Mettere in questione l’ornamento attraverso un approccio morfologico al visibile

The paper investigates the question of the ornament starting from a parallelism between biological- architectural ornaments and decorative-artistic ones. The element of innovation and the emergency of the ornament allow to consider images as if they were living organisms and to highlight their becoming through new forms. Starting from a morphological point of view, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to the contemporary morphology, the ornament is strictly connected to the dynamics of forms and to a particular approach to the visible. The ornamental dynamics, according to the binomial form-function, open the dimension of the visible to new perspectives and foreshadow potentially infinite changes. The essay analyzes the consequences in the production of visible forms and in the attribution of meanings, but also the political function of images, with particular reference to the idea of an economy of visible forms.

Diderot, Reid e l’esperienza percettiva. Compensazioni sinestetiche, linguistiche ed estetiche

Sensible qualities, not presumed abstract or pure aesthetic properties, are the main source for the Diderot’s and Reid’s aesthetic theories. Both authors work on the perceptual activity in normal situations and in blind people’s cognitive experience.This essay is aimed at emphasizing both the connections between perceptual activity and aesthetic experience and the role of aesthetic devices in the cognitive life. In Diderot sensible qualities are connected to emotions; in Reid they are the natural signs of emotions and mental properties. This kind of relationship is the key to interpreting how cognitive activity is configured as an aesthetic experience because of the sensible qualities’ role.

Come Macbeth si lava le mani. La concezione diderotiana del movimento fra i primi scritti di estetica teatrale e i Salons

In the pages of Diderot, theatre is able to enclose a precise sense of movement. By distancing itself from conventions, poses, mannerisms, and affectations, the stage gesture can embody a fundamental dynamism and vitalism. Such a gesture should be read in the light of Diderot’s materialistic conception of nature. The centrality of body language and of pantomime is a leitmotiv of the art of the French eighteenth-century actor. However, in Diderot’s formulation of a dramaturgy of space and motion, as well as in the theorization of the aesthetic relationship between actor and spectator, we find a peculiar synthesis of the dichotomies illusion / fiction and sensitivity / detachment, which emerge with regard to the fictional status of theatre in the Enlightenment environment. In this sense, the analogy with the pictorial sphere turns out to be a fundamental resource. There is a sort of circular reasoning that induces in Diderot the desire of reforming theatre on the basis of painting: a painting which is however conceived in a radically dramatic way. Concepts such as absorption, theatricalization, decisive moment, unity of action, and fourth wall are applied to theatre as well as to painting. Therefore, they can be included within a more general interpretation of the sense of movement, according to the principles of fluidity, harmony, and transformation that regulate both nature and the work of art.

Il teatro e l’indagine sull’umano. L’attore moderno in scena... all’ombra di Diderot

Can we say that the 18th century philosophe Denis Diderot and his theses of theatrical aesthetics are still relevant and viable on the modern theatre stage? The article elaborates on our contemporaneity to try to give an answer to this question, creating questionnaires-interviews with four professional actors with questions related to the key themes of Diderot's theatrical and artistic aesthetics, encountering the incredible actuality of the Diderotian vision. The idea of the actor's profession is, in its true essence, an aesthetic idea, thus stimulating a philosophical reflection based on all the great concepts of this discipline, highlighted by the theoretical and practical thought of Diderot and now investigated by the theatrical practice of contemporary actors: body, gestures, genius, interpretation, communication, expression. The sentiment of the Diderotian comédien on stage overcomes the distinction between a "warm", involved and passionate acting and a "cold", rational and controlled one, and declines its sensibility in a supra-individual meaning, in a concrete presentation of a model with a universal value but possible for the body of the actor on stage, therefore shared by spectators who observe the events happening on stage. In the same way, the modern actor trains on stage, organically and honestly, towards "becoming" in every moment and towards being legible, credible, creative, bringing to the stage actions full of questions that explore the possibilities of being human. In other words, becoming - as one of the actors interviewed in the questionnaire states in a very Diderotian way - «body of all bodies. A body that knows and can tell something universal and that makes vibrate inside the viewer the internal velvet that moves the soul. Even looking at something unrecognizable directly or consciously, I will feel narrated as a human being».

«Io giungo all’essere e a me stesso». le prime opere di francesco Lo Savio, 1957-1959

The main aim of the article is to explain the beginning of the Roman painter Francesco Lo Savio’s career from 1957 to 1959. This part of his production has long been unknown because it was considered too distant from the mature works. During those years Lo Savio is still tied to his training in Informal Art. Moreover, the work of this period also show influences coming from American art, in particular, from the pictorial research of Mark Rothko. This essay illustrates why these works should be considered an important step, although germinal, in Lo Savio’s painting career. Just by analyzing the origins of his painting, it is possible to understand the next steps of his work. The works at the end of 1958 and early 1959 are, in fact, the start of his artistic path that will result in Space-Light paintings a few months later.

