The idea to prepare this book was conceived with Achille already in 1999, the proposal was to compare the work of a great artist to the most potent image machine of our time: advertising. And with Renato Meneghetti it seemed to proceed very well given that he dealt with advertising professionally for over thirty years, and for thirty years admen have looked to his work, stealing an idea here and there, a sensation, a play on forms and colours, as we can see from the catalogue. But the whole thing took a different turn because Renato Meneghetti could not care less about advertising. These pearls taken form a dialogue recorded on seventeen cassettes, held in Bassano in March 2001, are a unique countermelody to everything that the book sets out to demonstrate.
T. T.
Title: THE HEAVY IMAGE
1977 – 2002 Comparative study of advertising and art.
X-rays in art and advertising.

R. M. - … Yes, Fontana was luminous landing place for me in Milan, in the late sixties, when my grandmother still played canasta ... a frequent thing in bars those days... like palette as well; we had it at the oratorio in Bassano too. Table-football lasted longer...

T.T. – Fontana, you were saying...

R.M. - Ah, Fontana... a port from which to set sail for deep waters … even if, with results that did not satisfy me much anymore... Waters I would prefer not to have sailed. There is a part of my collection that I have often thought of burning…

T. T. – That is to say?

R.M – The space… that I sought in working on multiple plains, in sculpture; varying material, in painting… A matter of forced and jutting perspectives, as in encaustics, or of density if you like, because also the monotypes, on which I worked really hard, were a means of varying the depth of the image. And the same occurs with optical matters, it is above all graphic amusement …

T. T. – Where depth is equal to light…

R.M. – In a binary exchange where it is sufficient to grade from light to dark, or vice versa because the point of escape is not of an obligatory colour: think of a tunnel where light is returned by the exit or a cave where the final distance of light, the extreme depth is precisely that black that is completely closed off to vision… two ways of seeing the same cone, cut off or not. But then I did not deal with light and perspective in this sense. In any case it was not sufficient for me. You know, now I think that the cone could be turned in the opposite sense, in a divergent perspective... Or that vision would follow along its walls, not simply crossing the void, aimed at a single point…

T.T. – Indeed, your paintings work on nuance, more sensation than idea.

R.M. –Idea? History, philosophy, politics, they interest me very little indeed; or not at all: constructions made of words in which I had fallen, like many contesters. There too there were no great results …

T. T. – Are you referring to the phagocytizers?

R.M. – A painting has to convince you, possess you despite its meaning.

T.T. – Because if not, it is not a painting, it is an obstruction of space, a visual annoyance? In the best of cases it is something indifferent? Like that sculpture that Parmeggiani remembered seeing placed in front of a Gothic church, the rubbish bin… It is a great illusion to think that things have a sense of their own accord.

R.M. – It is a greater illusion to think that the sum of senseless things has some sort of sense. And I have always found that the ground rule of sociology rather curious whereby what counts is only the relationship between a and b, when a exists and b exists, and the only thing that does not exist is that relationship: a verbal sophism, to indicate that our perception of reality is synaesthetic. An object has colour, odour, consistency and so on, but because it has been absolved by our senses and is not there for us, this does not mean it does not exist at all. A blind man can trip up even if he does not see the obstacle.

T.T. – But he would feel it…

R.M. – He would fall down even if he could not feel it. And a poison is no less effective if we do not recognise its taste or odour.

T.T. – But a complete absence of sensations….

R.M. – It is not given to us, unless with the blessing of Epicurus, after death: this great infinit du silence, sa immensité noir, from which the Lazarus of French literature did not wish to be liberated. But painting is more like Dionysian plenitude, an excess of sensitivity and a sensual matter, almost sexual…

T.T. – A crystal, a prism...

R.M. – Material, more than material, quintessence. As the sea when you feel the depth and not the rippling surface, painting is the quest for the equal superior to distinctions; the extreme obscures the particular… Painting is experiencing the extreme, experiencing the extremity: which is then, the only way to fathom this sphere of infinite radius that is the universe of Nicola di Chiusa. Who really loved bread and salami…

T.T. – delicious, with plenty of grappa. Which brings on sleep and the best dreams; which you live by day without any distinction of what is lawful or possible.

R.M. – If you are inebriated you can meditate and try to fly. Painting is a sort of intoxication; and it is no less dangerous.

