[1982]
The Redemption of Objects
The personal anthology that Mario Praz has compiled—Voce dietro la scena (Voices Off), published by Adelphi—brings together essays and chapters from his oeuvre written over the course of more than fifty-five years. One of the main themes is that of autobiography. Praz was a scholar with an insatiable appetite for learning about and comparing things; he was an omnivorous compiler of files about great, minor and negligible works where the human hand has expressed the unmistakable tone of the age as well as the hidden urges of the soul. He was an explorer of the remotest sources of the currents of taste that have irrigated the entirety of Western culture. As a historian of taste Praz does not proceed in linear fashion in his work but through a juxtaposition of materials in which every element refers in turn to other series of elements. Similarly this autobiography is not an ordered account of events in chronological order but an accumulation of motifs and opportunities and stimuli, or rather the catalogue of the rationales that have underpinned and given shape to his life.
Thus we find here his vocation to be an English literature scholar identified at its source, in his study of English eccentrics who once stayed in Italy, especially in Tuscany (such as Vernon Lee, writer and disciple of Ruskin, and William Morris, a curious character who combined Pre-Raphaelite aestheticism with Tolstoyan humanitarianism). It is also seen in his scouring of London in search of places described by Charles Lamb, whose essays he had just translated (it was Papini who had commissioned this first work from him for his famous series ‘Cultura dell’anima’ (Culture of the Soul) in 1924), and in the years spent teaching in Liverpool, impatiently trying to squeeze out of the dullness of the modern industrial city every last drop of fascination for the ancient civilization that was the only thing that attracted him.
Thus we see that his survey of the origins of Decadentism (or rather of the Romanticism-Decadentism nexus), which would be the theme of his first and most famous book, La carne, la morte e il diavolo (The Romantic Agony, 1930), stemmed from his research on D’Annunzio’s predecessors and sources, as well as from a trip to Spain and from his reflections on the bullfight in literature. His interest in Mannerism, which is a related area, came from his love of Tasso (Tasso whom we see in one essay unexpectedly placed alongside Diderot: one of the pleasures which a reading of Praz always holds is just such unpredictable juxtapositions, his short-circuiting of thematic and stylistic analogies). Then we have his passion for collecting: Empire furniture, for instance, where he records his first purchases with the meagre savings he had put aside as a student; paintings of interiors which, even when they were not top-class works, have so much to tell us, as part history of taste and part narrative; and wax images where the suggestion of the living person and his ghostly appearance are both equally present.
This relationship with objects is another key part—the most essential one, I believe—of this ‘personal anthology’ by Praz: it can also be found in other typical books of his, from Il gusto neoclassico (On Neoclassicism) to La casa della vita (The House of Life). Indeed it is in this relationship that what we can call Praz’s philosophy is defined. Two essays in this volume illuminate this philosophy in particular, ‘Dello stile Impero’ (On Empire Style) and ‘Un interno’ (An Interior). Both were written to defend Empire furniture from the accusation of being lugubrious and sinister—an accusation documented in a great number of literary references which Praz, suffering all the while, collects together, and up to a point he takes pleasure in emphasizing the effects that might support these people, his enemies. However, he also advances his own defence to a certain extent, but doing so as though he is someone who knows that it will not be understood, that it will be a secret that is difficult to communicate to others. It is the secret of a man who has managed to find ‘in the sheer repetition of certain decorative motifs . . . an almost magical atmosphere . . . which comes together as a solemn calmness’. ‘Did not sphinxes, chimaeras and other fantastic creatures find their raison d’être in a quintessence of nature, in a nature relived in the human imagination, and reassembled according to the logic of a dream . . .?’
In ‘An Interior’ we are told about the occasion when Emilio Cecchi came to visit, while Praz was still living in via Giulia, in Rome, in the spacious but gloomy apartment in Palazzo Ricci. ‘Not knowing whether to be amused or worried’, Cecchi asked Praz how he managed to live amidst such disturbing furniture. And Praz in turn had fun describing the house room by room, loading it with ghostly, dismal penumbras; only to then go through it once more in full sunlight and to exalt it in all its colourfulness, and to prove that ‘the soul of neoclassicism is noble, serene and—whatever its detractors say about it—profoundly cheerful’.
Nevertheless, the point I wanted to stress is a different one: Praz realized that Cecchi’s objection was not so much about his taste as about his possession of such furniture. ‘Expensive beauty was repugnant to Cecchi . . . as decoration for his own house he loved objects in which a minimum of intrinsic value was combined with a maximum of expressivity . . . Modest things, things that aided devotion and nothing else, yet devotion’—and he would emphasize this point—‘has to be totally spiritual, disinterested, uncontaminated by the crude love of possession.’
