Events

Meeting history, ‘Moses by Michelangelo’ Buonarroti (2)

Original painting by Gianni Russomando[3]. Ref.: 0_5524211_125008.jpg

“Psychoanalysis is used to get deep into secrets and hidden items, relying on elements not so appreciated or realized, that is what our observation did reject”[4].

Freud became fond of the essay on Moses by Michelangelo, up to coming back often and up to that ‘L’uomo Mosè e la religione monoteistica’ which was his last book, edited in 1939 : he began           asking to himself what ever in that huge statue was able to recall him so strongly.

In some evidence, it was already on which he was working, as the work by Michelangelo did offer to Freud just the packing of a thought that maybe could have been real life. There was something asking Freud, not so logical in Moses gesture but it didn’t seem a mistake by the author, as he was already conscious about his own authority in translating a hystoric special flash on which the Old Testament still didn’t pronounce.

“If in that Moses his half left of bear is under pressure of the forefinger of the right hand, that’s can be intended as the ‘residual’ contact between the right hand and the left part of bear, a contact that – previously to what Michelangelo has drawn – was much more tightened”[5].  There is still infact a residual fury in that huge man, promoter – also contested – of an exodus which revealed its safeguard : Moses has just learned his fellows are abandoning him, tired or maybe jealous of his speking directly to God.

“Moses express his fury… in gesture directed against his own body (the forefinger against his bear – note by redactor)… Then a change intervenes, tha hand… has been rushly shrinked and the tighten relaxed… Just a moment, the tables will have to round again on their support, fall to the ground… and crack.”[6]

Freud perfectly understood that only a previous twistling of Moses bust – of which Michelangelo was leaving its residual – made as logical that pending immobility of the statue : and he commissioned three drawings in a sequence that – just as in a relenting video – could well show the study and following result by Michelangelo.

The gesture, that attitude in Moses, his own behaviour in history couldn’t be neither realized  nor used without referring to what soon before preceeded by considering its own unusefulness and damage too.    

A ‘psychic good shift’ then, was the alternative to the traditional ‘sublimation’ by Moses and, in the freudian science, also safe choose to pathological destiny of an ignored affect : here it is the Freud intuition which opens to a quality shift on ‘pulsion’ science, confirmed by following criticisms too. 

“…The right hand comes back and abandons the bear… then the hand gets to the tables and supports them… The unusual mix (the bear, the hand and the two tables staying – note by redactor) derives from that unique passioned hand gesture and its well justified consequences…”[7]

“He won’t throw away the tables to crack against the stones, just beacause due to them he domined his own fury, in order to save them he checked his passion… He remembered his mission and renounced to satisfy his affect (i.e. his fury - note by drawer)... In this position he remained when Michelangelo draw and sculptured him as the keeper of mausoleum .”[8]

“At last Moses does doubt about his presumed illimitate authonomy : he recognize his mistake – and consequences he already had to pay, up to acknowledge the reality of a presence with whom maybe he can work together”.[9]

                                 Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio June 3, 2021

[1] “Mosè Gesù Freud”, by Giacomo B.Contri, Collana ‘Pensiero di natura’ SIC Edizioni 2007, Nota 3 p.16 : “…Without any doubt he (Freud, ndr) didn’t accept the said ‘Seventies’ translation about a well known passage in ‘Exodus’ 3, 14 when Hebraic language has been forced till Saint says to Moses : ‘I am the one he is, or : who is being or the being rather than ‘I am who I am!’, so near to earth and human”.

[2] “Il Mosè di Michelangelo”, by Sigmund Freud (1913-1914) Biblioteca Bollati Boringhieri (1976, 2020) : it was edited anonymous in its first edition (1914) on the magazine ‘Imago’, directed by Freud himself.  ‘Moses’ in San Pietro in Vincoli church (Rome) is by Michelangelo : the project was commissioned for a future monument for the death of Julius II, and was begun in 1513 as the pope dead, then finished by Michelangelo only around 1542.

[3]Gianni Russomando, biography : “I’m born in Vercelli (1956). Graduated at ‘Istituto di Belle Arti di Vercelli’, I can describe me as a simple ‘amanuense’ (medieval hand-painter). Far from expositions and competitions, it’s not a long time I’m on social media with a very personal aim : to give just a flash of joyful to anyone watching at my simple works.”

