“It was a Friday evening, November 8th to be precise, the mild lower Bavarian autumn was about to slowly give way to the cold, foggy winter and Professor Roentegen was in his laboratory completely absorbed in his work (…) everything seemed to proceed as usual when Roentgen’s eye was caught by “something” luminescent…(1 –P. Donizetti, I cacciatori d’ombre, Mondadori, Milan 1963, p.20); it was 1895 and from that date that “something”, drawn out of the invisible, seemed to make an improbable technological dream come true, not even science fiction writers had foreseen it.
In 1760 Tiphaigne de la Roche had come close predicting photography in his “Giphantie” (“…the rays of light reflected by various objects, compose pictures and paint these objects on every shiny surface, on the retina, on water and on mirrors. The ‘elemental spirits’ have found the means of catching these fleeting images…” (2 –T de la Roche, Giphantie, à Babylone – Paris, 1760, p94, now in I. Zannier, Storia e tecnica della fotografia, Laterza, Bari 2000, p.22), but the idea of “seeing” the inside of bodies in an image was more daring than believing in the appearance of spirits materialised at the most in soft ectoplasm.
A new species of ghost appeared that evening in Roentgen’s studio; more real that reality, not a hallucination but an astonishing reality with which not only science but also the imagination had to reckon.
The result was a hidden scenario miraculously projected on a screen, like the photosensitive “mirror” in “Giphantie” – and likewise the image was retained indelible and binding – yet revealing mysterious marks, though shadows of reality; projections of a hyper-reality so magical that they soon stimulated artists too, especially in the Twenties, when Moholy-Nagy or Ray (but also Heartfield in his photomontages) tried to escape the banal “objectivity” of photography, exploring an unknown world, in experimental quests for new dimensions of “vision”, a world of infinite shadows that imposed novel forms, that were strange and even improbable, and in any case, that came from “beyond”.
Likewise today, Renato Meneghetti, who for some time now has embarked on a radioscopic voyage as fantastic as Alice’s, even if it is so often dramatic or at least disturbing, outlines an itinerary in the occult of objective reality that it concluded, as it should, in the anxious orgasm of the artwork, in its own cry of visible and readable light.
Roentgen immediately presented the scientific paper on that “new type of ray” to the Secretary of the Physics and Medical association of the University of Wurzburg, and the world, the world of scientists and magicians, was endowed with new powers, appropriating the fascination of images that seemed to some like “effluves humains” as Santini defined them in an essay on the subject at the beginning of the Twentieth Century (3 A,Santini, Photographie des effluves humains, Mendel, Paris, s.d.) describing daring theories on “electric fluids”, “astral bodies” and “auras” the latter was revived by Kirnian in paranormal research and he called them “living auras”.
The occult is at the summit of a religion that investigates the unknown, unseen or not sensed (the artist knows how though) spaces, in the space of the infinitely small as in the infinitely large, where landscapes are confused with pure thought, beyond everyday life that can seem to some, as to Meneghetti, unsatisfactory, or at any rate partial.
This is the spiritualistic anxiety – perhaps also implicated in Renato Meneghetti’s aesthetic experimentation -; the curiosity that brought Crookes, Lombroso and Capuana to visit the medium Eusapia Paladino and her parapsychological “ultra-terrestrialness”; Roentgen’s rays offered a great new energy to spiritualist theories, beyond certain fairground shows, where a poor soul posed in a shack for money before a radiological screen so that visitors could admire his ribs like a living skeleton stripped of his flesh.
Tales of times past, but with Renato Meneghetti’s artistic voyage they share, above all, their curiosity for mystery, what is more, the demanding search for the fundamental emblems of life, exactly there where it would seem to have vanished.
“The photographs in darkness –wrote Antonio Pappalardo about spiritualist photographs in 1910 – are supporting evidence that the elements from which these materialised forms are made go completely outside that which is known to us (…) how can we explain how a photograph can be taken in total darkness of a body that has projected onto a plate, rays that are invisible to us?” (4 A. Papalardo, Spiritism, Hoerpli, Milan 1910, p. 114), yet Pappalardo knew, was acquainted with Roentgen’s discovery, he insisted on believing that those shadows came from the “beyond”, at least those obtained during some bogus sitting-room séance in which he ingenuously wished to “believe”.
