VI. How a 'maniante' apprentice became a painter
by Nino Sottile Zumbo
The small window shutters, closed for a long time, resist being opened; the short electrical wire, intertwined and exposed, pinned to the edge of the left wall, next to the door, is interrupted by the lamp.He sharpens his wits to overcome the darkness. He lights a candle end, but the light is dim and doesn't help him; from a crack in the shutter, the provident moonlight reveals bodies and faces. We are in the demo of Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, Sicily, where the Abaceni mountains join the tail of the Peloritani, on the northern side of the Scalene triangle. In the ancient heart of the demo, at the puppet theater in Via Domenico Scinà.
Here in the mezzanine, between the ground and intermediate or noble floor, a family of puppets waiting to be restored rests, with crests askew, crumpled papier-mâché faces, wooden skeletons that shine through flaming cloaks, peasant robes, or through sumptuous ones, Greek damasks, of bridesmaids; a short distance away, harnessed and battered steeds with twisted legs. It’s all a confusion of acrobatic and tragic poses; but it is not a question of painful deaths, imposed by the motion of wires, like in a stage scene, rather it is an inert catastrophe, of glorious poses.
Francesco, known as Ciccio, a “maniante” apprentice (puppeteer), is in charge of the deposition. It is the turn of the old, worn out, awkward Rocinante; the ideal knight, Don Quixote, caught between reality and vision, sense and unreason, after yet another conflict with the giants of the wind and clouds, will not be able to ride.It was both his fault (Ciccio’s) and that of chance. Coming down from the fertile hillock of Maloto of the plain, due to a jolt and to the inexplicable sudden halt of the donkey, while sitting on the cart, next to the driver, fumbling it, he fell into the crag along a cliff.Rocinante lies next to his brothers. They are weak puppets, mostly due to wear and tear. When ready, master Don Ettore will come to assist them, and heal their wounds. For the debut of the new work Ciccio depicts (he is talented in the art of drawing and coloring, more than in that of the maniante) at least eighteen backdrops for the theater, with the story of Princess Armida, of how she swore by joking to avenge the ignominious beheading of her brother Rodomonte (the maniante recalls that it is question of a lady’s ejaculation) and besieged Rometta, and was invincible in every part, except in the lower abdomen. And how Prince Riccardo pretended to be a corpse in the field, waiting for her to oversee the dead enemies, and from underneath he stuck the Durlindana right into her lower belly with a gush of black blood and death...Ciccio, albeit just fourteen years old, urges Don Ettore not to declare the number out of all proportion. Not twelve thousand, not eight thousand, not five thousand, nor two thousand or one thousand; less than a hundred are the dead infidels, if contradicted by the public, renounce insults and abuse.
He also prepares the backdrop for the events of damsel Angelica and her majestic Hippogriff, dressed in gold and silver, glittering with studs, tinkling with bells, crested like a king. In the middle of a small clearing in the ash wood, good for hunts and singular combat, the Hippogriff, with its majestic ambiance, ventilates the surrounding air.
The archpriest of the Assumption of Pozzo di Gotto, Monsignor Giuseppe De Francesco, great-uncle of Ciccio on the former paternal side, won it.It was in the autumn, a few days before the beginning of school lessons. He convinced his nephew, also named Giuseppe—pharmacist, known for long night walks with friends through the deserted streets of the town, in the clear summer moon but also during the adverse seasons—and Our father, that the young man to learn the art of puppeteering was distracted from high school studies and too often hiding from the Vesper mass, and the officiant was left without his necessary service of altar boy.The prelate, a very cultured man, to be forgiven, in those same days, on a warm October afternoon, gave his great-grandson the precious Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes of Saavedra, illustrated by Gustave Doré, in the Florentine edition of Nerbini of 1932. It was large format and bound in half parchment, with a gold title on the spine.And also The Adventures of Pinocchio. The story of a puppet, a rare small-format book, printed in Florence by Bemporad and Son in 1915, with illustrations by Carlo Chiostri—eighty engraved on wood by Adolfo Bongini, and five printed full pages in mezzotinto. Ciccio, once again in tears because of the forced abandonment of the apprentice office maniante, receives them, and clenching his teeth, thanks the relative only out of obligation.Randomly leafing through, first one, then the other, he is still fascinated by the illustrations.Thus began the story.
