Thanks to Leonetti’s daughter, Bitta Leonetti, who kindly made the writer’s correspondence with Pomodoro available, a collection of twelve notable letters dating between 1966 and 1970 has come to light. Half of these letters were penned by Pomodoro, and half by Leonetti, showcasing their distinct personal styles, preferences, and approaches to letter-writing. While the sculptor resorted to his own handwriting, Leonetti’s missives are typewritten, with a few autograph annotations at the bottom of the page or in the left margin (and even vertically in one case). Additionally, the correspondence is not continuous but is concentrated in two periods: the years 1966-67 and 1970.

Furthermore, these letters diverge in terms of content. Pomodoro’s letters, some of which were sent from Stanford, documented social revolutions and general political unrest, along with their effects on American youth. Indeed, Pomodoro bore witness to a pivotal moment of change that would soon reach Italy. A poignant letter from October 1966, accompanied by newspaper clippings of a protest in Berkeley, stands as evidence of this (see here). In contrast, Leonetti’s letters documented his role as an organiser and instigator of cultural events and debates. They attest to his meticulous editorial work and his constant effort in developing a critical and informed perspective on pressing issues.

Among the many topics discussed in these letters, one particularly deserving of attention is the news of the inaugural issue of the cultural and political magazine “Che fare,” of which both Pomodoro and Leonetti served as editors. This magazine, first published in May 1967, anticipated several cultural issues that would soon become crucial to the 1968 Movement. This attention to such issues, I dare say, stemmed from Pomodoro’s experiences in California.

As evident in a letter dated January 10, 1967 (see p. 1 of the pdf below), Leonetti encouraged Pomodoro to establish contact with the nonviolent movement, seek reliable and lasting correspondents, and solicit collaboration from members of the Black Power movement for the “Che fare.” Furthermore, Leonetti’s letters during this preparatory phase reveal his desire for the Italian Neo-avant-garde, then engaged with the literary magazine “Quindici,” to be more actively involved with international movements.

Furthermore, this letter is a significant document shedding light on a conflict between different factions within the Italian literary world. Shortly after the publication of the initial issues, the editorial boards of “Che fare” and “Quindici” clashed. The latter published an article by Umberto Eco, criticising the occupations at the Milan Triennale and the Venice Biennale. In response, within the same letter, Leonetti informed Pomodoro about his meeting with Balestrini, Sanguineti, Filippini, the most radical and politically committed representatives of Gruppo 63. Interestingly, Leonetti also invited Mario Spinella, an ‘organic intellectual’ aligned with the cultural policy of the Communist Party.

These covert strategies of calculated diplomacy, coupled with the extensive network of relationships gradually cultivated by Leonetti, which reveal his desire to unite intellectuals of varying ideological and cultural backgrounds, provide a glimpse into what another of Leonetti’s editorial projects could have been, if given the opportunity. I am referring to “Gulliver”, the international magazine conceived by Leonetti and Vittorini, and slated to be published by Einaudi, which sadly never saw the light of day.

Indeed, it was Vittorini who fuelled Leonetti’s creative enthusiasm and shaped the editorial line of “Che fare” as outlined in another letter dated March 8, 1967 (see pp. 2-3 of the pdf below). The objective was to include in each issue several meticulously written contributions aimed to capture all aspects of reality and kept very short so as to ensure readability. These pieces were then linked together – sometimes even overwritten – through notes, comments, and reflections, resulting in an encyclopaedic zibaldone capable of capturing a moment in the ever-evolving advancement of human knowledge before it vanished into the void.

[translated from Italian by Eleonora Lima]

(Images courtesy of Bitta Leonetti)

L'articolo Sketches of a Dialogue: The Correspondence Between Arnaldo Pomodoro and Francesco Leonetti sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Two of the most representative authors of European and Anglo-American modernism, Eugenio Montale and Wallace Stevens, can shed new light on the complex intermedial relationship between cinema and poetry. The analysis of their poems as well as the reading of their notes on cinema reveal the multifaceted relationship of modernist poetry (a supposedly conservative and elitist movement) with mass culture. Indeed, this relationships much more ambivalent than is usually thought.

In her 1926 essay, The Cinema, Virginia Woolf claims that ‘some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema’ (381). Similarly, Montale and Stevens seem to understand that new media can shape new imaginaries and therefore modify the ones built with already existent techniques. Although the relationship between Modernist poetry and cinema has become a central topic in the last few decades of literary debate, we still seem unable to grasp something: that is, the emergence of a new medium does not always result in a polarised reception of the latter (i.e. avant-garde vs arrière-garde, futurism vs modernism).

