An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) by Oliver Sacks

Author:Oliver Sacks
Format: epub
Published: 1995-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

5. The Landscape of His Dreams

I first met Franco Magnani in the summer of 1988, when the Exploratorium in San Francisco held a symposium and an exhibit on memory. The exhibit included fifty paintings and drawings by him—all of Pontito, the little Tuscan hill town where he was born but had not seen for more than thirty years. Next to them, in astounding apposition, were photographs of Pontito taken by the Exploratorium’s photographer, Susan Schwartzenberg, from exactly the same viewpoints as Magnani’s, wherever possible. (This was not always possible, because Magnani sometimes visualized and painted Pontito from an imaginary aerial viewpoint fifty or five hundred feet above the ground; Schwartzenberg sometimes had to hoist her camera aloft on a pole and at one point thought of hiring a helicopter or a balloon.) Magnani was billed as “A Memory Artist”, and one had only to glance at the exhibit to see that he indeed possessed a prodigious memory—a memory that could seemingly reproduce with almost photographic accuracy every building, every street, every stone of Pontito, far away, close up, from any possible angle. It was as if Magnani held in his head an infinitely detailed three-dimensional model of his village, which he could turn around and examine, or explore mentally, and then reproduce on canvas with total fidelity.

My first thought when I saw the resemblance between the paintings and the photographs was that here was that rare phenomenon, an eidetic artist: an artist able to hold in memory, for hours or days (perhaps for years), an entire scene that has been glimpsed in a flash; the commander (or slave) of a prodigious native power of imagery and memory. But an eidetic artist would scarcely confine himself to a single theme or subject; on the contrary, he would exploit his memory, or display it, in a huge range of subjects, to show that nothing lay beyond its grasp—whereas Magnani seemingly wanted to concentrate it exclusively upon Pontito. This, then, was an exhibit not of “pure” memory but of memory harnessed to a single, overwhelming motive: the recollection of his childhood village. And, I now realized, it was not just an exercise in memory; it was, equally, an exercise in nostalgia—and not just an exercise but a compulsion, and an art.

A few days later, I spoke to Franco and arranged to meet him at his house. He lives in a small community a few miles outside San Francisco. Once I had found his street, I did not need to look for his house number, because his house stood out immediately from its neighbors. In the small front yard was a low stone wall, resembling those in his paintings of Pontito; his car, an aging sedan with vanity plates (“Pontito”), was parked in the street; the garage had been converted into a studio, and its door was wide open, revealing the artist himself, intently at work.

Franco was tall and slim, with enormous horn-rimmed glasses that magnified his eyes. He had thick brown hair, carefully

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