One evening in late December, when the North Star is in its splendor, having devoured both books, he asks the elderly master Don Ettore for permission to access the mezzanine.He approaches the door, the shutters remain closed, the lamp useless, this time the North Star shines providently, but looking attentively, there is no trace of the sick puppets. Disappointed with the futile crowns of kingdoms never reigned, the puppet kings, Christians and infidels, wrapped in superb purple drapery, commanded—at least so it is said—their entire entourage, of crippled and hindered people, in a leap of pride.Thus, princesses, their hairstyles are towering, their chinsticks elegant; haughty dukes; knights eager to draw their swords, seated on limping steeds with ribbons and rosettes scattered everywhere, from the halter to the girth. Ladies and bridesmaids with divine faces; noisy family drivers, graceful purebred animals; giving support to each other, but only among confidels, in an orderly row for two, they advance along the closet, as if pushed by an unthinkable Meccano.Having climbed the stairs rather laboriously, they get to the door on the street that had been magically restored (was it perhaps a Fairy?), to the glorious conquest of kingdoms no longer painted on the seabed. Will they have more luck?Suddenly a little mouse scurrying across the dusty wooden-slatted floor in front of him, slipping between some trade tools which, heaped in bulk, rest here waiting for reuse—pliers, wire, pins, a small hammer, stropes, an awl, a carver, some pine and cherry wood logs, and a dense roll of papier-mâché—, dribbles the metal box with the garavella glue and quickly hides at the corner of the basement.We do not know if what has just been described is real or a dream. But it is certain that from that day on, giving up the primitive desire for an apprentice forever, Ciccio entrusted himself to the art of painting and refining it.When, to ingratiate himself, he gave him the two books, the prelate great-uncle reminded him of their value. The young man knew very well that Don Quixote, the bony oblong loser who always wins, spectator and actor of a universal theater by Maese Pedro, was a metaphor for freedom and literary archetype of every era, he had learned during the shows.When it was Pinocchio’s turn, revealing himself to be the priest he was—and priests know a lot—, he insinuated malice among merits.Nothing new under the sun: his next ancestors are the eighteenth-century automatons, self-propelled machines of human appearance and capable of rudimentary logic, such as the Friedrich von Knauss’ “writing automaton” or the “chess player,” called “The Turk” for its appearance, designed by Wolfgang von Kempelen for the delight of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.Not even the literary birthright of a living puppet belongs to him. The text appears in installments, from the year 1881 to the year 1883, with the title The Story of a Puppet, in the “Giornale dei bambini” by Ferdinando Martini; then, with the definitive title The Adventures of Pinocchio – the Story of a Puppet, it was published in volume, in the same year (1883), by the Florentine Paggi, with illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti.But François Janet, an obscure Parisian bookseller, wrote and printed in Paris, almost twenty years earlier, in 1862, in a few copies which he gave to friends, a coming-of-age novel, The Talking Doll, which tells the story of a little Seneca in a skirt which, to educate the little ones, spits out sentences.
The similarities with the character from beyond the Alps, for the great-uncle, are irrefutable.Not true, Ciccio meditates to himself: Pinocchio is, on the contrary, a trouble-seeking anarchist, even though he regrets it, everyone knows.Is it legitimate to raise it to an emblem Thus continues the great uncle. If so, what medal and coinage—gold, silver or bronze— should be hung on his chest?Giuseppe Prezzolini, a professor who knows about books—the prelate admits, however— commands that to get to know Italy and the Italians (only these people Ciccio muses) one must read Bertoldo and Bertoldino by Giulio Cesare Croce and The Adventures of Pinocchio; as well as Alberto Savinio. A refined musician-writer-painter, says that the latter's adventures are “the Bible of love.”Greedy for life, curious and strong-willed like every child, he immediately practices his free will. Newborn, he opposes his father, but Geppetto has the power to govern his gestures; the father created it for himself to pull the strings at will, but the son is always searching for freedom (like the puppet kings and their entourage, remembered the great-grandson).
