The artist-Vate and the last work.
According to the Greek myth, Narcissus was a handsome young man from Tespi, who fell in love with the nymph Eco. Eco had been deprived of the word by Hera, the wife of Zeus, and could only repeat the last syllables of the words of others. Unable to express his love, Eco was rejected by Narciso and died of a broken heart. The gods then punished Narciso for the hardness with which he had treated Eco making him fall in love with his image. The soothsayer Tiresias had predicted that Narcissus would cease to live the moment he saw himself. One day, bending over the clear waters of a spring, he caught his reflection in the water. Narcissus fell passionately in love with that image and no longer wanted to leave the place. He died so languorous and turned into a narcissus, the flower that grows at the edges of the sources.
The narcissist is a person who cares only about himself, excluding all others. He becomes his own world and believes he is the whole world.
The narcissists present various combinations of intense ambition, grandiose fantasies, feelings of inferiority and excessive dependence on the admiration and approval of others. Chronic uncertainty and self-dissatisfaction are also typical; cruelty and exploitation, conscious or not, towards others. The narcissists are absorbed by their image, they are not able to distinguish between the image of who they believe to be and the image of who they actually are; the narcissist identifies with the idealized image, the image of himself is so lost. The difference between himself and his image could be compared to that between a person and his reflection in the mirror; one understands then why, the artist, narcissistic in himself, sees in his work his image. What happens in the body influences thought and behavior as what happens in the psyche: we can therefore say with a certain degree of certainty that, at the end of his life, the artist creates works that are tragically evolved, almost able to grasp the essence of all that has been his life and his working with a sort of magical and evolved realism, a sort of vision, certainly personal, but absolutely perturbing, as it deals with the dazzling reality: death.
The sense of self depends on the perception of the life of the body. Perception is a function of the mind and creates images. Narcissists do not deny having a body, but consider the body as an instrument of the mind, subject to their will. Although the body can be an efficient tool, functional as a machine or striking for the statuesque appearance it lacks however of "life". And it is precisely from the sense of one's being alive that the experience of the self is born. The narcissist's short circuit lies precisely in the denial of feelings, he is a person whose behavior is not motivated by feelings. We must observe narcissism as an organization in terms of image and not emotion. The antithesis between the self, which is a mental organization, and the self, which is a bodily and sensitive entity, exists in all adults, or at least in anyone who has developed a certain awareness, which derives from the ability to form an image of oneself; since this is a function of the ego, narcissism must be considered a disorder of ego development.
The artist's narcissism is evident in the tendency to be seductive and to measure one's own value on the basis of the ability to attract, with the ostentation of a great self-assurance, a sense of superiority and an exaggerated dignity. Artists are not only a little better than others, they are the best! They are out in the world of feelings and do not know how to relate to other people in a real, human. The artists become their work, which is the image in which Narcissus was mirrored and died there; in the same way the work becomes the superiority that distinguishes the artist from the mass; there is in fact in the human psyche, a long duration of certain behaviors due also to the surprising stability of the expectations of an uncertain public to cross the borders between art and magic, which is the artist's topos.
The reaction of society to the artist is conditioned by the talent and personal characteristics of the latter, narcissistic precisely, this reaction influences the artist himself. The intuition of an autonomous value of art as an independent dimension of creative work, art for art, makes explicit a desire to know the person of the artist. One could speak, without exaggeration, of a "secret life of the hero".
The artist-prophet can be considered, from the greek anekdoton "unprecedented", the one who sees and, somehow, expected, what will be, his foresight is considered a kind of magic, despite the secular modernity. There is an indissoluble link between modern thought and poetic myth.
Central theme in all the debates between art and artist, an artist's urgency to give expression to their creative talent and the power to magnetically attract the attention of others.
Goethe- The creative power of the mind forms the finite of the indefinite.
Luca Signorelli is, beyond any reasonable doubt, the great master of our artist Lorenzo Chinnici, he lived between the first and the second Italian renaissance and as such he does not ask his works for an autonomous portrait, but a place in the "stories" that , in the form of a fresco, and I think of the magnificence of the Cathedral of Orvieto, which with its image becomes part of the monument and this awareness aims to be admired. The apocalyptic theme of Renaissance frescoes, like that of the last human days, seems difficult to explain except in direct connection with the disturbance of consciences caused, as well as horoscopes and catastrophic foreboding, which were multiplying, here and then, also due to of the approaching of the second half of the second millennium, from the Florentine events for which Savonarola was the most illuminating example. The ignominious bodies of Signorelli are exalted with the energy that preludes the epic celebration that, the illness of our artist will bring to the magnificence of the nude portraits in the last period of Michelangelo. That is, Lorenzo Chinnici starts from the purity and loveliness of the anatomy of Signorelli, to arrive in a period of semi-blindness, to the exasperation of Michelangelo's anatomy, also agonizing for philosophical-religious problems of the great master, anguish that the latter revealed only to the great confidant Vittoria Colonna. The foreground meaning of the nude is, totally in favor of classical beauty, but always attentive to the non-classical, possibly also taken in the contemporary. The exasperation of the bodies of fishermen and other workers can be traced back to the unavoidable Vitruvian aesthetic canon, rediscovered precisely in the Italian Renaissance. The nude figures of a Madonna del Signorelli at the Uffizi, served as a model to Michelangelo. It is therefore the nucleus, driven by the awareness of the "passage of the witness" to gravitate around a mythical and archetypal nucleus. The aim is to focus on a particular historical situation characterized by the onset of awareness of how the artist's action is partly removed from the domain of consciousness and then focus on the point where that awareness affects the change in vision, on the stylistic transformation that characterizes that moment of transition from the figurative arts to blindness, or anyway, from the awareness of art. The return to order is characterized by a great measure and by the rejection of natural inclinations, usefulness and the search for effect. This sobriety was motivated by the intention to drop values, reach discipline, clarity and greatness.
For Lorenzo Chinnici art is anthropometric, man is beyond measure; it is monumental, there is in it the aspiration to magnificence and to minimize the ornamental element; but above all aware of its own greatness, solemn and joyful.
In the moment in which the illness, or in any case the advance of senility, arrives in the work of the artist, the definition of fantasy and visionary reveals its generality more if it is not brought back decisively to the awareness of the unconscious, that is of that subversion of values, of that revolutionary overturning of the objectives of the psychological attitude: the concept of culture at the same level of life, where joint, art and instincts, include the process traced out of the ego without solid support of will without a fixed goal. For the artist ideas take on meaning of life; that the English called "the eternal snows of thought".
F.Passini