The two authors’ concern for the effects cinema has over its spectatorship allows their reader to appreciate the way new cultural environments affect one’s poetics. ‘Once irrational vitalism and the new technique of communication will have reached the highest level of their development’, writes Montale in 1956, ‘art will be arranged on two levels: a utilitarian and almost sporty art for the great masses; and a true art, not too different from the one of the past […]. Only those who are isolated will be able to speak, only they will be able to communicate. The others – the men of mass communication – will repeat, echo, vulgarize the words of the poets. (1996b: 56). In a similar way to Woolf’s “common reader”, Montale and Stevens ask their audiences to both unravel the complexity, if not the difficulty, of their poems and to participate in preserving it. While these authors formally refuse that they are courting an élite of highbrow readers, they nevertheless show great contempt towards larger, middlebrow audiences. They do not ignore, however, that it is mostly modern mass audiences that are responsible for deciding the evolution of a medium and not the other way round: poetry, just as cinema, can thus be seen as a moment in the ever-changing process of organising the imagination of its own audience.

Is this modern mass audiences?

Hartford’s Motion Picture Palace (Hartford Collection, Hartford Public Library)

L'articolo “Poi, come s’uno schermo”: Modernist Poetry and Cinema sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

This book is mostly constructed as a collage of visual referents (from Hieronymus Bosch to Superman). In fact, each of the 111 narrative chapters is designed as a square in a game of “Snakes and Ladders” (“Il gioco dell’oca” in Italian). Yet, instead of the conventional illustrations, the reader finds a series of pictures derived from artworks or products of consumer society.

My research, which employs the methods of visual philology, has allowed me to identify numerous sources. [Three examples of these – works by Mimmo Rotella and Robert Rauschenberg, as well as a vintage toy, “Voiced Boppertop” produced in 1960s – are described in «Antinomie»].

Sanguineti’s omnivorous interests are reflected in his writing practice and in his diverse visual repertoire: for example, in the ecfrastic board some Pop Art artists – like Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Hamilton and Mimmo Rotella – are placed next to anonymous engravings, period photographs (from Marilyn Monroe to Beatles fans), and advertising images.

Ékphrasis is the only macrotextual criterion for considering the book as a romance and not a collection of short stories: the presence of a narrator who describes in detail everything he sees – whether it is mass-cult or mid-cult. Every painting or art object is described in its entirety (colours, materials, forms, etc.), making the narrative structure similar to the Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas. The writer moves through the different chapters like a museum guide who presents and explains the paintings of an imaginary gallery. Moreover, the visual descriptions, in certain cases, overlap with the storyteller’s dreams, in a mixture of realism and oneirism.

A book-palimpsest like this is a significant example of the ideology of the “interdisciplinary intellectual”, which the writers of Gruppo 63 employed to identify themselves from 1960s to 1970s. If the classical ékphrasis often occupied the narrative space of digressions – detached and separated from the central plot –, in contemporary writing one witnesses a continuous evolution and extension of this category. In the case of Il Giuoco dell’Oca, ékphrasis becomes the engine itself of the romance.

Tracing visual sources requires philological inquiry as well as (and above all) a rediscovery of a context characterised by multimedia interactions, which involved poets, musicians, actors, directors, and painters. The literary scholars who work on Sanguineti’s book thus have the duty and opportunity to read these texts against their historical background and original cultural milieu. Philology, combined with sociology, provides an opportunity to shed some light on a literature too often considered as abstruse nonsense.

I believe that, behind its apparent hermeneutic darkness, experimental writing often hides specific references – through the ancient technique of ékphrasis.

Therefore, Il Giuoco dell’Oca represents a kind of modern hypertext, in which intertextual or intermedial quotes replace the interactive links. It is impossible (and over-ambitious) today to know how to move in the «iconosphere» of 1960s – with its myths, images and imaginaries. The task of future scholarly inquiry will be to help the common reader to understand texts written in a particular historical moment (the embryonic consumer society), to stimulate a response from the reader and to be provocative.