[4] “Il Mosè di Michelangelo”, by Sigmund Freud (1913-1914) Biblioteca Bollati Boringhieri (1976, 2020), p.37

[5] “Il Mosè di Michelangelo”, by Sigmund Freud (1913-1914) Biblioteca Bollati Boringhieri (1976, 2020), p.40

[6] “Il Mosè di Michelangelo”, by Sigmund Freud (1913-1914) Biblioteca Bollati Boringhieri (1976, 2020, p.41-45

[7]  “Il Mosè di Michelangelo”, by Sigmund Freud (1913-1914) Biblioteca Bollati Boringhieri (1976, 2020, p.46

[8]  “Il Mosè di Michelangelo”, by Sigmund Freud (1913-1914) Biblioteca Bollati Boringhieri (1976, 2020, p.48-49

[9]  It is a part of my intervention in classroom, in the Seminary ‘Letture freudiane col pensiero di natura’, Urbino 2017 – ‘Questioni controverse’/ work session ‘Meta’ 11 marzo 2017, ‘Il Mosè di Michelangelo’ (S.Freud 1914)

The sound waves spread mechanically, allowing themselves to be modified by the surfaces they encounter. But the human listening doesn’t work the same way.

The engineer Yasuhisa Toyota maybe is not commonly known, even if the industry experts have been fighting for him it’s a number of years : as a matter of fact, his professional CV places him among the rare excellences in the construction of buildings at high acoustic quality[1]. Owner of ‘Nagata Acoustic’, the engineer Yasuhisa Toyota has been called to take care the restructuring of what was the ‘Meeting Hall’ at the Palazzo dell’Arte in Cremona, made between 1941 and 1942 by the rationalist architect Carlo Cocchia. 

Today the Auditorium[2] - dedicated to the entrepreneur Giovanni Arvedi[3] and opened to public in 2013 – is provided with an excellent sound diffusion and with a minimum time of reverberation of sound, so proving its excellence.

It is remarkable that, during the analysis for the preparation of the project, engineer Yasuhisa had to point out the very bad acoustics in the room – even conceived and wanted to favour the communication between the then Fascist government and the top executive officials, called to operate directly on the territory – while he was, as a simple technician, in the uncomfortable but necessary position of revealing a secret which perhaps had to remain so, between the then designer and the client town.

Cremona infact – and little we know about – preferred as far as possible to distance the regime guidelines from the citizens, also resorting to unassailable sorties, such as histories know : the ‘Meeting Hall’, even if prepared for listening was instead quite insufficient in favouring the sound persuasion of a multitude.

And this is where the choice of architect Carlo Cocchia, as a designer in charge of the execution, appears to be suddenly critical, or maybe strategic at the right moment, as the esteemed Naples professor – who in II World War would have been imprisoned and then would have co-built the Central Station and the St. Paul Stadium in Naples, and also some well done popular Districts in the city, the Power Plant on Volturno river and other civil works in Rome and elsewhere – had however a deepest experience in the field of the civil buildings : but “the subversive shot didn’t belong to him, or the avant-garde experimentation… He worked on definite historic and historiography documents, he disregarded what was not verifiable, he avoided the rhetoric… Right in that sense he has been a builder… The districts of cheap and popular construction are made with unexpected diligence compared to the time pointing out a recovery of the private construction business… ”[4]

The inspections made by ‘Nagata Acoustic’ in the ‘Meeting Hall’ of the ‘Palazzo dell’Arte’ – which can be still admired for its original façade interwoven with bricks only – proved the insufficience of the whole space, compared to the goal of comfortable hearing : we like to imagine engineer Toyota while he was thinking and evaluating the calculations, and then suddenly cheering at the bold intuition.

The foundations too much buried were the real responsible for the narrow space of the hall!!

Yes, but due to which illogical reason – the technician perhaps wondered – they have been built that way ?

If, since the beginning they would have been shorter in the stage are, that would have allowed a much better quality of the whole acoustics, without increasing the construction risks. 

The final result confirmed the predictions made by engineer Toyota and today the Auditorium designed by the rationalist Carlo Cocchia in 1942 is also an excellent live recording studio for live concerts, with requests and reservations from all over the world.

You can almost think that those two men have been making an appointment… But, over the centuries can it ever be possible ?

Sometimes what doesn’t come to mind !

                               Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - May 16, 2021

[1] Considered by now one of greatest specialist in the world, Yasuhira Toyota has been project leader of more than 50 concert halls in different Countries.

