Rebellious thoughts

Author: (Italian) A. B. Oliviero / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Satire, melancholy, and self-deception in the crisis embodied by artists such as Pontormo, Beccafumi, Rosso Fiorentino, Bronzino, and Parmigianino, where artists who exhibit capricious and individualistic tendencies have a strange and whimsical demand for expressing the irrational forces of humanity, thus proposing an alternative anthropological hypothesis. The oscillation of Mannerist intellectuals in discovering the result of exquisite forms is not a product of superficial strangeness, because strangeness is a sign of a desire that emerges in a world submerged in the violence of political realism, marked by a significant and personal signature; the courtier of Castiglione is moved not only by worldly ambitions but also by a sense of melancholy, a consciousness of being unable to communicate with the world and others. Choosing elegant forms as a satire of form, this interpretation, the only one, weakens the possibility of connection with external reality. The "melancholy pretense" that moves the courtier is the result of a lucid awareness of the need for rules, which are presented as an exclusion of biology and also as the sole mediator with the world. … This result is moral ambiguity, the loss of morality and the ambiguity of moral norms, the confusion of reality and realism and its proximity to realism. Satire must necessarily be added at one extreme, and the low level of loss is brought by the high level of escape. Don Quixote, the wandering knight, experiences a dual situation: he applies the rules of chivalry from antiquity to the crudeness of the present. Chivalry faces reality with a nostalgic tension, a reality that is unacceptable and cannot be avoided. Don Quixote constantly oscillates between reality and fantasy, and the world is inevitably perceived as self-deception, with characters only saved from deception through satire. The knight is an unrooted existence, and when facing reality, he must prevent his own fragmentation, otherwise he cannot live in reality. The individual’s fantasy compensates for historical (inability), providing a magical reality because the truth far exceeds imagination. Cervantes’ work itself is structured in a state of separation: in the first part, Don Quixote can only survive by self-deception, believing his fantasy is the truth; while in the second part, he has accurately revealed their true faces to adapt to reality itself. This reversal of position acknowledges fragmentation: in a world where everything is deception and nothing is deception, imagination is the only way to live in one’s own life. Don Quixote’s transparency is entirely within his foolish space, because this is not a sign of a sudden return to reason, but rather a mirror supplement of foolishness itself. The territory of survival has a circular structure, and it is impossible to break it from within. Now, one is Don Quixote who has exposed society, and the other is a conspirator who adapts to his imagination. However, ironically, his imagination also includes the acceptance of real principles. An unharmed acceptance, in which truth and fantasy exist in a continuous relationship of penetration, where everything, whether superficial or intellectual, is in an unstable state of existence. Because the foundation of life lies in the coexistence of its opposites, the balance between affirmation and negation, cynicism and sentimentality, rational principles and pleasure principles. Mannerism does not possess the means to make precise choices between opposing values, and it is condemned to live in opposing emotions and imbalance. On the other hand, the Renaissance and Baroque can respectively choose rational values and imaginative values, precisely because these cultural movements are discovered within solid structures and linear historical processes. English metaphysical poetry also confirms John Donne’s assertion: "Proportion is dead," which is placed in the process of consciousness fragmentation, in emotional oscillation, in the world between sensation and reflection, where it never directly confronts analytical objects but always questions and deviates from them. "Everything has become fragmented, all unity has passed; / All sufficiency, and all relations / The sun cannot / Walk a circle perfectly, nor keep forward an inch / Of its orbit; but he no longer / Rises from where he rises today, but along a line full of tricks, / He steals to that point, / He walks crookedly, he steals to that point, / The two legs that support that point, / The reward and punishment are already broken. / Oh, undoubtedly, / That beautiful proportion is long dead." (Excerpt from "A Year’s Meditation") P15-16