He experiments with a world of imaginative arabesques and real perils: Mangiafuochi; gendarmes; tempting Candle Wicks; joyful and ignorant toys; marvelous and judicious animals, Jiminy the Cricket, the pigeon, the industrious bees, the crab; evil and corrupt animals and figures, the Cat and the Fox, the Beech Marten, the Little Buttery Man; illiterate of the Fourth Estate.Even if only a few times, he lies to purge himself of guilt and make himself accepted (how do we all behave, young and old, and the priests? Meditates Ciccio); discreetly, without a magic wand and no prodigy, the Fairy watches over him, leading him in the right direction, while his father educates him. This is a pedagogical revolution of roles for the rigid, unequal, bourgeois post-unification society of the time, balthered the progressive Concettina D'Amico, teacher of Italian and Latin in the upper classes of the local Ginnasio-Liceo “Luigi Valli” and colleague of the prelate.Felice dictu: he passes the exam with his good will, and from a living wood thing becomes a child in the flesh.However, the book is ambiguous, the great-uncle mumbles again: it can be read in a secular and colorless, or spiritual key, and this wandering for the Holy Roman Church is misleading: vicissitudes, those of the puppet, from a new Oedipus, a motherless orphan (and the Blue Fairy Isn't she the putative “mommy,” mutters Ciccio), or from the prodigal son who, conquered by his love for him, emends himself and returns to his father?And the book has obscured its author, as if—and the great-uncle at this moment, trembling, signs himself with the cross—Jesus Christ, the son, was obscuring God, the father.
Years have passed.Ciccio, as a young man, took care of the puppets’ wounds; now, wearing the white coat, the corporal evils of men.He studied anatomy, physiology, human pathology, the art of Apelles and Phidias as it has evolved over the centuries, and he has never abandoned brushes and colors.In the first year of the third millennium, on a pale dove-colored February morning, fate is provident: in a the dim light of a living room in lower Bergamo, rummaging among the mighty volumes on the first shelf of the chestnut wood bookcase, in search of a catalog of works by Beato Angelico; moved, The Adventures of Pinocchio slips into his hand, a gift from his great-uncle Giuseppe, that was strangely out of place.
He reads it again in breath that same day, decides to illustrate it—with simple fine monochrome and rarely colored pointed pencils—and completes it within two years.Twenty-one graphic plates: each plate, full of episodes, and sometimes with transcribed passages, dated and signed with the mathematical sign pi greco, a real, irrational and transcendental number as the cipher of his art would be; the sheet breathes, the stroke is light or dense as needed.On the tables, the main symbolic objects—as in the composition of the mocked Christ by Beato Angelico preserved in the Convent of San Marco in Florence—are suspended in the air.Symbols unrelated to the novel enrich its meaning.The artist uses splashes of color to polarize the focus on the figures.The animals, especially some winged ones, are worthy of being among the wonders of the illuminated medieval bestiaries.
He is a visionary: he chooses an episode from the novel—a novel that evokes, suggests and does not describe—and sees the scene projected in rapid sequence on an ideal screen before his eyes. He does not capture the images, he calibrates the mot juste, and freely translates them on the sheet of paper into happy, incisive, memorable, icastic forms.
