Philosophy of Art by Andina Tiziana; Iacobelli Natalia;

Author:Andina, Tiziana; Iacobelli, Natalia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

4 Expressive theories

4.1 Vehicles of expression

O animal grazioso e benigno / che visitando vai per l’aere perso / noi che tingemmo il mondo di sanguigno, / se fosse amico il re de l’universo, / noi pregheremmo lui de la tu pace, / poi c’hai pietà del nostro mal perverso. / Di quel che udire e che parlar vi piace, / noi udiremo e parleremo a voi, / mentre che ‘l vento, come fa, ci tace. / [. . .] Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende / prese costui della bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende. / Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, / mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. / Amor condusse noi ad una morte: Caina attende chi a vita ci spense. [. . .] Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse, / l’altro piangea; sì che di pietade io venni men così com’io morisse. / E caddi come corpo morto cade. (Dante, Inferno, libro v, v. 88–142)31

Francesca strives to translate those sentiments into words, for the benefit of Dante, while her companion remains silent at her side and transforms his feelings into weeping. She does so by choosing the most opportune words that will transmit her innermost feelings, and her words touch Dante’s heart so deeply that he is overpowered by them. Together with the poet, we readers experience the same sentiment of pity and affection for those two souls, damned for eternity as a result of such a human sin.

From the time that art and science separated, and distinguished their own fields and objectives, the expression of emotions is one of the traits that has typically been reserved for art, while science has been known to be better equipped to describe the world.32 One of the main conceptual bipartitions to have characterized modernity starting, at least, from Romanticism is that which separated external reality (the world of phenomena and nature) from internal reality (the world of love, feelings and, more generally, the domain of our minds). While science attends to the former, the latter seems to be reserved for art.

The expressive theory of art33 has as its premise the idea that art is a sort of privileged field – a laboratory, if we wish to continue the parallelism with the sciences – in which artists research, put to the test and deepen expressions, in an entirely original manner, by trying them out first on themselves and then by depositing them in an artwork, the ideal location for them to reach others and to be transmitted by a universal language. Dante, a profound connoisseur of love and pity, described in a very personal manner two emotions that preserve a universal typicality. What emerged from them are some of the most beautiful pages of Italian literature, and perhaps of all literature: the fifth canto of the Divine Comedy.

Within this context, then, works of art are to be considered true vehicles of human emotions. To generalize what we have

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