Imaginarea Weekly

The vanishing point of a painting is the spot to which our eye is drawn and that gives us the intended perspective; but who’s to say the eye wouldn’t prefer to continue roving? A bit like Vermeer’s  “Astronomer” which is now in the Louvre, but once belonged to the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking family. The Führer wanted to get his hands on it, so it was requisitioned in 1940 when the Germans took Paris, purportedly to rescue it from degenerate non-Aryan collectors. At the end of the war, the masterpiece was returned to France, but a small swastika is still stamped on the back. In more or less the same period, Italy was swarming with officials abusing their office: they would help themselves to works of art and escort them in their “Topolino” cars (the ancestors of the iconic FIAT 500) to provincial fortresses, where they were much safer from bombings; or they would keep a Piero della Francesca in their living room for a few days so as to make sure it stayed ‘at home’. This is what happened to the “Madonna of Senigallia”, the signature image of the “Liberated Art” exhibition (“Arte Liberata. 1937-47”) at the Scuderie del Quirinale (the former Papal Stables, now belonging to the Quirinal Presidential Palace in Rome). Visitors are invited to continue depackaging the poster we designed in the exhibition rooms, where they will find the entire epic of these “Monuments Men”. The exhibition is on until 10 April, but it seems spot-on to talk about it today to remind ourselves that memory is a matter of training: it begins every year on 28th January and continues until the 27th of the following year.  Piero’s Child is holding a flower and that is where we imagine our butterfly’s vanishing point to be. A stroke of the brush that deviates and goes back to the big picture, history, so that we can start not forgetting.

“The silence of the place was dreadful”, is how Perrault describes the Prince’s impression when he arrives at the castle, shortly before breaking the spell which had kept Beauty asleep for one hundred years. We could do with a fairy tale, even after one week; a week during which, with a great deal of effort, we found ourselves having to climb down from the comet and resist our homes’ cosiness that kept slyly beckoning us back to bed. Indeed it would take a ruse to trick “Blue Monday”, a name that will be plastered all over the web today to remind us that this particular Monday is a bit more depressing than usual. In actual fact, the concept had been devised some time back as a publicity stunt by a travel agency; the latter claimed to have calculated the date based on a peculiar mathematical equation that summed together the cold and dismal weather conditions with having to go back to work. The formula was later dismissed as pseudoscience. In the original version of “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood” the fairy tale unexpectedly takes on nightmarish tones after the wake-up kiss: the Prince and Princess have to deal with an ogress mother-in-law-queen, protect their children from her and see to the running of a castle. A far cry from the “and they lived happily ever after” ending. But then we too need to rise and shine: washing away those Monday blues under the shower may help us make a fresh start.

December is the month we measure the year as if counting with an abacus. But no worries, at least as far as words are concerned: the newly-coined ones that get most frequently mentioned usually don’t give us too much of headache. Although they come charging through the palisades, they generally consist in the name of one’s sweetheart or of a new baby. However there are other words marching on history too. Last December Pantone predicted that “Very Peri”, the ultimate shade of periwinkle, was going to be the colour of the year. On the other hand, that doesn’t mean it has been the most searched term during the past 12 months – nor has “war”, for that matter. Ever heard of  “Wordle”? That’s the one, according to Google’s Year in Search overview. Wordle is an online game in which you have to guess a five-letter English word; it has been so popular with users that it is included in the New York Times subscription package. It seems that hitting the right combination raises serotonin levels. Wordle leaves Google 2022 slightly more “war-less”. After all, if this year’s war tactics have at times seemed closer to gambling than anything else, we feel we can risk taking this to another level and, for good measure, even imagine deploying our cannon to conquer Kamchatka… in a game of Risk. It may be an exercise of pure make-believe, but at least we can call it a measured war scenario.

According to a time-honoured tradition, today is the day that we Italians put up our Christmas trees and proceed to staging our nativities. Let’s imagine, however, that we’re flying over another classic Christmas scene: New York, Fifth Avenue and the Metropolitan Museum. The Christmas tree lights are about to be switched on but, as we get closer, we can see that the Big Apple’s nativity scene isn’t exactly an indigenous one: all the figurines that the decorate the MET’s tree come from an 18th-century Neapolitan crèche. Perhaps what is so appealing about crèches is that they’re a bit like a Polaroid photo that pops out every year with a sparkle or retro filter-effect. The bustling characters represent our multiple temperaments, although of course nobody wants to identify with the mean innkeeper. There’s a specific script and the characters all gravitate round the central scene or the ox and the ass duo. It’s a timeless set: we look at the world’s most famous crèche, at the Certosa di San Martino in Naples, with the same gaze as the collector Cuciniello did two hundred years ago when he set up and donated the baroque nativity to the monastery. The only figurines that have a certain freedom of movement within the prescribed script are the sheep: it’s not unusual to see them perched on top of the temple or wandering around in random order. From Manhattan to the nativity shops on Via San Gregorio Armeno in Naples, one makes allowances for their easy-going pastoral demeanour. If not three bags full, our little ovine will be able to provide plenty of pencil shavings; definitely paler than the wool sheared off “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, but gently, and with a few “sharps”, they’ll fit nicely into the tune.