I will force my words to pursue the essence of his icons, fleeting like Pinocchio.On the first board there are very complex archetypes and citations: the steatopygia Venus of Savignano (Pigorini Museum, Rome) which dates back to the Neolithic period, the Great Mother transfigured into a tree, like the women of Paul Delvaux. Venus with generous shapes just outlined, veiled, fecundates Pinocchio in her belly—coiled in a fetal position and highlighted with yellow. Next to it is the angel of the good news, of Renaissance workmanship. Suspended in the air the carpenter's tools, the saw and the plane; then there is the rabbit, an emblem of fertility in ancient representations; and the three nails of Christ's Crucifixion that surround the face and head of a an already manly screaming Pinocchio (every birth has a destiny of passion and death). I haven’t spoken about Mastro Ciliegia in the singular role of butcher.I will mention other illustrations briefly, indicating the relevant tables with Roman numerals.
II. Drawn upside down, figures and shadows appear; the illustrator reminds us that the characters of the novel are solid things and that reality is subverted by the lie (the Talking Cricket agrees).
XIV. The small fish darting to the surface of the sea, which bite and spit out the inedible pages of the book (shreds can be seen with the letters from the alphabet) and the judicious crab, an accomplished imagérie.
If the book were a celestial body, it would be a meteor.You have already read it from beginning to end.Let's play the collage game. Open it and draw randomly, here a page, there a passage and go to the corresponding illustrations. You will discover a new Pinocchio who belongs to you.I forgot. The artist, for our delight, created, in gray cardboard, a lovely sculpture of the puppet, sitting on a chair, alive rather than inert. I contemplated this three dimensional puppet with a sun-kissed forehead.To the melancholy respectable child he has become, I will always prefer the libertarian, puppet wanderer that he was. This short piece, real and visionary, is for Francesco De Francesco, creator of fabulous icons. check novel for original translation
Here in the mezzanine, between the ground and intermediate or noble floor, a family of puppets waiting to be restored rests, with crests askew, crumpled papier-mâché faces, wooden skeletons that shine through flaming cloaks, peasant robes, or through sumptuous ones, Greek damasks, of bridesmaids; a short distance away, harnessed and battered steeds with twisted legs. It’s all a confusion of acrobatic and tragic poses; but it is not a question of painful deaths, imposed by the motion of wires, like in a stage scene, rather it is an inert catastrophe, of glorious poses.
Francesco, known as Ciccio, a “maniante” apprentice (puppeteer), is in charge of the deposition. It is the turn of the old, worn out, awkward Rocinante; the ideal knight, Don Quixote, caught between reality and vision, sense and unreason, after yet another conflict with the giants of the wind and clouds, will not be able to ride.It was both his fault (Ciccio’s) and that of chance. Coming down from the fertile hillock of Maloto of the plain, due to a jolt and to the inexplicable sudden halt of the donkey, while sitting on the cart, next to the driver, fumbling it, he fell into the crag along a cliff.Rocinante lies next to his brothers. They are weak puppets, mostly due to wear and tear. When ready, master Don Ettore will come to assist them, and heal their wounds. For the debut of the new work Ciccio depicts (he is talented in the art of drawing and coloring, more than in that of the maniante) at least eighteen backdrops for the theater, with the story of Princess Armida, of how she swore by joking to avenge the ignominious beheading of her brother Rodomonte (the maniante recalls that it is question of a lady’s ejaculation) and besieged Rometta, and was invincible in every part, except in the lower abdomen. And how Prince Riccardo pretended to be a corpse in the field, waiting for her to oversee the dead enemies, and from underneath he stuck the Durlindana right into her lower belly with a gush of black blood and death...Ciccio, albeit just fourteen years old, urges Don Ettore not to declare the number out of all proportion. Not twelve thousand, not eight thousand, not five thousand, nor two thousand or one thousand; less than a hundred are the dead infidels, if contradicted by the public, renounce insults and abuse.
He also prepares the backdrop for the events of damsel Angelica and her majestic Hippogriff, dressed in gold and silver, glittering with studs, tinkling with bells, crested like a king. In the middle of a small clearing in the ash wood, good for hunts and singular combat, the Hippogriff, with its majestic ambiance, ventilates the surrounding air.