This is the controversial point which sees the ascetic and the collector face to face as in a work of ethics or a philosophical dialogue. On the one hand: ‘This business of possession was a heresy for him: out of Cecchi’s mouth I would hear Tagore’s condemnation against “foolish pride in furniture” being repeated’; on the other, ‘This asceticism, as I said, is totally alien to me. I would not hesitate to repeat to my friend my brazen confession that I am a materialist, so that for me the sensual presence of things has enormous importance.’
This dispute had flared up several times before in the preceding essays of this anthology, so much so that one could almost say it is its leitmotiv. And the role of supporter of asceticism had been taken on in turn by Vernon Lee (in the first essay in the volume), that apostle of aestheticism and of rejection of possessions, then by Rabindranath Tagore, in the essay ‘Dello stile Impero’. The Indian poet, in a lecture given in Florence,
singled out amongst the deplorable vices of the West ‘the foolish pride in furniture’. In fact it seems absurd that one should be proud of an elegant little table or of a chair in a certain style or of a pair of candelabra: what good does it do to decorate a house till it becomes beautiful, when the human spirit, according to philosophers and poets, can still proceed as supreme ruler amidst four poor walls. Diogenes’ barrel should be enough to provide protection for us human worms born, as Dante says, to form the angelic butterfly.
Then suddenly Praz rushes to marshal the opposing argument:
But immediately a doubt arises. Because such is the nature of these dear material things amidst which we live our lives that you can’t deny one of them without denying all of them at the same time. To have set my soul on a little table or chair that has caught my eye is a sin that is only slightly worse than setting my soul on a landscape . . .
And yet the contemplation of natural landscapes passes for being the most spiritual thing possible: so why then is the contemplation of furniture not the same, especially as ‘furniture obeys a law of economics which is the same as that which controls landscape’? These are passages from the 1930s, and it is no accident that an echo of Bauhaus theories is recognizable even in an author who is so far from them, someone who is totally concerned with the forms of the past. Furniture ‘has artificial but not arbitrary forms; it has a rule of necessity that is the same as that which governs the mountains and the plains; and its beauty is in p
roportion to the extent to which it conforms to that rule’.
With the calm tone of someone who wants to examine the question from every angle, but always with a hint of sarcasm, beneath which the tenacity of his passion is visible, Praz affirms what he calls his ‘materialism’, in other words the rejection of any spiritual asceticism (‘the truth is that I have a soft spot for fine furniture but no soft spot for Rabindranath Tagore’), but also the rejection of any reduction of the human to the bare nature of a biological or vitalistic or existential or psychological or merely economic entity.
The human is the trace that man leaves in things, it is the work, whether it is a famous masterpiece or the anonymous product of one particular epoch. It is the continuous dissemination of works and objects and signs that makes a civilization the habitat of our species, its second nature. If we deny this sphere of signs that surrounds us with its thick dust-cloud, man cannot survive. And again: every man is man-plus-things, he is a man inasmuch as he recognizes himself in a number of things, he recognizes the human that has been in things, the self that has taken shape in things.
Here the philosophy that I have tried to extrapolate slips from the universal to the particular, or rather to the private, because it is here that the logic of collecting clicks into place, collecting that restores unity and a sense of the whole that is homogeneous with the dispersal of things. And the mechanism of possession also clicks into place (or at least the logic of the desire for possession): this mechanism is always latent in the relationship between man and objects, a relationship which, however, does not exhaust itself in it because its aim is the identification, the recognizing of oneself in the object. And in order to achieve this aim, possession clearly helps because it allows prolonged observation, contemplation, a symbiosis, a living together with the object. (But Praz, who follows the traces of his beloved objects also in books, in the non-corporeal existence of written texts, who becomes a collector of quotations, allusions, references, Praz is the proof of how much this concrete passion of his feeds on immaterial things.)
The identification of man with objects works in both directions, because the object does not just play a passive role. The collector:
through constant practice manages to see an antique shop from the other side of the street, and to note the authentic pieces which call on him out loud amidst the junk and imitations. How satisfying it is to redeem a good object in all its purity from the contamination of low and degrading company! I have often heard it said that if those pieces of furniture could speak, one could hear them pouring out their gratitude into our ears. The bookcase would fling open its glass doors impatiently to receive the volumes that are worthy to be on its shelves, the armchair would hug you in its embrace, the desk would stretch itself out to offer fresh inspiration to your pen. I am convinced, leaving fantasy aside, that furniture feels better physically—I was just about to say spiritually—when it is placed in its proper environment.
This is a passage from the article ‘Vecchi collezionisti’ (Old Collectors), which rightly belongs in any essential anthology of Praz the writer, or rather Praz the narrator. I would just add two other excerpts, two apparitions who are similar in their pathos: Charles V, now old and infirm, in the convent in Estremadura, roaming around amidst the ticking of his collection of clocks, and Mazarin, deposed and in exile, wandering round his collection of paintings, at night, in his gallery, bidding them farewell. This amorous relationship with things has at its base a layer of melancholy: just to give the last word to those who support the ascetic life.