“How can we explain it - he insisted – if it is against all the laws of nature that we know; and, it is so true that we are dealing with a light we do not perceive, that there is no trace on the plate where the ghost’s photograph has appeared, of the surrounding objects…”(5 – ibdem) Papalardo’s reflections would seem to also be on the “aesthetics” of image; they deal with the image “devoid of its surroundings”, of the “objects that surround it”, observations that are implicit in Meneghetti’s work. Meneghetti is, however, conscious of the troubled path he has taken among the forms of the invisible, where he “chooses”, “isolates”, “cuts” and “assembles” the pieces he needs to narrate, also searching for a little magic among the fragments. In fact above all it is in this, if it is there, that his concept of art and poetry lies.
This technique of “manipulated” x-rays that Renato Meneghetti practices so particularly and so passionately – a technique that I find to be central and salient in his eclectic artistic being: painter, sculptor, designer…, frequently “contaminated” by photography – and indeed often poetry, especially where, as Gillo Dorfles has written, the stimulus from which the artist could, and can, draw highly imaginative inspiration. The primitive “plate” is in turn transformed into portrait, abstract composition, but also into landscape…” (6 – G. Dorfles, Radiografie, x-rays, Meneghetti, Never edizioni, Padova 2000, p.6).
Images that reveal the faces of aliens, mysterious landscapes, drawn at times rather than from x-rays of the human body, from wood fibres x-rayed, or sections of a tree trunk, or yet other things that here exist in another reality – corpselike it would seem in their underground – never simply iconic, in any case beyond any persecutory or scientific intention. That bone, that splinter, that structure, that texture of fibres made radiographically transparent is transferred and appears transfigured into the empyrean of pure images, though often revealing, or rather signaling, emblems and meanings of earthliness; like a hallucination or at least a dream - which can also be a nightmare, as after all some of the titles of Meneghetti’s works suggest.
“On the edge of the third millennium” is a title that stands for all in synthesis; it is almost apocalyptic, like the waving of shroud-like standards, or the inflamed transparency of plexiglas x-rays that cross one another in Meneghetti’s recent gigantic installations, both airy and scenographic.
In 1931 Auguste Lumiére, in the preface to Auguste leprince’s essay “Les Rediations Humains”, considered the possibility that “our knowledge of numerous phenomena does not in fact correspond to reality and the principles on which we base certain observations will be more or less changed in the future…” (7 A. Lumiére, in A. Leprince, Les Radiations Humaines, Legrand, Paris 1931, p. 11); it has happened, and it will always be so.
Artists have always contributed to this “knowledge” with their specific imagination, without which on the other hand there would be no creativity, not even scientific creativity.
In this sense photography is emblematic of the marriage of science and art, indeed it was the first artistic discipline that was a consequence of scientific research (apart from an ancestral dream: to catch a shadow), achieved by means of chemistry and physics. In fact Arago immediately defined the daguerreotype as “art and science”, when he presented it to the Academy of Science and Fine Arts at a meeting in Paris, that fateful 19th August 1839, when France gave the “marvellous invention” as “a gift to the world”. From that day onwards “artists would have to reckon with it”
One of the first reporters of the event declared, probably inspired by the phrase of Dalaroche: “as from today, painting is dead”.
Painting did not die, but certainly had to immediately take photography into consideration. Today there is an ever-growing number of “exchanges” and “contaminations” etc. they take place before our eyes - including the most reactionary, like some Italian critics for whom photography is, if anything, a useful servant of painting, what is more its “humble” servant, as Baudelaire put it in his famous (though ironic) attack of 1859.
Arago’s dreams (at the time even the portrait of a man seemed “impossible” to obtain because of the long “pose” needed) came true one by one: instant photography, colour, cinema and all the rest that absorb us completely today, television and internet as well.
We are in the age of icons, this we know, but perhaps we do not realise that it all began in that fateful 1839 with the inventions of Daguerre-Niépce and Talbot, which also coincided with the beginning of a travel adventure, of speed, with the first railways; in Italy the first was the Naples-Portici line, also in 1839, almost a metaphor of the modern age.
From the visible daguerreotype (but was it really visible to the naked eye, this detail revealed by the daguerreotype, by the calotype and then by the collodium, fixed onto plate and paper and further enlarged with the aid of a lens?), the graphic revolution of the invisible had arrived. Firstly – amazing, spectacular and magical – with Roentgen’s discovery, seeming to permit introspection into the soul of man.
And it is indeed this that Renato Meneghetti tends to suggest with his pictorial-radiographic elaborations. They sublimate an idea of absolute reality to the point of almost surpassing the objective data on the plate, with the precise aim of revealing hidden countenances and expressions, uncovered by means of amphibious images of pure creativity, constructed by starting from scientific magic and reaching artistic magic, which in the end is the only magic that counts, also for Meneghetti.