In conclusion, speaking about images and ékphrasis will become one of the most useful way to speak about the text – and to allow the text to speak. Unlike novels like Capriccio Italiano or the contemporary poetic production, Il Giuoco dell’Oca seems to be arranged like a real Gallery of images (similar to Giambattista Marino’s one). Besides the intertextuality found in many chapters, most sections are made of precise and detailed descriptions of paintings, movies, advertisements, and even of a toy. So much that, in my opinion, one day it will be possible to reconstruct the entire representational (figurative?) board and play the ‘game of images’ Sanguineti designed in his book.

*** For a more detailed analysis, see Chiara Portesine, «Una specie di Biennale allargata». Il giuoco dell’ecfrasi nel secondo romanzo di Edoardo Sanguineti, Fabrizio Serra, Pisa-Roma, 2021″ (available here).

A detail from Gianfranco Baruchello, Il Giuoco dell’Oca, collage, 82,5 x 63 cm, 1967; © Fondazione Baruchello

L'articolo Sanguineti’s ‘Il Giuoco dell’Oca’: The Novel as an Ecfrastic Board sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Mazzoni supervised all stages in the construction of the Palazzo delle Poste in La Spezia which was completed in just three years (1930-33) (http://dialecticsofmodernity.manchester.ac.uk/artefact/34) (Cozzi et al. 2003, 288). Part of a national plan for urban regeneration, it is located in the city centre (piazza Verdi), an area once occupied by the poor residential neighbourhood nicknamed the ‘Torretto’ (Fig 1).   A stone-clad volumetric main body flanked by a lateral clock tower gives to this solid building an unusually bright appearance which is complemented by an internal explosion of colours in the decorations (Eltin 1983, 89). In 1933, almost at the end of the project, Mazzoni commissioned futurist artists Enrico Prampolini and Fillìa the internal decoration of the clock tower, which was made of a majestic mosaic representing the land-based, maritime and aerial means of transportation and communication of the time, subdivided into five main, continuous scenes and entitled Le comunicazioni. Cutting-edge vehicles and aeroplanes, telegraphs and telephones stand side by side with trains and ships in a continuous tale of modern times (Fig. 2). Despite being a collective work, Fillìa (Le comunicazioni terrestri and Le comunicazioni marittime, 1933) was more focused on a simple but poetic language, Prampolini (Le comunicazioni telegrafiche, Le comunicazioni telefoniche and Le comunicazioni aeree, 1933) based his representations on broad perspectives. Overall, the brilliant colours of the composition, placed within a stylized context dominated by lines and geometry, become images dominated by a few, representative elements, occasionally tending to geometric abstraction.

This post office is a fine example of how the arts contributed to the totalitarian project by marrying social modernization of the infrastructures with anti-representational, modern aesthetics as well as of how the arts did so in an interdisciplinary fashion by responding to rationalist architectural designs (Billiani-Pennacchietti, 2019). Rather than thinking about the arts under the regime therefore, a more apt way of the describing how politics and aesthetics worked under the dictatorship, would be that of acknowledging that the arts could function productively as an interdisciplinary system under the overarching idea of State art which aimed at gaining political consensus amongst collectivities (Billiani 2021).

[1] F. ‘Mazzoni’, letter to Zevi, Rome, 5 December 1966, MART.

References

Billiani Francesca. 2021. Fascist Modernism. Arts and Regimes. London: I.B. Tauris.

Billiani Francesca and Laura Pennacchietti. 2019. Architecture and the Novel under the Italian Fascist Regime. London: Palgrave.

Cozzi, Mauro, Godoli, Ezio and Paola Pettenella (eds). 2003. Angiolo Mazzoni (1894-1979). Architetto Ingegnere del Ministero delle Comunicazioni. Milan: Skira.

Etlin, Richard A. 1983. ‘Italian Rationalism.’ Progressive Architecture (July): 86-94.

Forti, Alfredo. 1978. Angiolo Mazzoni. Architetto fra fascismo e libertà. Florence: Edam.

Figures

Fig. 1 Post and Telegraph Office, La Spezia

Fig. 2 Prampolini and Filllìa,  Le comunicazioni, le vide del cielo e del mare, 1933

Fig. 1. Post and Telegraph Office, La Spezia

Fig. 2. Prampolini and Filllìa, Le comunicazioni, le vie del cielo e del mare, 1933