At the Fondazione Prada in Milan Rem Koolhaas and Salvatore Settis have mounted a Roman sarcophagus on a desk: visitors are invited to sit down on an office chair to observe the marble artefact. It’s almost an explicit invitation not to get distracted. It was the Romans themselves who had favoured the idea of a “comfortable” observation point: when they erected Trajan’s Column, they knew that by climbing up to the terrace at the top of the Basilica Ulpia they could survey the war between the Romans and Dacians just a stone’s throw away. As time went by, however, it was clear that the Basilica had been a venue of convenience, a commodity, linked to a specific moment of need; consequently, it has since disappeared, practically without a trace (while the Column itself survived because it was recycled as a bell tower for a church).  The word “commodity” comes from the French “commodité” and means something that is convenient or comfortably available. Commodities camouflage themselves into our lives, to the point that we often don’t even notice them – unless a ‘hiccup’ of some kind occurs. Can soup thrown at a painting be considered a hiccup? Yes, in a way, if we consider Vincent Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” part of our everyday landscape: they certainly seem to have comfortably wheedled their way onto our desktops, ties and mugs.  People will be able to visit Italian state museums for free next Sunday, 4 December  (a privilege granted every day to those who live in a city like London). Fingers crossed that no happenings involving tomato sauce occur, Italy could comfortably win this round with one single painting by Parmigianino (the nickname of the great painter means “the little one from the city of Parma”, in other words, “the little Parmesan”). Will our mouths water as we look at his masterpiece, like the great Italian actor Alberto Sordi’s did as his eyes greedily devoured the pasta on a plate in front of him in a famous film from the 1950s? Buon appetito!

Medieval books of hours always featured sections – flourishes – that didn’t contain the devotional prayers to be said at the canonical hours. In these miniature drawings, which in technical jargon were called “Marginalia”, the illuminators would let their imagination run free. One of the strangest and most popular drawings of this kind depicts a knight in combat with a snail; and what is even more peculiar is that it wasn’t the latter who was shown to be losing the duel. This has given rise to a myriad interpretations: could it have been a warning to beware of garden parasites or of social climbers? Or did it allude to the hopelessness of a war waged by the poor against the rich, or perhaps against the Lombards? According to scholars, the snail symbol is far too slimy to have just one possible and irrefutable meaning. In informatics a symbol resembling a snail (and which is called precisely that in Italian) represents connection, although it did in fact originate in ledgers where it meant that items were being sold/bought “each at the price of”. Come to think of it, it’s a symbol that is particularly apt for the month of November with its Black Friday and shopping frenzy. Do we feel a bit like Sir Lancelot jousting against a mad cyborg and will we, like our ancestors, lose both the tournament and our common sense? Our guess is that no one will be able to resist the enticing snail price and there’ll be the usual rush to grab a bargain, even if only a pair of socks in the same colour as granny’s wallpaper. You can bet your little cotton socks that’s exactly what’s going to happen…

This autumn, social networks are offering us a rather interesting journey around the world. For example there’s the Metaverse which recently celebrated its first birthday, yet is still about as densely populated as Antarctica. On the other hand, when it comes to traffic TikTok allows us to glide over a street in Beijing at rush hour, while the experience offered by Instagram resembles a souk in Marrakech: very noisy with a lot of buying and selling. Facebook, however, is a bit like a town in the Midwest becoming rapidly depopulated. What else can we look at? There’s Twitter of course which now, with Elon Musk in the cockpit, will have to go a-conquering other planets (i.e. users from totally new niches). Perhaps you may have noticed that Europe, somewhat lethargic during the years when social media platforms were making their breakthrough, doesn’t seem to be on the map for this tour. BeReal was created in 2020 by a French team but is actually emerging at present. It allows one to share photos on a real-time basis only. A notification comes in, followed by a two-minute countdown. That’s all we get to post something. A race against the clock, reminding us of Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout: we don’t know if BeReal will outlive the present thirst for novelty, nor if it will be impervious to cloning. But this app certainly makes one thing clear: contents need to be checked because we’re becoming more mistrusting than ever… Perhaps our eyes have become lazy and need to slow down on this constant flirting with images and, instead, start surveying them from a sensible distance. A bird’s eye view, so to speak. Off we go…