[2] The construction of the Auditorium is the result of a cooperation of the project team of ‘Arkpabi’ – Architects Giorgio Palù e Michele Bianchi, Polytechnic of  Milan.

[3][3] Giovanni Arvedi of Cremona, began his entrepreneurship in 1963 : in 1973 the ‘Acciaieria Tubificio Arvedi’ was established in Cremona. In 1983 he worked, at the invitation of the Minister of Industry, to draw up the ‘Piano nazionale dell’industria dei tubi saldati e senza saldatura’. In 1989 he was named president of the Industry Association of Cremona.

[4] ‘Museo virtuale’, ‘Carlo Cocchia’ in ‘Istituto di Studi Superiori di Progettazione’/ Napoli  www.issp.it

‘Aurora’ (1948) by Salvador Dalì.

“…My ruthless and patient painting[2]”, Salvador Dalì has been admitting. Original painting by Stefano Frassetto[3]

I found out Salvador Dalì only recently and thanks to Facebook, where often good authors are hosted : here I’ll tell about his ‘Aurora’ (1948) which by me can well assert Dalì, otherwise criticized as often happens to someone able to be noted with good reason.

“…I believe that the time is near when, through a paranoic and working process of thinking, it will be possible (concurrently with the automatism and other passive conditions) to systematize the confusion and contribute to a total discredit of the world of reality[4]”.

The biggest sun of a radiant aurora appears behind eggshell-clouds breaking in the sky, while diligent workers climb on its surface and, slinged not to slip, do their best to scratch it. The two halves of the shell are also the two halves of a fragrant small white bread, and the sun a fresh egg yolk, and the profile too of a flourishing daisy : in front of such a wealth the sailor who was taking off with his boat, is running away terrified in the opposite direction.

“Today I declare that the new sexual appeal of women will depend on the possible use of their spectrum attitudes and resources, that is to say on the possibile their dissociation, bright carnal de-composition. The rainbow-coloured spectrum sets itself against the ghost (still performed by that homesick chemist of a country town so much resembling, desperately, to the other prosaic and diabetic ghost named Greta Garbo). The spectrum woman will be the dismantlable woman[5]”.

All the painting elements really make up an ironic performance, light and serious at the same time : Salvador Dalì looks incredulous at the terror driving any scientific discoveries and giving rise to cruelty, since the revolutionary atomic and quantum energy were soonest used for unimaginable devastations[6].

“I’ll not insist on what today it seems to me absolutely unacceptable, not only a poem, but also any literary production not responding to the anti artistic notation, loyal and objective of the world of facts, whose occult sense we’re still asking and looking for the revelation… Neither is the moment to fervently praise the photographic evidence, but to wander without a method on paths of unintentional, and notice the simple fact that the reason is becoming more and more the essential element in the knowledge field …[7]”

A thought definitely anti-artistic, anti-lyric anti-decorative is present indeed in the epiphany Dalì called ‘Aurora’, as any epiphany is not generalized until is individually recognized, coming out from darkness of a crowded night with the same delirious dreams which at morning we are conscientiously building, looking for hostility all around us. The good genius of Dalì was meeting the diabolic Picasso[8] and let himself be laughed at, due to his own affective fidelity and his disarming frankness.

Here however he dares to point out that our conscience ‘knows’ how to take back to a faultless justification perversion and paranoia by which so often we face the new and the unpredictable, until we do our famous existential doubt, invalidating but absolutely ‘natural’ for humans : an obsession indeed, able to crumble our experience, as far as the delirium itself.

“It was just a dream…!”, is the common saying of our clichè.

                                              Marina Bilotta Membretti, Cernusco sul Naviglio – January 7, 2021

[1] “One day I’ll have to write long, maybe a book, on a character named Eugenio Sanchez, to whom I was linked as a friend during the nine months of my military service. To that extraordinary man, of whom unfortunately I’ve lost any trace,  I owe some of the richest hours in my life and, moreover,  the reading of a few most interesting texts. The man I’telling about was a carter by trade and absolutely uncultured; he could only read and write : however I could understand myself with him, better than with anyone else and right about on most unapproachable items, not only to our language but also to our own conscience”. Cited by :  “Perverso e paranoico. Scritti 1927-1933”, Salvador Dalì 1971 ÉÉditions Denoël – original title ‘Oui’ / Ed. ‘il Saggiatore’ Milano 2017, p.96-97

[2] “Perverso e paranoico. Scritti 1927-1933”, Salvador Dalì 1971 ÉÉditions Denoël – original title ‘Oui’ / Ed. ‘il Saggiatore’ Milano 2017, p.234.