The archpriest of the Assumption of Pozzo di Gotto, Monsignor Giuseppe De Francesco, great-uncle of Ciccio on the former paternal side, won it.It was in the autumn, a few days before the beginning of school lessons. He convinced his nephew, also named Giuseppe—pharmacist, known for long night walks with friends through the deserted streets of the town, in the clear summer moon but also during the adverse seasons—and Our father, that the young man to learn the art of puppeteering was distracted from high school studies and too often hiding from the Vesper mass, and the officiant was left without his necessary service of altar boy.The prelate, a very cultured man, to be forgiven, in those same days, on a warm October afternoon, gave his great-grandson the precious Don Quixote of Miguel Cervantes of Saavedra, illustrated by Gustave Doré, in the Florentine edition of Nerbini of 1932. It was large format and bound in half parchment, with a gold title on the spine.And also The Adventures of Pinocchio. The story of a puppet, a rare small-format book, printed in Florence by Bemporad and Son in 1915, with illustrations by Carlo Chiostri—eighty engraved on wood by Adolfo Bongini, and five printed full pages in mezzotinto. Ciccio, once again in tears because of the forced abandonment of the apprentice office maniante, receives them, and clenching his teeth, thanks the relative only out of obligation.Randomly leafing through, first one, then the other, he is still fascinated by the illustrations.Thus began the story.
One evening in late December, when the North Star is in its splendor, having devoured both books, he asks the elderly master Don Ettore for permission to access the mezzanine.He approaches the door, the shutters remain closed, the lamp useless, this time the North Star shines providently, but looking attentively, there is no trace of the sick puppets. Disappointed with the futile crowns of kingdoms never reigned, the puppet kings, Christians and infidels, wrapped in superb purple drapery, commanded—at least so it is said—their entire entourage, of crippled and hindered people, in a leap of pride.Thus, princesses, their hairstyles are towering, their chinsticks elegant; haughty dukes; knights eager to draw their swords, seated on limping steeds with ribbons and rosettes scattered everywhere, from the halter to the girth. Ladies and bridesmaids with divine faces; noisy family drivers, graceful purebred animals; giving support to each other, but only among confidels, in an orderly row for two, they advance along the closet, as if pushed by an unthinkable Meccano.Having climbed the stairs rather laboriously, they get to the door on the street that had been magically restored (was it perhaps a Fairy?), to the glorious conquest of kingdoms no longer painted on the seabed. Will they have more luck?Suddenly a little mouse scurrying across the dusty wooden-slatted floor in front of him, slipping between some trade tools which, heaped in bulk, rest here waiting for reuse—pliers, wire, pins, a small hammer, stropes, an awl, a carver, some pine and cherry wood logs, and a dense roll of papier-mâché—, dribbles the metal box with the garavella glue and quickly hides at the corner of the basement.We do not know if what has just been described is real or a dream. But it is certain that from that day on, giving up the primitive desire for an apprentice forever, Ciccio entrusted himself to the art of painting and refining it.When, to ingratiate himself, he gave him the two books, the prelate great-uncle reminded him of their value. The young man knew very well that Don Quixote, the bony oblong loser who always wins, spectator and actor of a universal theater by Maese Pedro, was a metaphor for freedom and literary archetype of every era, he had learned during the shows.When it was Pinocchio’s turn, revealing himself to be the priest he was—and priests know a lot—, he insinuated malice among merits.Nothing new under the sun: his next ancestors are the eighteenth-century automatons, self-propelled machines of human appearance and capable of rudimentary logic, such as the Friedrich von Knauss’ “writing automaton” or the “chess player,” called “The Turk” for its appearance, designed by Wolfgang von Kempelen for the delight of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.Not even the literary birthright of a living puppet belongs to him. The text appears in installments, from the year 1881 to the year 1883, with the title The Story of a Puppet, in the “Giornale dei bambini” by Ferdinando Martini; then, with the definitive title The Adventures of Pinocchio – the Story of a Puppet, it was published in volume, in the same year (1883), by the Florentine Paggi, with illustrations by Enrico Mazzanti.But François Janet, an obscure Parisian bookseller, wrote and printed in Paris, almost twenty years earlier, in 1862, in a few copies which he gave to friends, a coming-of-age novel, The Talking Doll, which tells the story of a little Seneca in a skirt which, to educate the little ones, spits out sentences.
