La freccia e il cerchio
anno 8, numero 8, 2021
pp. 226-229

Rosanna Cioffi
Matter and form in the language of sculpture.
Some reflections and emblematic examples

   I have long made a privileged field of research of the modern European sculpture. Observing shapes, I interpret their meanings in the light of relationships and comparisons with many elements: other works of art and physical contexts of statues, groups and plastic decorations in which they were and are placed; relationships between sculptors and patrons; positions of the history of criticism; fortune or misfortune of the public depending on the historical periods in which the examined works were conditioned by taste, fashion, collective imagination of their time. Being mindful of the fact that, firstly, sculptures occupy a space within a physical context and involve not only the sense of sight but also the sense of touch, I consider them especially in their phenomenal aspect. Starting from materials, techniques and tools through which metaphorical alphabets, diphthongs, words and sentences of a language and non-verbal implicit meanings become manifested and the inherent presence of very complex and sophisticated symbols, I aim to understand the working methods of masters, considering this aspect to be a starting point necessary to comprehend the ideas and beliefs of the sculptors who chose these particular techniques for their creations.
   I have therefore accepted as a challenge the invitation to write for a philosophy, literature and languages edition dealing with a dyad not explicitly referable to the means and expressive ways of figurative art. Taking into consideration the experience and passion about my previous sculpture studies I wondered how I could respond to the theme chosen for this last stage of an ambitious project focused on “a complementarity of knowledge that rejects fences and hierarchies”. Certainly, it can be done with the help of the intercultural and interlinguistic approach that is appealing to me and in tune with my multidisciplinary method of researching the world of art history. However, it would be trivial to start with the simple assumption that any sculpture is a result of its author’s choice in relation to many materials and processes that he could apply to give shape to his inspiration. It is rather a question of identifying what could be the other element of the dyad in question: my proposal is to go back to the “inert bodies” – naturally, on the grounds of the classical tradition, the initial “enemies” of the sculptor – with which he must painstakingly start his artistic path. Referring to Rudolph Wittkower, the author of the key essays of the second half of the 20th century in which he laid the foundations for the developments of the European art history with brilliant and even great results mainly referring to architecture and sculpture, I shall discuss the “couple” of this monographic issue through the choices that two emblematic sculptors of the past, the sculptors of incommensurable fame and stature made in relation to the eternal conflict between material and form inherent to the language of sculpture par excellence. Having identified in brute raw material, whether it consists of harsh and hard marble or ductile and elusive terracotta, a potential enemy, a sculptor must decide what factual and mental path must be made in order to achieve the ultimate goal of his creation. As many literary sources describe the difficulties, sometimes even physical, that many sculptors faced during the phase of realization of their works, I will depart from this initial hostility that the “brute and enemy” matter (be it stone, wood, metal or rather wax, clay or plaster, the latter used mainly for the realization of the initial “ideas” of the creative process) presents to the sculptor who must choose appropriate tools and techniques to transform, regenerate and make it responsive to its own poetics. Hard, fraught and fallacious paths often do not allow repentance, especially with regard to marble, or, on the contrary, allow too many second thoughts as in case of the so-called “plastics”.
   «Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto, / Ch’un marmo solo in sé non circoscriva/ Col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva/ La man, che ubbidisce all’intelletto». With these verses Michelangelo begins a well-known sonnet in which he exposes his theory of sculpture. Stylistically inspired by Dante’s Rime petrose dedicated to Vittoria Colonna, the sonnet contains the key themes of the tormented Michelangelo’s existence led in the perennial contrast between love and death, sin and salvation. As Garin wrote, being influenced by Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino the artist began to consider the body to be an earthly prison, he glimpsed the idea hidden in the matter and felt the tension between the active and contemplative life, including the sense of the form that emerges from the formless. In this sonnet, Michelangelo appeals to the metaphor linked to his sculptural technique that suffers from the Neo-platonism of the Medici circle, according to which it was necessary to detach from the material – a fictitious reality – and rise to a higher spiritual level (fig. 1). As expressed in his verses, Michelangelo strives to chisel and cut the marble removing the superfluous in search of the form already inherent in the material and that can be reached by the idea that he himself has already in his head, not as much happens in the attainment of the loving correspondence with the noble friend whose hardness and otherness are not even remotely sculpted by his platonic feeling. Michelangelo is convinced that just as initially a stone, even though crude and rough, already contains an artist’s idea in itself, so coexist good and evil in the world and in particular in the human soul – ambivalent, discontented, longing for the absolute good. In this regard, a pioneering study of Erwin Panofsky is of great help and value:

While the Neoplatonic belief in the ‘presence of the spiritual in the material’ lent a philosophical background to his aesthetic and amorous enthusiasm for beauty, the opposite aspect of Neoplatonism, the interpretation of human life as an unreal, derivative and tormenting form of existence comparable to a life in Hades, was in harmony with that unfathomable dissatisfaction with himself and the universe which is the very signature of Michelangelo’s genius. […] The tenacious preference for the exhausting “scoltura per forza di levare”, and his preoccupation with the block-form gives a psychological meaning to – and at the same time receives a philosophical meaning from – the poems in which he reinstates Plotinus’ allegorical interpretation of the process by which the form of a statue is extricated from the recalcitrant stone.

   This conflict, referring again to the words of Panofsky, becomes «the very essence of his own personality», a precipitous form of his whole life that from the beginning seems to sculpt the very subject of his works. «His figures sym- bolize the fight waged by the soul to escape from the bondage of matter. But their plastic isolation denotes the impenetrability of their prison».
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