[3][3] Stefano Frassetto is born in Turin in 1968. After his degree in Architecture at ‘Politecnico’ he begun as graphic novelist for local magazines. In the ‘90s he edited in France too, on ‘Le Réverbère’ and on ‘Libération’ : then he created ‘Ippo’ for ‘Il Giornalino’ and then the stripe ‘35MQ’ for the swiss magazine ‘20 Minuti’. In 2000 he came into ‘La Stampa’ as portraitist for cultural page and the insert ‘Tuttolibri’, then for the weekly ‘Origami’. Today he works also for the swiss magazine ‘Le Temps’..

[4] “Perverso e paranoico. Scritti 1927-1933”, Salvador Dalì 1971 ÉÉditions Denoël – original title : ‘Oui’ / Ed. ‘il Saggiatore’ Milano 2017, p.132.

[5] “Perverso e paranoico. Scritti 1927-1933”, Salvador Dalì 1971 Éditions Denoël – original title : ‘Oui’ / Ed. ‘il Saggiatore’ Milano 2017, p.201

[6] Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic explosions of August 6 and 9, 1945.

[7] “Perverso e paranoico. Scritti 1927-1933”, Salvador Dalì 1971 Éditions Denoël – original title : ‘Oui’ / Ed. ‘il Saggiatore’ Milano 2017, p.95.

[8] “…I twill be then natural that, when his fierce eyebrows (Dalì refers to Picasso, editor’s note) once more shoot the poisoned arrows of the objective world of his outward Saint Sebastian, he is the last one to be informed about the physical pain he does cause”, cited.by : “Perverso e paranoico. Scritti 1927-1933”, Salvador Dalì 1971 Éditions Denoël - titolo originale ‘Oui’ / Ed. ‘il Saggiatore’ Milano 2017, p.232. ‘Saint Sebastian’ is also the title of an essay Salvador Dalì published on the magazine ‘L’Amis de les Arts’ (1927).

The suit titled ‘Portable Organ : to catch the sound’ – the designer Sara Pernatsch produced it in collaboration with Margherita De Candia for “Il Teatro della Moda”, School for haute couture training in Milan, inspired by Leonardo’s homonymous sketch and remained unfinished; the pencil drawing is present in the ‘Madrid II Codex’ (1491-1505), at the ‘Spain National Library’. The thirty suits of the exhibition “Leonard prisoner of flight” www.leonardoprigionierodelvolo.com are already offered for sail ‘by public auction’ : the proceeds will be donated to V.I.D.A.S. for the first children hospice in Lombardia (Italy).

Reproducing sounds in Nature, as they are catched by our sense of hearing, inspired the two young women authors, Sara Pernatsch e Margherita De Candia who interpreted and translated Leonardo’ sketch ‘Portable Organ’ by which Leonardo Da Vinci began to project a bellows vertical keyboard, ancestress about 300 years earlier of the accordion which uses the pressure of the fingers of both hands to modulate the sound just entered by the player in exhalation. The sketch by Leonardo has been happily taken up by the luthier Mario Buonoconto[1] who made with it a fully functional accordion.

“…It was not so obvious to find a source of inspiration that didn’t make me fall into the ‘banality’ or in a ‘bad copy’ of the original. So, I wondered, what would help make me feel so close to Leonardo Da Vinci to be able to understand his own works to the point of creating one myself ? I had to find something in common with a man lived 500 years ago, which would allow me to give free rein to my imagination, but remaining at the same time connected to his own studio. Really, I haven’t found anything that unites us, if not just the love and passion for our respective jobs. That’s exactly where I started from to develop my project. We can’t be more sure that everything Leonardo worked on, was the fruit of great love and passion…

I liked reproducing the immensity of sensations which a melody can give, right through the grandeur that characterizes this dress. The inspiration almost came by itself within the walls of my apartment, listening what is, at the end, the real source of inspiration for the whole projects : music…”[2]

                                               Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 29, 2020

[1] Mario Buonoconto, workshop ‘Antichistrumenti’, at Majano – Udine (Italy).

[2] Cited from the description of ‘Portable Organ’ suit, shown at the exhibition “Leonardo prisoner of flight” www.leonardoprigionierodelvolo.com at ‘Palazzo Morando’ in Milan, until last January 5.