Some are doomed to roam the earth before they find a soul mate with an ideal form, and the following story is all about this. We know that the origins of “All Hallows’ Eve” are to be found in the Celtic pagan tradition: it was believed that on that particular night the souls of the dead were given special permission to re-enter the world of the living which was off-limits to them during the rest of the year. Later came the legend of Stingy Jack, the cunning drunkard who not only bargained with the Devil, but actually managed to trick him. Having made a mockery of both good and evil, neither Heaven nor Hell would ultimately grant Jack entry. That’s why, in order to ward off his restless soul, the Irish would scoop out turnips and carve scary faces out of the rind to expose the hollow interior. But there’s no getting blood (or lore) out of a turnip… Many centuries later, when the Irish immigrated to America they found there a local gourd, the pumpkin, which was chubbier and far more appealing in form than the unassuming European root vegetable. Jack’s ghost had finally found its soul mate: the coupling of Jack and the pumpkin was a mystical marriage because, as we all know, Jack-o’-lantern became the quintessential symbol of Halloween. It may take clever brains to find an ideal form but this tale about a hollow head teaches that one should never underestimate chance encounters either – especially when the luck of the Irish is involved. And the art of marketing will certainly take its hat (or paddy cap) off to such profound wisdom.

The dachshund is a classic example of wishful thinking. Although handbooks tell us that it has a playful temperament, it seems that this is an ‘optional extra’ reserved for close acquaintances only. Indeed the dachsie fancies itself as a guard dog, but its diminutive size isn’t on its side. Talking of sides, the dachshund’s defeat as an elite pet came after World War I. It should be noted that although a symbol of Germany, the breed had become immensely popular in England, having also been Queen Victoria’s favourite doggie. Nevertheless, after the fall of the First Reich, a popular cartoon depicted a dachshund dangling from an enormous English bulldog’s mouth with the caption “Got him!” : there could be few doubts as to who had won the Great War and who had lost, and thus the short-legged hound’s popularity hit rock-bottom. Then came a marketing operation to associate it with the culinary world: what eventually came to be known as the hotdog was originally called the “dachshund sausage” for obvious reasons, although this name soon fell by the wayside and was supplanted by the catchier version. Germany didn’t give in and in 1972 chose “Dackel Waldi” as the mascot of the Munich Olympics – the Games that have gone sadly down in history on account of the tragic events that took place there. Before we take our sock dog apart and put its components back in their drawer, let’s bark back, oops, hark back to the fact that this breed has always distinguished itself as an excellent hunting dog, particularly good at flushing out badgers (hence its name from “Dachs”, German for badger). Neither badgers nor bad news are in scarcity right now, quite the contrary, and while we wish no harm on the musteloid creature in its sett, we would love to badger the “badger hounds” to devote their proverbial doggedness to chasing out the rising mortgages, inflation and energy prices by which we are all currently beset. After all, quite a few burrow-dwelling animals have had their “socks blown off” by these Wiener dogs, as they are sometimes called, who are always hot… on the trail.

Today we’re going to tell you a story about the 8vo (octavo) which was invented thanks to a brilliant paper-folding operation. Our story takes place during the Renaissance: in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg has already printed his Bible while in Italy, in Venice to be precise, there’s a certain printer who is fascinated by the idea that the design is in the message. His name is Aldus Manutius (or, in Italian, Aldo Manuzio) and he’s luring to his ‘Aldine Press’ the top artists and engravers of the day – not to mention philosophers such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. Why? Because he’s in the process of creating a brand new style in reading: the predecessor of the modern paperback. In Germany the printing presses were rolling off books which, albeit modern, seemed tailored for bygone times: bulky tomes that were so hefty they couldn’t be carried around easily. Moreover, their thick Schwabacher typeface certainly did not make Gothic lettering easy on the eye. Manutius’ masterstroke, on the other hand, consisted in his fonts: it was he who inspired Garamond, a font which is so good at hiding discreetly behind the words themselves that continues to be extensively used to this day. Next came the font which, on account of Manutius’ nationality, is called Italic – one of the latter’s many advantages being that it allows more letters to fit onto a page. And then came the 8vo volume, obtained by printing 16 pages of text on a full sheet of paper and folding it 3 times to produce 8 leaves: here then was the ‘mobile’ book which one could finally hold in the palm of one’s hand and take and read anywhere, even in the new worlds that were being discovered. It was nothing short of a revolution, comparable to the one that occurred in recent years when the telephone became… mobile. At any rate, five hundred years on, printing still seems driven by this kind of inspired frugality. Something similar has happened at Bari University’s Faculty of Architecture where a violin has been designed in 3D; thus, thanks to 3D-printing, the string-instrument can be produced in one day at the cost of approximately 100 Euros (as opposed to the 6 months required by a luthier, and a cost well above the thousand mark). Naturally this fiddle can’t compete with the handcrafted instrument but constitutes, nevertheless, an invitation to step inside the world of music without too much fuss or expense. In the very same way that, in spite of their compactness, Manutius’ pocket-size books expanded readers’ horizons, making their world a bigger place. Is our approach to sound about to change? Who knows. However history does teach us the importance of always being, ahem, in tune with the times.