L'articolo Angiolo Mazzoni Meets F. T. Marinetti: the Italian System of the Arts during Mussolini’s Regime sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The most engaging discourse on the social function of garments is found in Gadda’s major work, La cognizione del dolore, first published in serialised form between 1938 and 1941. Set in the imaginary South American country of Maradagàl, an allusive criticism of fascist Italy, the novel establishes an opposition between neurotic individuality, embodied by the intellectual protagonist, Gonzalo, as Gadda’s alter ego, and a boastfully grotesque society. This dichotomy, reinforced through Gonzalo’s vestimentary choices, is reminiscent of the struggle in fashion between “individual difference” and “social homogeneity” theorised by sociologist Georg Simmel in his 1905 treatise, Philosophie der Mode (Simmel 2020: 202). Consumed by a mysterious melancholia, the highly civilised Gonzalo is extremely attentive to his immaculate wardrobe, comprised of a formal suit, custom-made shirts, suspenders to avoid irregularities in the fit of his pants, and a pair of pointed-toe, lace-up shoes made of the blackest goat leather. A master of sartorial subtraction, he expresses a firm repudiation of the pullover sweaters, which are certainly a subtle reference to Mussolini’s late-1920s informal style (Billeri 2019: 92).

In a remarkable passage of the novel, Gonzalo also evokes the social scene with which he feels incompatible, a universe populated by ostentatious parvenues who closely resemble the members of the Lombard rising bourgeoisie. Adorned in lavish evening clothes, they conceitedly exhibit a hyperbolic inventory of ornaments, such as “fripperies, toggles of cornelian or polished bone, assorted haberdashery.” Silk merchants and pompous engineers cannot wait “to put on their heavy furs from beyond the polar circle, of the strangest bears, sables, seals from Pitt Land, kangaroos from Australasia, and opossum” (Gadda 2017: 147-148). In his sarcastic depiction of sartorial kitsch, Gadda focuses purposefully on the phenomenon of men’s furs, which had come into vogue in Italy at the beginning of the 20^th century, when fur coats began to be produced for car drivers. Quickly adopted by men of high society to be worn over their dinner jackets (Figure 2), furs were indeed made from the pelts of various exotic animals heavily exploited by Milanese furriers (Municchi 1988: 14-36; Figure 3).

In Gadda’s sociology of fashion, an unusual preoccupation emerges with the modalities and appearance of men’s clothing. In the context of Italian literature, the singularity of Gonzalo’s obsessive minimalism brings Gadda’s reflection on masculine apparel interestingly closer to an influential, although controversial, antecedent, that of Adolf Loos’s essays on the dangers of ornamentation. In writings such as “Men’s Fashion” (1898) and the seminal “Ornament and Crime” (written in 1908 but first published in Italian by the magazine Casabella in January 1934; Figure 4), Loos aims his modernist battle at Art Nouveau decorativism while promoting a unilateral, Eurocentric celebration of sobriety and understatement in fashion, seen as the peak of modern civilisation. Loos equates dressing well with the adoption of a correct dress code exemplified by ascetic British standards in menswear (Loos 1993: 10-12). Gadda’s rejection of exhibitionism and ornamentation, which is paradoxically counterposed by his baroque literary style, should thus be understood within the frame of a wider debate on stylistic purity initiated decades earlier by certain theorists of European modernism.

* This contribution draws upon my doctoral dissertation on “Fashion and Literary Modernism in Italy: Palazzeschi, Marinetti, Gadda,” defended in 2019 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and currently under revision for publication.

Figure 1                                                                                                                                                Figure 2

Figure 1) Gadda (second from left) upon his departure for Argentina on November 30, 1922. Full page from Fabio Pierangeli, Carlo Emilio Gadda. Turin: Gribaudo, 1995.

Figure 2) A men’s evening fur coat with an astrakhan collar. From the 1907 privately printed catalogue of Sartoria “E. Giorgetti,” Milan.

Figure 3                                                                                                               Figure 4

Figure 3) Advertisement for the Milanese furrier “Brivio Giuseppe,” early 1920s. Courtesy Civica Raccolta Stampe Bertarelli, Milan.
Figure 4) Index page of the January 1934 issue of Casabella, with Adolf Loos’s “Ornamento e delitto.” Courtesy Mondadori Media S.p.a.

Bibliography

Billeri, Matteo. 2019. “Gadda, Mussolini e l’orango. Una fonte per Eros e Priapo,” Paragone, vol. LXX, no. 144-145-146, August-December, pp. 83-95.

Bruno, Giuliana. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso.

Gadda, Carlo Emilio. 2017. The Experience of Pain, translated by Richard Dixon. New York: Penguin.

Loos, Adolf. 1993. Parole nel vuoto, translated by Sonia Gessner. Milan: Adelphi.

