Non-finito

This paper deals with Ovid's Tristia 1.7 where the central theme is the fate of his Metamorphoses. By playing with the two sphragis-like pieces at the beginning of the poem, the poet shows the end of his own role and highlights that of the work's reception and of the reader's response. The poem closes with a third sphragis-like piece where the reader is authorised to re-organise the beginning of the Metamorphoses with three elegiac couplets, thus interfering with the epic form of the work. In these couplets the poem is declared parentless and it is the reader who undertakes to disseminate it among the people (in urbe). Tristia 1.7 then comes to complement the closural piece of the Metamorphoses: the work will survive because it is rude, that is, without lima, a non-finito work, which every reader, according to his interpretative possibilities, will always strive to give its final form. Eventually the poem proves to be a study on the topic of the reader's response.

The Rondanini Pietà (1552-1564) engages the viewer in an embodied and temporal process of perceiving the becomings of sculpted form—rough and smooth surfaces, indentations, fissures andcontours—enfolded in the material and physical qualities of the marble block and its flesh-like surface. Emphasizing the process of creating the work, a multitude of chisel marks animate sculpted matter and prolong the eventual pausing of the viewer’s eyes. The materiality of the stone urges the viewer to move around to perceive the sculpture as it becomes transfigured anew through the continuous morphing of the facial and bodily features of its two figures: Christ and the Virgin. Deterring the comprehensibility of the subject matter, the enfolding of matter and form, conceptualized as the 'infinito', calls attention to the very rhetorical and ontological nature of the work as sculpture.

Kept in private collections for several centuries, the Rondanini Pietà is an uncommissioned sculpture considered to be the last work by Michelangelo Buonarroti. To interpret this Pietà, scholars have utilized established biographical, iconographic, and chronological approaches to the artist’s oeuvre. In 1934, Charles de Tolnay published the first modern study of the work, interpreting it as a testament of the artist’s religiosity—an interpretation that dominates the scholarship. Focusing primarily on a discussion of the Rondanini Pietà, this thesis introduces a concept of the infinito and with it a theoretical framework to expose the overdetermined nature of this scholarship. Judging the work to be either finished or unfinished (finito or non-finito) scholars rehearse the Cartesian dichotomy of res extensa and res cogitans, segregating matter from form and denying sculpture its ontological quality.

In order to understand what comes prior to the processes of description, interpretation and contextualization, what is at stake is to rethink how we approach sculpture as a medium that has specific physical and material characteristics that determine its rhetorical potential. Making the viewer part of how sculpture works to make temporally visible the becomings of form, the concept of the 'infinito' challenges us to reflect upon the methodologies used in the study of sculpture produced in the period.

CONTENTS
Introduction: The Rondanini Pietà and the Infinito
Limits of Interpretation: Historiography and Iconography of the Rondanini Pietà
Leon Battista Alberti: The Rhetoric and Visibility of Sculpture
Locating Sculpted Matter in Sixteenth-Century Art Theory
The Concepts of Matter and Form: A Brief Look at Modern Philosophy
The Infinito: Perceiving the Temporal Enfolding of Matter and Form

unfinished (1400-1800)

What is a work unfinished? This panel seeks papers that critically probe this inquiry through early modern exempla of art, architecture, writing on art, and objects of visual culture considered unfinished. Small and multivalent case studies are equally invited, which investigate single objects, art projects, or entire oeuvres labelled not finished, here broadly conceived. Papers can also consider: is unfinished a formal, theoretical, symbolic, or contextual state of being? What or who decides on the criteria of the unfinished? Can an object go from being unfinished to finished? Does unfinishedness accrue value over time? And, finally, can any artistic product of the epoch be considered finished in the longue-durée of history? Proposals of up to 300 words should be sent using the UAAC " Call for Papers" form to Ivana Vranic by July 15.

[Forthcoming article/Article à paraître]

Le critiche formulate alla la pittura di Tintoretto nel corso del Cinquecento, condannano la rapidità di esecuzione che si manifesta fin dalle prime opere. Con i loro articoli fondamentali, Paul Hills et Tom Nichols hanno mostrato come la prestezza di Tintoretto vada compresa all'interno di un ambiente letterario e culturale ben preciso, e debba essere comparata alle produzioni di alcuni poligrafi come Anton Francesco Doni, Andrea Calmo, Alessandro Caravia, con i quali l'artista si lega di amicizia.

