Babel: Littératures Plurielles (Jun 2017)
La fortuna dell’iconografia di Pulcinella all’inizio degli anni Venti del Novecento : Pablo Picasso e Gino Severini
Abstract
In the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Commedia dell’Arte had exhausted its cycle from a theatrical point of view, masks such as Pulcinella, Arlecchino and Pierrot, together with street performers, clowns and acrobats, began to lose their specificity for the wider identity of the so-called “entertainer”. Painting will represent this shift in multiple ways, with differentiated and often contradictory messages. Such versatility will also be the main feature of entertainers represented from 1915 onwards, when some aspects of the Commedia dell’Arte will be rediscovered and reinterpreted in a modern way, leading to a kind of “revival” of Pulcinella’s mask. In painting, the main feature of his representation will be a certain split between its purest essence and its interpretation, which will bring artists to enjoy wider freedom, oscillating with ease between processes of humanization, dehumanization, iconographic contamination, archetypalization and distortion. In this context, Pablo Picasso and Gino Severini are two key figures. In different ways, both used the mask as a pretext for experimenting with new formal solutions, and for both the mask was linked to the “Italian”, in the folk sense for Picasso and, in the case of Severini, as an existential key to the rediscovery of the artist’s roots.
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