Maraini, Dacia. 1973. E tu chi eri? Interviste sull’infanzia. Milan: Bompiani.

Municchi, Anna. 1988. Homo in pelliccia. Modena: Zanfi.

Simmel, Georg. 2020. Stile moderno: saggi di estetica sociale, edited by Barbara Carnevali and Andrea Pinotti. Turin: Einaudi.

L'articolo Ornament as Crime: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Sociology of Fashion sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

The plurality of adjectives adopted by Damen described an extremely eclectic and hybrid panorama of international visual poetics in the 1960s and 1970s, in which very distant approach, research and operations can be traced, ranging from the textual and phonetic performances of Gerhard Rühm, Adriano Spatola, and Patrizia Vicinelli, to the technological collage-poems of Lucia Marcucci, Lamberto Pignotti and Michele Perfetti, from the transgressive pornographic poetry of Hans Clavin and the logo-iconic combinations of Clemente Padin, Giusi Coppini and Jean-François Bory, to the photographic text-compositions of Ketty La Rocca and Luciano Ori, or to the works of a series of artists who have ‘subjected the book to a tension which dilates its concepts, techniques, and materials’ (Miccini, 1980) with regard to intermediality and intertexuality, such as Giuliano Della Casa’s Motopoem (1971), Gianni Bertini’s Oppure (1970), Dieter Roth’s Quadrat Print (1965).

In 1965 Paul De Vree described this cross-disciplinary dimension as a form of ‘integratie poëzie’ (De Tafelronde, no. X/I), while Dick Higgins (Dé-collage no. 6, 1967) and Adriano Spatola (Geiger no. 5, 1972) defined it as ‘intermedia’ (Figure 2).

The vast and controversial history of post-World War II visual poetics is rich and fragmented and is characterised by transnational exchanges and multiple geographies as well as different lineages and expressions. In fact, while sharing the ground-breaking principle whereby ‘the arts have entered into a fusion’ (De Vree, 1968), the wide and intercultural context of poetic concretism and visuality arises from diverse linguistic contexts, political environments and historical backgrounds such as the 1968 counterculture which marked a turning point in the change of aims and attitudes between Concrete and Visual poetry.

Influenced by Concrete art and structural linguistics, concretist poets worked on the embodied presence of words by creating spatial-typographic compositions to be fitted or stripped, whereas visual poets engaged with intersemiotic relationships and diverse techniques (cut-ups, fold-ins, ready-mades) by introducing political tensions in the poetic body through the collage of words and media fragments (e.g. newspapers articles, advertising images, photo novels, comic strips, printed ephemera).

In Italy, this critical shift in the concept and in the aesthetic of poetry took the name of poesia tecnologica (Gruppo 63, 1963-69) and poesia visiva, which, since their inception in the early 1960s (Gruppo 70, 1963-68) and their distinctive manifestations during the 1970s (Gruppo Internazionale di Poesia Visiva, also known as Gruppo dei Nove, 1972-79), performed strong interactions between photography, painting, typography and graphic design (Figure 3).

Incited and opened up in the multilingual networks of neo-avant-garde experimental poetry, from Europe to Brazil, from North America to Japan, the specificity of Italian and Belgian relational axis is located in the wider context of cross-references and shared experiences that deeply informed the international and intermediate phenomenon of poesia visiva. The long-lasting exchanges between the two countries resulted in the production of seminal collective poetry collections (Il Libro 1968-1971, 1971), ἔξω-editorial projects (De Tafelronde, 1953-81; Lotta Poetica, first series: 1971-75) and mixed-media works (including picture-poems, alphabetical writings, verbovisual objects and typewriter compositions) that have revolutionized accepted notions of linguistic production by creating a critical path that led to the ‘visual turn in poetry’ (Vos, 1987) as well as to the ‘linguistic turn in visual arts’ (Rorthy, 1967). Founded in 1971 by Sarenco and Paul De Vree, the literary magazine Lotta Poetica (poetic struggle) is the aim of Italian and Belgian co-authored artists’ publications, interartistic exchanges and international poesia visiva movement (Figure 4).

The official organon of a militant protest and in radical contrast to the logic of advanced capitalism, Lotta Poetica investigates the impact of new media, political imagery and technologies on poetry by establishing itself at the core of social activism and neo-avant-garde verbicovisual investigations. Combining insights across verbal and figurative arts, media poetics and literary semiotics, this pivotal co-authored artists’ publication triggers a cultural integration of knowledge and creates a unique model of interdisciplinary cooperation where historic avant-garde legacies and futurable dimensions of visual poetics strongly converged.

