| DECEMBER 1998 |
..
The
literature , as it is asserted by the protagonist of a recent novel of
Martin Amis, ' The Information' follows a declining
parabola'.  First, gods. Then, demigods. So the epic becomes tragedy: failed kings, failed heroes. Then, the little aristocracy. Then, the bourgeoisie and its mercantile dreams. Then, the social realism, the underworld, the age of irony. And now literature has time enough to dedicate itself to us, the writers, for a few. Heaven knows,  maybe even
art, in spite of any of our progressive  ideologies, has followed
an alike involutional and reductionist path, till landing at the
self-reference tautological nihilism of the artist, good and fetish,
as Andy Warhol. If the assumption is true, the beautiful exposition, organised by Flavio Caroli at Palazzo Reale, around the portrait topic - meaning the idea the west modern man has had of he himself, his face and body _ allows to give a valid resume, a summa of the last phase of this tormented path. The five  centuries passed
between Bacon and Leonardo, considered in the light of the uninterrupted
meditation that, by the means of art, man has carried on about his living
in world, his grandeur and his own frailty. |
 The exposition
begins with the Renaissance proud exaltation of the centrality of man and
with Leonardo's exhortation, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, to
investigate his emotions by the means of painting. And it ends with the
ruinous fall of certainties, with the loose identity of man by Francis
Bacon, son of an age when  science, technology, psychoanalysis
and two deadly world conflicts have swept away any notion of centrality of
our being and all basis for traditional
values. Between these two ends, the absolutely original pictorial and critical itinerary, developed in parallel with the physiognomy evolution (that is the art of knowing human beings since their physiognomy) and lowered in the living society, in culture, into the world views going with man along the modern man way. The contrast, in full Cinquecento, between the arouse of individual introspection and the power absolutism. The new attention paid to the achievement of natural science, due to the related reality, in the seventeenth century. The interlacement of rôles and classes in Europe at the time of the Acien Règime. The nineteenth century triumph of the bourgeoisie and the discover of the individual as a lump of  unsolved tensions. Finally, in our century, the arouse
of psychoanalysis and the breaking of self into thousands and thousands
appearances of a reality, already centreless.
All that recorded and translated into 300 masterpieces from that unique, sensitive seismograph of soul and time that the heart and the eye of the artist are.  |
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