Ontologia del tra. Metamorfosi e incontro per un’antropologia fenomenologica

Metamorphosis seems problematic for our occidental point of view. Becoming in general is viewed as an error or exception by our classic standpoint. In fact, it is strongly against identity and law of non-contradiction: A is fundamentally something different from B and for A it is impossible to be at the same time B. We need to think A as what-becomes-B in order to make metamorphosis possible. Anyway, how can A become B? As a matter of fact, this very claim has been historically the most common critic opposed to becoming. Deleuze and Guattari in their monumental work had tried to offer an enormous contribution to a few related problems. Redefining the subject as an event described by movement and affect can exceed the metamorphosis’ aporia. This new principle of individuation provides a new look upon arisen questions primarily because affects and movements are constant coordinates that define how metamorphosis is experienced. The paper tries to show how the betweenness (Zwischenheit; Aida; Traità) in action in the encounter with people, human beings, things, animals, plants and minerals defines the logic field of metamorphosis. This is shown in dialogue with the ontological turn in anthropology that is particularly focused on this affective and lively dimension of encounter especially among Amazonian populations. Actually this is also what happens in our – occidental and classical but live – relation with things and objects, as long as we try to think a real conceptualisation of experience.

Schrodinger’s Narratives: Denis Diderot’s and Laurence Sterne’s Manipulations of Time and Space

This article proposes connections between literature and science through the relatively recent scientific concept of chaos. I examine Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist and His Master to show how these authors contradict the scientific thinkers of their time by creating narrative structures that disrupt the normal flow of time and bend the typically absolute space between reader and fictional story. Though the physical books of Jacques and Tristram Shandy have a final page, the two authors leave it to their readers to finish the stories for themselves. The narrators of both novels interact with their readers, creating a space that allows their audience to fill in the narrator’s and author's blanks. In doing this, these texts become simultaneously complete and incomplete. Thus, a narrative styled similarly to the thought experiment of Schrodinger's cat is created. In this sense these novels can be perceived as precursors to scientific thought of the twentieth and twenty-first century.

The space of ragoûts. Diderot, the dressing gown and Penelope in a beer hall

My article aims to interrogate the tension between space and time in Diderot’s philosophy starting from the tableau of the imagination and its specific functioning.By examining the category of ragoût – a culinary preparation that, during the 18th century, became an expression of an aesthetic of the relationship and harmony between the parts and the whole – I will show how it plays, between the Lettres sur les souds et muets, the Essais sur la peinture, the Salons and the Regrets sur ma vieille robe de chambre, its central role in defining an idea of dynamic spatiality, within which reality and representation coexist in relationships of mutual tension and correspondence. In fact, the ragoût reveals a conception of convenience which, by interweaving space and time, recalls the processes of human reason and interrogates them in pictorial and real space, making it habitable and comprehensible: if a detail always reveals a totality, activating a process of orientation in reality, when the relationship between the parts and the whole breaks down, the world itself falls apart. It is the law of convenience and ragoût that regulates the world: to change one’s dressing gown is to redefine one's life entirely. If this does not happen, if the relationship between the fragment and the whole is broken, as in La Grenée painting exhibited at the Salon 1767, Penelope appears more suited to a beer hall than to the majestic but sober palace of Ithaca.

Diderot: Space and Movement Introduction

Space and movement are not central concepts in discussing Diderot’s physical and philosophical thought, however they become quite interesting when the discussion shifts to aesthetics. Because of that, the question of space and movement in Diderot’s works is the main focus of this issue of Itinera. An analysis is carried out of the rhetorical and literary use of space and movement by Diderot to spatialise his materialist written expression and “put thinking in motion”. Special attention is devoted to the philosopher’s aesthetic considerations, of which space and movement are an important theoretical piece. Some of Diderot’s main works - among which the Lettre sur le aveugles, the Salons, Jacques le fataliste - are investigated under different perspectives in order to show the relevance of space and movement.

From space to movement: the walk as an intellectual dynamic in Diderot's La Promenade du sceptique

Diderot's Promenade du sceptique has sometimes been criticised for a somewhat systematic use of allegory, associated with a tripartite division of space summarising and tracing, between the thorns of devotion, the flowers of worldly life, and the chestnut trees of philosophy, the three paths of life available to men. The work's device is nevertheless much more complex and elaborate, and is affected by a diffuse scepticism from within. Open rather than closed, the space and the places of the walk in La Promenade du sceptique are misleadingly the support of an analogical understanding of the world. The writing of the walk becomes a metaphor for the intellectual dynamic that doubts and searches. Movement in its temporal dimension, as a concrete experience, challenges the conception of a geometric space, mocks deism as well as idealism, and opens the way to the experimental method and the materialist hypothesis.