Envisioned by the German philosopher Siegfried J. Schmidt as one of the major ‘perspectives on the development of post-concrete poetry’ (1982), this significant moment in 20^th century visual poetics has in fact created artistic experiences, languages and styles that we are still experiencing today, and is now forcefully taking centre stage again. Counter Weight (E. Beaulieu, 2018), Finding Chopin (T. Vonna-Michell, 2005-18), Subtraction (Splitting) (T. Auerbach, 2007) and No. 111.2.7.93-10.20.96 (K. Goldsmith, 1997) are just a few significant examples of contemporary artists and poets working at the intersection of visual art and literature, producing some of the most compelling work in either medium.

*This topic is at the core of an ongoing postdoctoral research project entitled Concrete & Visual Poetry: Artists’ Publications and/as Connections with Italy and Belgium in the 60s and 70s carried out at the University of Liège and KU Leuven. It will be further explored in the international symposium ‘Engaged Visuality: The Italian and Belgian Poesia Visiva Phenomenon in the 60s and 70s’ which will be organised in collaboration with Jan De Vree (M HKA Museum, Antwerp) and hosted by the Academia Belgica of Rome in December 2021.​

Figure 1) Herman Damen. Mixing the concretes, in Herman Damen Poesia Visiva. Exhibition catalogue no. 5. Brescia: Studio Brescia, 1972. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

Figure 2) Paul De Vree (ed.). De Tafelronde, no. X/I (Integratie Konkrete Poëzie). Antwerp, 1965. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

Figure 3) Lucia Marcucci. Anonima, 1967, collage on cardboard, 51.5 x 36 cm. Courtesy Fondazione Berardelli, Brescia.

Figure 4) Paul De Vree. Amsterdam, 1969. Excerpt from Lotta Poetica no. 2. Milanino sul Garda: Amodulo Edizioni. July 1971 p. 19. Courtesy Collection M HKA, Antwerp.

L'articolo ‘Poesia Visiva: Use a Concrete Mixer.’ The Vanguard Intermediate Poetry in the 60s and 70s sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Quando il sorcio
beve un sorso
di fernet
si contorce
dal rimorso
d’esser me.

Tre per un topo provide us with many clues about Scialoja’s working method and provides key clarifications on the chronology of the iconographic sources that inspired his nonsense writings. While preparing his books Scialoja in fact went back to the visual sources of his childhood (Edward Lear’s limericks and the Corriere dei Piccoli’s strips, among others), especially to J.J. Grandville’s book Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux (1842). Grandville, a French caricaturist, aimed to educate the reader-observer toward a new dynamic of the image. No longer would the illustrations provide a support for the text but, rather, they would guide and perturb it, transforming the book into an object féerique. The world of the Scènes is both an ironic portrait of the clichés of the French bourgeoisie as well as a bestiary that displays the ferocity of the animal world.

The revival of Grandville’s drawings by Scialoja cannot be fully understood unless one bears in mind the many literary and visual parodies present in his poetry. A specific example of the importance of this attitude can be found in the “istrice, attrice illustre” (a porcupine, illustrious actress), protagonist of one of Scialoja’s most famous poems:

L’istrice, attrice illustre
recita parti tristi
con gli occhi lustri lustri
inchiostrati di bistri.

Did the poem inspire the illustration, or vice versa? The illustration in Grandville’s Scènes, which represents a porcupine-actress, seemed to have inspired the entire text of the poem and not only the drawing that accompanies it. But when did the Grandvillian influence come into play? It is likely that Scialoja was initially inspired by just the text of the Scènes, which faithfully describes the image of the animal. In Tre per un topo [Fig. 1], the illustration of the porcupine appears, in fact, to be quite undeveloped, completely devoid of the refinement of each stroke that is typical of Grandville: equipped with tiny shoes that resemble Greek cothurni and a handkerchief, the animal sports a messily drawn snout, a vest, and he bears no trace of bistre-inked eyes.

