponty highlight. Goethe composes instead his poetics around an “eye that feels” and a “hand that sees”. His Italian journey had a particular impact on him and his interpretation of nature. In Sicily, he frequently mentions the “pictorial eye”, where vision enables first an experience and then a representation of nature, becoming a means to create art. The Painting Poets: John Keats and Dante Gabriel Rossetti Chiara Moriconi The painting-poetry duo binds Keats’ and Rossetti’s art more tightly than is evident from the latter’s production. The special connection between the media links the two poets and reveals the profound crisis of their artistic performance. This crisis originates in the fall of the Romantic poet into a state of desperate self-consciousness and leads to his subsequent and exasperated search for an escape. Keats and Rossetti cling onto the concreteness of the aesthetical object in an extreme form of artistic sincerity, to lay bare the immeasurable isolation of a solipsistic and belated poetic “I”. In Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes the influence of Rossetti’s mature poetic is strongly present: from Rossetti’s Romantic grotesque to Spenser’s characteristic pictorialism, Keats’ poem paves the way to Rossetti’s art, perceived as a ritualistic act of attention, repetition and translation. Optical Vision and Pictorial Vision in the Works of Nikolaj Gogol’ Rita Giuliani Nikolaj Gogol’ has always been considered as the forefather of Russian realism. Nevertheless, at the beginning of his career, he did not achieve immediate success. Consequently, in 1836, he decided to leave Russia and travel around Europe for twelve years. His favourite destination was Rome, where he spent four and a half years writing and painting. The self-proclaimed writer-painter was accustomed to imagine a scene before jotting it down. This artistic inclination was also visible in his use of variegated chromatic tones in his works. Moreover, Gogol scattered lots of differing ekphrastic models in novels like Dead Souls and Rome. Recent studies have unveiled some of the original paintings that have inspired the writer. However, in the case of missing canvasses, it is hard to prove whether it was a painting or Gogol’s meticulous eye which had suggested his microscopic descriptions. Through the Looking Glass Poetics of Visuality between Victorianism and Modernism Giuseppe Massara In Yeats, the poetic act is reduced to an act of seeing. It is not the vision of a seer but the common, “sudden” sight, inspired to him by Rossetti and his typically unreal figures set in a familiar context. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde states that art does not reflect the object itself but the mere spectator. In Dubliners, Joyce takes a step further by considering the act of seeing as a mental process where interiority and exteriority coincide. In the light of all that paved the way for it, Modernism would focus on preserving the naturalistic experience, its artistic realism being so tightly combined with the imagination that is instilled into the reader by the literary texts. By the time Modernism established itself, the expression “seeing through the looking glass” had come to point to a mental process in which the true object of art is not what is actually seen but the very process of seeing. Later on, with Postmodernism, the act of thinking would encroach the territory of the eye. The Road to Perfection Passes Through Painting: Pío Baroja’s Camino de perfección (1902) Norbert von Prellwitz Pío Baroja’s novel, Camino de perfección (1902), concentrates on the figure of Fernando Ossorio, a self-proclaimed painter. This Bildungsroman narrates Ossorio’s life from his youth to the birth of his second child. The main character gradually comes to believe that culture, which includes both art and religion, symbolizes death while nature represents life. This view guides him through the numerous sentimental vicissitudes caused by his continuous wandering around the Iberian Peninsula. Ossorio lives a period of transition, from the decline of a rebellious artistic vision to a flâneurian lifestyle. His return to painting is followed by an unprecedented success that derives from the disavowal of his artistic ideals. The author emphasizes this change, portraying Ossorio’s evolving relationship with El Greco’s painting, El entierro del conde de Orgaz. Ekphrastic Poetry and Pre-Hispanic Art: a Controversial Relationship Stefano Tedeschi Ekphrastic Poetry in Hispano-American countries represents a precious link to the past. G. Jiménez Aguirre argues in Un pasado visible that the work of art involves both the poetic word and the reader. In this sense, Pre-Hispanic art has been considered a perpetual recall of a distant and desired past, where time plays an important role. In particular, poems set in an ancient past are closely linked to a present, which is pervaded and modified by myths and fables as it needs to remember its origins. The most important authors who deal with ekphrastic poetry are O. Paz in Piedra del Sol and E. Cross in Los Bebedores de Pulque. In their work the necessity of a voice emerges, the voice of the poet, whose