The similarities with the character from beyond the Alps, for the great-uncle, are irrefutable.Not true, Ciccio meditates to himself: Pinocchio is, on the contrary, a trouble-seeking anarchist, even though he regrets it, everyone knows.Is it legitimate to raise it to an emblem Thus continues the great uncle. If so, what medal and coinage—gold, silver or bronze— should be hung on his chest?Giuseppe Prezzolini, a professor who knows about books—the prelate admits, however— commands that to get to know Italy and the Italians (only these people Ciccio muses) one must read Bertoldo and Bertoldino by Giulio Cesare Croce and The Adventures of Pinocchio; as well as Alberto Savinio. A refined musician-writer-painter, says that the latter's adventures are “the Bible of love.”Greedy for life, curious and strong-willed like every child, he immediately practices his free will. Newborn, he opposes his father, but Geppetto has the power to govern his gestures; the father created it for himself to pull the strings at will, but the son is always searching for freedom (like the puppet kings and their entourage, remembered the great-grandson).
He experiments with a world of imaginative arabesques and real perils: Mangiafuochi; gendarmes; tempting Candle Wicks; joyful and ignorant toys; marvelous and judicious animals, Jiminy the Cricket, the pigeon, the industrious bees, the crab; evil and corrupt animals and figures, the Cat and the Fox, the Beech Marten, the Little Buttery Man; illiterate of the Fourth Estate.Even if only a few times, he lies to purge himself of guilt and make himself accepted (how do we all behave, young and old, and the priests? Meditates Ciccio); discreetly, without a magic wand and no prodigy, the Fairy watches over him, leading him in the right direction, while his father educates him. This is a pedagogical revolution of roles for the rigid, unequal, bourgeois post-unification society of the time, balthered the progressive Concettina D'Amico, teacher of Italian and Latin in the upper classes of the local Ginnasio-Liceo “Luigi Valli” and colleague of the prelate.Felice dictu: he passes the exam with his good will, and from a living wood thing becomes a child in the flesh.However, the book is ambiguous, the great-uncle mumbles again: it can be read in a secular and colorless, or spiritual key, and this wandering for the Holy Roman Church is misleading: vicissitudes, those of the puppet, from a new Oedipus, a motherless orphan (and the Blue Fairy Isn't she the putative “mommy,” mutters Ciccio), or from the prodigal son who, conquered by his love for him, emends himself and returns to his father?And the book has obscured its author, as if—and the great-uncle at this moment, trembling, signs himself with the cross—Jesus Christ, the son, was obscuring God, the father.
Years have passed.Ciccio, as a young man, took care of the puppets’ wounds; now, wearing the white coat, the corporal evils of men.He studied anatomy, physiology, human pathology, the art of Apelles and Phidias as it has evolved over the centuries, and he has never abandoned brushes and colors.In the first year of the third millennium, on a pale dove-colored February morning, fate is provident: in a the dim light of a living room in lower Bergamo, rummaging among the mighty volumes on the first shelf of the chestnut wood bookcase, in search of a catalog of works by Beato Angelico; moved, The Adventures of Pinocchio slips into his hand, a gift from his great-uncle Giuseppe, that was strangely out of place.
He reads it again in breath that same day, decides to illustrate it—with simple fine monochrome and rarely colored pointed pencils—and completes it within two years.Twenty-one graphic plates: each plate, full of episodes, and sometimes with transcribed passages, dated and signed with the mathematical sign pi greco, a real, irrational and transcendental number as the cipher of his art would be; the sheet breathes, the stroke is light or dense as needed.On the tables, the main symbolic objects—as in the composition of the mocked Christ by Beato Angelico preserved in the Convent of San Marco in Florence—are suspended in the air.Symbols unrelated to the novel enrich its meaning.The artist uses splashes of color to polarize the focus on the figures.The animals, especially some winged ones, are worthy of being among the wonders of the illuminated medieval bestiaries.