Fig. 1

Rather, in the plate that was proposed for publication [Fig. 2 and 3], Scialoja was inspired by Grandville even in the style of drawing. Compared with Tre per un topo, the illustrative style changed radically, to resemble more the French source closely, only a few details of which were modified: the little animal actors and the backdrop of the Scènes disappeared altogether, while the details of the makeup and of a handkerchief that alluded to the “parti tristi” (sad parts) appeared. It is as if Scialoja aimed at translating Grandville’s bestiary into the atmosphere of the twentieth century, embodied in his animals full of anxieties, doubts, and neurosis. This is just one example of the complexity of Scialoja’s creative process: the double movement of listening and seeing the word itself reflects on the genesis of the illustration.

Fig. 2.                                            Fig. 3

L'articolo ‘Tre per un topo’: A Journey into Toti Scialoja’s First Illustrated Book sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

This unique project was the focus of a recent event sponsored by Interdisciplinary Italy and supported by the Fondazione Eugenio Carmi, which took place at the Italian Cultural Institute in Dublin. During the evening, I had the opportunity, together with Francesca Placanica of the Department of Music at Maynooth University, to retrace the story of Stripsody and present the way in which comic strip onomatopoeias combining visual and acoustic elements, stimulated Berberian and Carmi alike.

Figure 1 (click to enlarge)

The genesis of the project belongs to the history of music, as Stripsody was originally born as Berberian’s first composition. Already a respected interpreter of contemporary avant-garde music, and well known for her collaborations with Luciano Berio—her husband at the time—and John Cage, with Stripsody Berberian decided to turn the onomatopoeias commonly found in comic strips into music scores. She combined the ‘bang’, ‘sniff’, ‘boing’, ‘bang’ of comic books into a music composition that she then interpreted with great humour and theatricality—a technique later defined as ‘vocal clowning’[i]—on the stage of the Bremen Festival of Contemporary Music in 1966, meeting with great success (a video of the performance is available here). Designed by the Italian cartoonist Roberto Zamarin, Stripsody’s scores, too, express the convergence between music and visual elements, with musical notation being replaced with actual strips (See Figure 1).

This contamination between languages was further explored as a result of Eco’s intervention, whose personal love of and academic interest in comics is well known. Having become aware of Berberian’s composition, in 1966 he facilitated an encounter between her (she was a long-term friend whom he deeply admired), and Carmi, with whom Eco was working on a series of children books. The idea was for the painter to create a series of drawings inspired by Berberian’s voice. The visual language of comic strips, transformed into music, was thus to be returned to the visual sphere, but via a different medium: it no longer belonged to the ‘low-brow’ genre of comics, but was now part of the sophisticated one of abstract art.

Figure 2 (click to enlarge)

Carmi’s eagerness to meddle with more commercial and popular languages was the very reason why Eco involved him in Stripsody. His interest in these themes can be clearly seen in his previous work on health and safety posters, commissioned in 1962 by the Genoese steel factory Italsider (known as ‘Acciaierie di Cornigliano’ until 1961), where Carmi worked from 1956 to 1965 as a graphic designer. Not only do these posters anticipate the same geometrical, clean lines and primary, bright colours displayed in the Stripsody tables, but they also reveal a similar fascination with a basic—and, therefore, highly communicative—visual language. In fact, these posters may well be seen as extremely concise comic strips directed towards the Italsider workers (Figure 2).

In March 1966, after spending months listening to Berberian’s recorded voice in his studio, Carmi was ready to present his fourteen tables at the Galleria Arco d’Alibert in Rome (Figure 3). Berberian, too, used his work as a stage setting for her performance in Bremen the following May (fFigure 4). Finally, in November 1966, the tables were collected in an art book, together with an introduction penned by Eco, and a 45-rpm record of the musical performance. Stripsody is often understood as the title describing this multimedia object, republished in a new version in 2013. However, like all objects, this is merely a crystallised version of a much more exciting and composite experiment, indeed an opera aperta illuminating a vibrant network of artistic collaborations, encompassing multiple spaces and genres.

Figure 3 (courtesy of Archivio E. Carmi – click to enlarge)

Figure 4 (click to enlarge)

[i] See David Osmond-Smith (1991) Berio. Oxford University Press: 60.

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It is symbolic of the way in which Olivetti history (and much of business history) has been written: as a succession of brilliant decisions taken by men like Burzio, the company founder Camillo Olivetti and his son Adriano Olivetti. But in this photograph, something has gone wrong: the manual labour, which is female labour, gives the lie to Burzio’s intellectual (male) productivity. The photograph tries to protect the story, but just as she is about to be excluded, the woman on the right stares back at the camera – at us – and exposes her presence.