He seems to sense that inside the x-ray – but even more so in the intimate “invisible” that dwells beyond its emblematic realism – there is energy, the same energy that Leprince, in the volume cited above, described as “energie vitale” and Santini, more daringly, as “effluves humains” (6 A. Santini, op cit. in the title) trying even to find photographic images by transmission of thought.
These are mysteries that the American scientist Elmer Gates tried to explain – in 1906 he analysed some stellar phenomena, though of “animate material” not immobile - in this case he observed them through ultraviolet rays – sustaining, almost paradoxically, that “a living substance projects a shadow, while the same substance, once it is dead no longer projects it”.
He concluded by maintaining that only “the soul, subjected to those mysterious rays, will stop them at their passage and produce a shadow” (cfr. S.i.A. “I raggi ultra-violetti” in “il Dilettante di fotografia”, Milan, Nov 1906, p. 4318) Gates showed such fantasy, even too much, yet it seems, though legitimately delirious, the fantasy of an artist.
Renato Meneghetti, for his part, also searches for the “soul” in the transparency of radiographic invisibility, and, as we have said, he discovers signs that seem to be those of a dream, at times of a nightmare. He draws out profane shrouds of unknown or mutating persons, and self-portraits. From minute anatomic details filtered by radiation and then enlarged, processed and pictorially or chemically fixed, the image, which was once “latent” within the “object” is concretised onto its medium.
Shrouds of cosmic “structures” pinpointed in the body of a man, or in that of a tree, as long as it is an invitation to complete the image in a work that has every right to be called pictorial. Despite the “passage” through photography, rather through the more sophisticated and mysterious radiography, artists are taught to “see beyond”, as the microscope taught microphotography or the telescope with astronomic photography; the “very small” and the “very big”, in this case they learn to see the “totally invisible”.
Renato Meneghetti seems to see these images as if they were “in different layers”, choosing only that which most interests him; even if in this case, unconsciously perhaps, Meneghetti asks himself questions that had also raised the curiosity of scientists a few months after Roentgen’s discovery: they asked if “Roentgen’s rays can cross a great number of overlapping sensitive layers producing the same effect in all of them” while “ordinary light, after having produced the latent image on a plate, does not react, one can say, on another plate put into contact with the first…” (9 – cfr. R. Namias, I cardini chimici della moderna fotografia, in “Bollettini mensile del Circolo Fotografico Lombardo”, Milan, Dec. 1896, p. 187)
Meneghetti’s aim at this point ceases to be “scientific”; what matters is the “aesthetic” result, or at any rate the narrative aspect, which always seems to tend towards melancholy, if not to an actual Apocalypse, searching everywhere for dramatic expressions like humanity disinterred.
And these images come from afar living as they do in the layers of the x-ray and blossoming from the artists subsequent alchemy: with alcohol, alcoholic inks on acetate plates, on pigmented canvass, on specially sensitised canvasses etc. They free the author in the end from the primary “realistic” references of the x-ray, allowing for the definitive transfiguration that is “painting” and nothing else.
In seems useless, yet again, to mention the inevitable “contamination or exchange” between photography and the other arts.
The “aberration” of photography has finally become, as Gio Ponti recalled in 1932 “our own reality: indeed it is, for many reasons, our conscience, and therefore our judgement” (10 – cfr. G. Ponti, Discorso sull’arte fotografico, in Domus, IV, 5, Milan, May 1932, now in I. Zannier, Leggere la fotografia, NIS-Carrocci, Rome 1993, p.88).
In any case a French scholar wrote: “La magniphique découvert du Professeur Poentgen a dejà inspiré de nombreux écrivains” about a year after the discovery of the x-ray; “A une époque ou tout le mond recourt à la chambre noir, ou tant de gens possèdent Kodaks, détectives, photo-jumelles, vérascopes, etc., beaucoup auront, sans doute, la curiosité d’appliquer leur outillage usuel à la photografie de l’invisible…” (11 – A. Hérbert, La Tecnique des Rayons X, Bibliothèque de la Revue générale des sciences, Paris 1897, p. 111)
Renato Meneghetti’s work is medium-like, and yet, as in the last lines of a “La bella di Lodi” by Arbasino: “smiling at the photographer for a picture postcard” his postcard recalls an invisible and still wondrous “beyond”, delineated in the alchemistic enigmatic laboratory of the “soul”

Italo Zannier