He is a visionary: he chooses an episode from the novel—a novel that evokes, suggests and does not describe—and sees the scene projected in rapid sequence on an ideal screen before his eyes. He does not capture the images, he calibrates the mot juste, and freely translates them on the sheet of paper into happy, incisive, memorable, icastic forms.
I will force my words to pursue the essence of his icons, fleeting like Pinocchio.On the first board there are very complex archetypes and citations: the steatopygia Venus of Savignano (Pigorini Museum, Rome) which dates back to the Neolithic period, the Great Mother transfigured into a tree, like the women of Paul Delvaux. Venus with generous shapes just outlined, veiled, fecundates Pinocchio in her belly—coiled in a fetal position and highlighted with yellow. Next to it is the angel of the good news, of Renaissance workmanship. Suspended in the air the carpenter's tools, the saw and the plane; then there is the rabbit, an emblem of fertility in ancient representations; and the three nails of Christ's Crucifixion that surround the face and head of a an already manly screaming Pinocchio (every birth has a destiny of passion and death). I haven’t spoken about Mastro Ciliegia in the singular role of butcher.I will mention other illustrations briefly, indicating the relevant tables with Roman numerals.
II. Drawn upside down, figures and shadows appear; the illustrator reminds us that the characters of the novel are solid things and that reality is subverted by the lie (the Talking Cricket agrees).
- The happiness of the puppet—which his father, without his noticing, has rebuilt and stuck his burnt feet in the brazier—explodes in a kinetic frenzy. The three pears, a lean meal, have the carnal sensuality of Man Ray's golden frame Le violon d'Ingres (Getty Museum, Los Angeles).
- VI. The bearded and mighty Mangiafuoco—who, pitied by the intercession of the good puppet, graces he and Arlecchino by fire—is the portrait-homage to the deceased Sicilian artist Alfredo Pizzo Greco, who created with fire.
The winged doctors Corvo, Civetta and Grillo are gathered at the bedside of the half-dead Pinocchio (in obedience to the Blue Fairy, dangling from the great oak, to which the Cat and the Fox hung him, he was freed by the large Hawk). A nonsense is transcribed there, the diagnosis of the Owl “When the dead man cries it is a sign that he is sorry to die.” Carlo Collodi thus ridicules the gloomy certainties of the prevailing positivist science.
- An important detail: the round gold and glassless glasses of the respectable Gorilla judge to whom the puppet denounces The Cat and the Fox who defrauded him of his sequins. Justice is shortsighted and not equipped for the purpose: Pinocchio is arrested by the two mastiff gendarme dogs as an injured party.
- A firefly (symbol of just justice) weighs on the skull of the man-Pinocchio; I say no more: you who have read the book already know why.
XIV. The small fish darting to the surface of the sea, which bite and spit out the inedible pages of the book (shreds can be seen with the letters from the alphabet) and the judicious crab, an accomplished imagérie.
- The fisherman who wants to fry Pinocchio to eat him reminds me of the grotesque characters of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.
If the book were a celestial body, it would be a meteor.You have already read it from beginning to end.Let's play the collage game. Open it and draw randomly, here a page, there a passage and go to the corresponding illustrations. You will discover a new Pinocchio who belongs to you.I forgot. The artist, for our delight, created, in gray cardboard, a lovely sculpture of the puppet, sitting on a chair, alive rather than inert. I contemplated this three dimensional puppet with a sun-kissed forehead.To the melancholy respectable child he has become, I will always prefer the libertarian, puppet wanderer that he was. This short piece, real and visionary, is for Francesco De Francesco, creator of fabulous icons. check novel for original translation