duty is to resurrect and restore these imaginative works of art and re-establish the everlasting bond between past and present and their cyclical pace. The Red Wheelbarrow: Modernism and Visuality in Early 20th Century American Literature Ugo Rubeo Modernism is a cross-cultural movement that starts in 1910 with the opening of an art exhibition at Grafton Galleries in London, whereas in the USA this movement begins in 1913, with the Armory Show in New York. In this period writing was close to the visual arts, which were then experimenting with new styles in order to stimulate emotional reactions. The important woman of letters G. Stein, for instance, tried to restore the original meaning of a word by the use of repetitions. Another famous example of such experimenting is “In a Station of the Metro” by E. Pound, the manifesto of Imagism: here, the poetic image is the verbal equivalent of visual language. Imagism develops into Vorticism and, later, into High Modernism and its chief poets: T. S. Eliot, who introduced the objective correlative theory; W. C. Williams, the poet of concreteness with his famous “Red Wheelbarrow”; W. Stevens, who made full use of metaphors and pushed poetry into Abstract art, and L. Hughes, linked to the Harlem Renaissance. On the Margins of Futurism Jolanda Nigro Covre Italian Futurism is closely connected to various artists coming from different cultural and geographical backgrounds, something which confirms its vitality, international diffusion and semantic versatility. Severini, Boccioni, Russolo, Balla and Depero influenced contemporary and later artists through their use of subjects, themes and materials. Artists from France, England, Germany and even Eastern European countries valued the Italian Futurism, its paintings and sculptures. One of the least explored fields in this context is the connection between Russolo and the Dutch artist Mondrian, in particular Russolo’s intonarumori and the Italian trend to abandon traditional music and so to explore new fields that were not necessarily artistic. This interpretation is not appreciated by the entire Futuristic community and is therefore opposed by Kandinskij with his “great silence”. PART III In the Audiovisual Media Cinema, Literature and Society: Brazilian Cinema Novo Silvano Peloso Cinema Novo has been the most important movement in South American cinematography. It was created in Brazil at the end of the ‘50s by a group of directors who wanted to react against Hollywood films and chanchadas. These directors explored popular Brazilian folklore in order to produce a cinema for the masses, as G. Rocha points out in Aesthetic of hunger, Cinema Novo’s manifesto. The 1964 coup d’état led to the end of the first phase of the movement because of censorship. During the ‘60s this movement became world-famous thanks to films like Vidas Secas, by N. P. dos Santos, adapted from the G. Ramos’s homonymous book, and Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, by G. Rocha. The latter was also popular in Italy, a country that knows so well about the dramatic tension between political power and artistic coherence. Pan Tadeusz on the Screen. The Polish Myth Interpreted by Andrzej Wajda Monika Wozniak Of all Polish film directors, Andrzej Wajda is certainly the most appreciated in his country. His films deal with the problems concerning national identity and Poland’s troublesome past. A good example is his adaptation for the big screen of Adam Mickiewicz’s epic poem, Pan Tadeusz (1834). In his intersemiotic transposition, Wajda offers two narrative levels: the figure of Mickiewicz, who reads the poem in the gloomy Paris of the exiles and the Arcadian world of Soplicowo, where the protagonists operate. The contrast resulting from these differing worlds is meant to emphasize Polish mythology, which is the driving force behind the country’s strong national identity. In spite of the excellent soundtrack and photography, the film was only a domestic blockbuster because of its extreme fidelity to the original text, something which makes it a Polish masterpiece but also an incomprehensible work for a foreign audience. Close-up: Portraits, Illustrations and Books in Boardwalk Empire Mario Martino Boardwalk Empire, the famous HBO series created by Terence Winter, reveals interesting narrative devices, clearly belonging to period drama, that aim at describing a realistic world in which fictional elements create precise historical and literary references. This series narrates the story and evolution of Atlantic City in the ‘20s – a city which became in a few years the capital of gambling and promiscuity – focusing in particular on the consequences brought by prohibitionism and by the enactment of the Volstead Act. By following the lives of Nucky Thompson, his wife Margaret and the protegé Jimmy Darmondy, the series punctually sets up a web of intertextuality whose threads are more than just intricated and whose references are always to books, characters, paintings and authors: most notably, besides John Webster’s, the series plays both thematically and formally with the works of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, and their illustrations.