Analizzando con precisione il vocabolario usato per biasimare la presunta negligenza dell'artista, il mio intervento intende indagare la temporalità delle pitture di Tintoretto, guardando sia al momento della loro creazione, sia alla durata dell'azione dipinta. Nei giudizi formulati dall'Aretino, da Vasari, da Francesco Sansovino o da Ludovico Dolce, i termini "macchia", "confusione", "garbuglio", "a caso", "prontezza", "rapidità", si ripetono per sottolineare l'aspetto "non finito" delle opere dell'artista, il quale sembra considerare l'arte della pittura come una "baia", una "burla". Il carattere beffardo della pittura di Tintoretto, non è stato sufficientemente studiato, ma va di pari passo con il suo ethos, che ci è stato tramandato da diverse fonti letterarie più tardive e che bisogna comprendere alla luce di una tradizione esistente fin da Plutarco.

Le linee "scarabocchiate", l'energia delle gesticolazioni lasciate visibili sulle tele, inducono a pensare che Tintoretto abbia voluto schierarsi con il suo stile all'interno di un dibattito sulla nimia diligentia (l'eccessiva diligenza) sviluppatosi a Venezia alla fine degli anni 1540 (dibattito analizzato, per esempio, da Robert J. CLEMENTS, « Michelangelo on Effort and Rapidity in Art » (JWCI, 1954)). Al "non-finito" formale delle sue opere corrisponde anche un "non-finito" narrativo: una voluta indeterminatezza delle storie e dei soggetti dipinti che stimola e lascia spazio all'immaginazione dello spettatore. Non si tratta però della brevitas poetica di Giorgione. Nei dipinti di Tintoretto assistiamo ad una attenzione portata sul movimento, la vita e l'azione. Come lo mostrerà l'analisi del quadro raffigurante Marte, Venere e Vulcano (conservato all'Alte Pinakothek di Monaco), per suggerire l'intreccio e rappresentare la durata dell'azione, Tintoretto utilizza le potenzialità temporali offerte dal suo medium sfruttando anche le condizioni di visibilità e la collocazione dell'opera. In questo modo, il suo dipinto risponde alle capacità cognitive di chi guarda in un modo analogo a una rappresentazione teatrale.

I cannot recall when the last time was that my imagination offered me something constructive, nor the last it assisted me in any way. I am talking about imagination, not creativity; creativity is something else — something providing us with intermittent glimpses of the outside world in its grand and transcendental wholeness. Science is not able to recount it, the bible cannot either. Art glimpses at it sometimes. Imagination, on the other hand, is the source of all the anxieties mankind can envision. It originates inside us but draws inspiration from the outside world in all its smallness and mundanity. It is when life has made its cycle once again, that I had the sudden and eventual impression there is something that is not being said about the world. This is when I have started questioning the function of imagination in my life. Think about someone who has been blind for life, getting what they call a sight restoration [we see things in such a rooted ocularcentric perspective we are not able to understand how one could live their life without, so we call it restoration]. Think about how this someone has been acquainted for all this time to being in the delicate world of dim lights and discreet, insightful touches. Someone who may have developed a wide dictionary of perceptions us sighted are not in the position to acknowledge, as our language of colours does not allow even the smallest description of it [as we do not have " colours " to portray sounds nor to depict smells; and with this I am to mean the closest possible category to colour that was never developed for the blind's world]. Think about how this person's imagination led them to wonder what a sublime thing the world is, according to their touch and feel. We told them it is even better once they would have got to see it with their own eyes. The disappointment they might feel when this happens to become true is limitless. Imagination worked against them, just like it works against someone who has being seeing for all their lives, but has being perception-blind for most of it, us sighted for instance. Because imagination is the fruit of our own thinking, it stays in the box, and never escapes it. It can reach such wide and profound taste of anxiety within its fields of knowledge — the possible — but it cannot provide us with insights into something lying outside our perceptive zone, something we have never experienced. Creativity, instead, is an apparatus that happens to be there every time we would think outside this box. It just happens. Creation comes from somewhere inside the world but outside our sheer understanding of it, imagination from what we think we understand of it. Creativity is uniting and intact, imagination is fragmented and divorcing.