[1981]
Light in Our Eyes
Every now and again I start making a list of the latest books I have read and of those I intend to read (my life functions on the basis of lists: accounts of things I have not completed, plans that are never realized). I read a medieval Persian poem, Nezami’s The Seven Princesses, now translated into Italian, where each of the seven colours corresponds to a separate allegorical and moral field; then I read the Japanese writer Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, which talks of ‘infinite gradations of darkness’; of course I have read Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Colours (also recently translated): for him colours can be defined solely on the level of language; and that book spurred me on to reread Goethe’s Theory of Colours, recently reprinted.
However, before all these books I had read another one which I had immediately wanted to write about, but I have held back until now, as happens with books which have too many interesting things in them to discuss properly in an article. Suddenly all my other readings in this area came to be connected with this one book, which tells us for instance that Newton, the man who discovered the spectrum through refraction, established that there are seven basic colours, not because he really saw seven colours, but because seven was the key number for the harmony of the cosmos (the seven notes in a musical scale etc.) and moreover he trusted an assistant who had such a discerning eye that he managed to distinguish a separate colour between dark blue and violet: this was indigo, which has a beautiful name but actually is a colour which has never existed.
Well, I cannot hold back any longer; I need to talk to you about this book: Ruggero Pierantoni, L’occhio e l’idea: Fisiologia e storia della visione (The Eye and the Idea: Physiology and History of Vision), published by Boringhieri. It is a history of the theories through which we have tried to understand how the eye works, what sight really is, what the nature of light is, starting with the Greeks and the Arabs and then coming all the way down to the modern age: it covers physiology, the philosophical premises behind every theory, and the consequences that stem from these for the arts, especially painting. I see from the blurb that the author ‘has specialized in the biophysical aspects of communication in animals, working at the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen and the California Institute of Technology, and is currently a researcher at the Cybernetics Institute at Camogli, run by the Italian Centre for National Research’. A scientist with all the necessary qualifications, then, but one who cultivates an elegant style like that of a literary essayist, and has interests in the history of ideas and aesthetics as well as in the history of science and practical research.
There is a borderline territory between vision theory and problems in the figurative arts, an area where Gombrich’s most famous books are situated; Pierantoni’s book, especially in its final chapters, sails a course parallel to Gombrich’s and in dialogue with him. But I am going to concentrate on the first three chapters, which are entitled: ‘Myths of Vision’, ‘Space, Inside and Outside’, ‘Light, Inside and Outside’.
Pythagoras and Euclid believed that the eye emitted a set of rays which struck against objects; just like a blind man who advances stretching out his stick, so the seeing eye becomes aware of reality by touching it with its rays, which then return to the eye and inform it of what they have seen. Democritus thought that immaterial images detached themselves from things and then entered the pupil; but for Lucretius these were tiny fragments of matter, which he called atoms (and we call them photons). For Plato there were rays that departed from the eye and rays departing from the sun; they combined when they struck objects and were sent back to the eye. For Galen there was a visual spirit which originated in the brain, flowed into the eye, captured the light and images contained in the lens, and carried them back up to the brain.
Heirs of Greek science, the Arabs started from Galen, accepting the mediation of the visual spirit, but totally rejecting the idea of rays projected from the eyes towards the outside: by this stage vision came from outside, not from within.
The conviction that the eye emits light hit a crisis also in the Christian Middle Ages. It was in the lens (situated, despite
what all experience tells us, in the centre of the eye, just like the Earth at the centre of the cosmos) that the fusion between the World and the Self took place: that was what Dante believed. The diagrams of the anatomy of the eye lost all reference to biology, acquiring a geometry of concentric circles just like—in Pierantoni’s words—‘a Ptolemaic world of armillary spheres’.
By the time we get to the epoch of Leon Battista Alberti the rays departing from the eye have become geometric lines, Euclidean abstractions: the perspective pyramid. Then Leonardo dismantles this abstract construction: the ‘property of sight’ is not dot-shaped as it would be if it operated at the apex of the pyramid of lines, but is a property of the whole eye.
Leonardo’s reflections on optics were inspired at times by his ingenious ability to stick close to reality, ignoring schematic patterns, and at other times by his efforts to make experience match the traditions that he had learned about in books. He was the first to realize that the optic nerve could not be a hollow canal, as antiquity and the Arab and Christian Middle Ages had believed, but something multiple and complex, otherwise the images would end up being superimposed and getting confused with each other. Meanwhile, in his paintings, it is the physiological, not the conceptual, nature of vision that he tries to capture.