The English word ‘typewriter’ can refer both to the machine and to the woman who uses it, while the Italian word ‘macchina’ is gender-feminine, blurring the boundaries between the technological and the biological. Olivetti represented these two modern ‘bodies’ in constant communication. The company’s advertising campaigns were famously artistic, involving the collaboration of painters like Giovanni Pintori and poets like Leonardo Sinisgalli. The machine-woman connection soon became a signature of Olivetti graphics, and since the intended audience was the businessman, the product became the ‘typewriter,’ in the double-sense of the word.

We must think of such marketing strategies within the contexts of two World Wars and international nuclear arms races, when the social consequences of technological development counselled suspicion, if not rejection. Despite the Futurists, Italian humanistic culture was by and large distrustful of modernity, and Olivetti was fighting an uphill battle to make machines friendly again. Representing them together with the female body was one way of attracting the attention of consumers while mobilizing associations of hospitality and care, but also liberation and experimentation.

As Olivetti’s advertising campaigns worked to humanize the machine, they also worked to dehumanize the typist. In a series of commercials broadcast on American television in the early 1970s, the company introduced a set of autocorrect features that made Olivetti ‘the typewriter with a brain inside.’ The co-star of these commercials was the ‘Olivetti girl,’ an American typist obsessed with the machine, and by ascribing the brain to the technology, the company boldly claimed to announce the end of female intelligence.

Until recently, we knew very little about how these representations were received. But the photographs of Bettye Lane (1930-2012), now housed at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library, provide a glimpse of organized resistance. In response to the American commercials, and the English-language print advertisements that accompanied them, activists in New York City marched with posters that re-signified Olivetti’s own messages: ‘Attention women,’ the Olivetti girl now warned, ‘the male chauvinist pig wants you.’

The story of women at Olivetti – and at many other companies – remains to be told, but it is not at all clear that the documentation is available. When women were not being used as advertising material, they were unable to inscribe themselves in institutional history, and it is only in rare moments, like in the photograph of Domenico Burzio, that they stare across time. Any student of modern Italy would do well to stare back.

Ing. C. Olivetti & Co. c. 1920

StoriaOlivetti.com 1926

Harvard University 1972

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For the purposes of my research, which I presented at the Interart/Intermedia conference, Sciascia’s works are particularly interesting, not just because the adoption of an intermedial perspective led him to new narrative solutions, but also for the numerous reflections on the visual he included in his articles, as well as in introductions and prefaces to catalogues and illustrated books. The author’s openness to intermediality arises from his devotion towards every form of figurative art, which he collected passionately. This visual universe poured into his novels and short stories, which are full of images used to give vividness to the writing. In A ciascuno il suo (To each his own) the widow Roscio towers above the Professor like the Nike of Samothrace does to those who climb the stairs of the Louvre, while, in Candido, Paris is described in terms of a comparison with a nude by Courbet. Even book covers and blurbs were chosen carefully by Sciascia to expand and complete the meaning of a story.

I argue here that the artworks owned by Sciascia influenced the genesis of his creative process and that he wrote starting from a certain image that appeared in his mind, translating it later into words. In his essay L’Ordine delle somiglianze (The Order of similarities) dedicated to the 15^th-century painter Antonello da Messina, Sciascia affirms: “Non c’è ordine senza le somiglianze, non c’è conoscenza, non c’è giudizio” (There is no order without similarities, there is no knowledge, there is no judgement). In view of his ideas we can say that the visual dimension for Sciascia is one way to approach reality, and that images, building a cross-reference system, enable him to develop a plot. Indeed, the mind of the author proceeds by associations, because every image produces a series of connections which urge the reader to recall his previous knowledge.

It is interesting to reflect that in his novels paintings help the writer to expand the story, finding similarities between the situations he narrates and the ones represented by other artists. In contrast, in his essays dedicated to the figurative arts, Sciascia often refers to the writers or the characters he loves in order to present a painter or a sculptor. On the one hand, Sciascia considers the interpretation of images as a way to grasp the truth, thus devoting particular attention to visuality in his novels. On the other hand, though, he is also aware of how a fascination with the visual dimension could serve as a temptation to which he should not yield blindly, but rather maintain a critical stance from. In other words, in his work narration and representation go hand in hand, and the development and deepening of these twin devices are part of the uniqueness of Leonardo Sciascia as a novelist.

A Randazzo, 1964 (from: La Sicilia, il suo cuore: omaggio a Leonardo Sciascia, Palermo: Kalós, 2004)

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