T.T. – (Gets up and walks like a tightrope walker) you live on a tightrope, with the risk of falling. Without a net if you really live… it is the game of all literary persons…

R.M. – Because you live with words… a string of letters, an entire alphabet making up irrelevant forms. I love only the sound in poems.

T.T. – Like those who claim to understand texts in languages they do not know…

R.M. – There is one who is an art critic, and he thinks you need a match to illuminate a raging fire.

T.T. – You do not have a good opinion of the critics; I mean the poetic ability of the art critic.

R.M. – (takes up an underlined photocopy)

T.T. – Envy, my friend. Because a good part of your work is waiting for an exegete …

R.M. – many times we see just what we hope to see. I fell in love once with a girl, she seemed so clear-cut to me, so stable…

T.T. : And so?

R.M.- She was a lesbian.

T.T. – Sorry!?

R.M. – A lesbian... would what you call a rose by any other name smell less sweet?

T.T. – You cannot do without good manners.

R.M. – You can, when it is an empty form, air pushing air... Sometimes to justify ourselves we invent very complicated things. When it is so simple to understand that there is an order. And if you do not understand it… remember the advert where a stupid boy pushes a paraplegic into a tunnel in a sphere?

T.T. – Perhaps you have missed two or three centuries of thinking.

R.M. – I have never made an issue out of being modern.

T.T. – Yet a lot of your work is social criticism... you are a continuous contradiction... the part you played in ‘68, you took part in the student revolution at Padua university, and also your correspondence in sense and letters with Guiducci and Nonis and others of those who were at the fringe of the academy, of official institutions, of the church …

R.M. – I spent a lot time elaborating on “money, dung of the devil”. And they were years when I earned a lot. For some time now I deal with other things and I no longer suffer the stench. I did not run away because of political reasons, it was for aesthetic reasons.

T.T. – Yes, you do not deal with politics it seems. Except for a very convenient militancy in Forza Italia, your support for Sgarbi’s campaign in the last elections, I think.

R.M. – Do you think it bad. I am friendly with a lot of people whose political opinions I know nothing about. And I stay friendly with people who have opinions I do not share. You know, I have very little consideration for these things. And I am horrified by those who distinguish people by uniforms... uniforms, perhaps too serious a word for today’s distinctions.

T.T. – Yet ideology is only a bad way of writing ideas, when there is some sort of coherence between them. Perhaps today there are none, but you cannot tell me that you are not interested in the ideas of the people you know, that you speak with, with whom you publish books…

R.M. – I go to the bakers to buy bread and to the barber for a haircut. And I am interested in nothing more than their activity. I do not ask for their membership cards or treatises on philosophy. Friendship, after all, is a matter of trust.

T.T – A curse of philosophy in human relations.

R.M. – A eulogy of common sense. Which would have much sense in opinions on art.

T.T. – Contemplation. Which would be the absence of judgement for you, I suppose.

R.M. – Some submit artworks to our awareness, to our taste, in the sense of a historical category. When we are before a masterpiece, however, it is the image that imposes itself on our mind: the observer, who has eyes to see, or ears to hear, is simply overcome and is brought back to a superior life of images that stands before him. In the end, enjoying a work of art is like is like having a good banquet, enjoying food without worrying about who cooked it and what the ingredients are.

T.T. – You are really incorrigible! So nothing at all can be said about the artwork.

R.M. – Indeed what can be shown cannot be said.

T.T. – The dominion of the image and that of the word. But surely they can have some common areas?

R.M. – When you are sad you tend to use certain forms and colours. And a painter born into a certain civilization that privileges red will be unlikely to paint only in blue. But what is of interest is not your little world – your civilization, your mood: it is why I look at your painting, when you have been dead a thousand years and there is nothing left of your misery, This breath that cannot be suffocated is the “common area”.

T.T. – On the other hand you can observe an object of art isolating its forms, examining the relations between its colours, looking for that “golden section” which moves the spectator…

R.M. – A work is not the sum of its parts. It is an indissoluble unit, separate from the world around it, indifferent to the spectator. Setting out the recipe of a painting, - so much pepper, a pinch of salt, a drop of oil, two sautéed fennels – would be tantamount to not having enough spirit to grasp the entire image.

T.T. – Reasons for paradoxes, at times entertaining, at the most useless. Because if you look at the last Titian if you do not notice that the light burns the image and that the colour is almost consumed, and that this happens because of a technical process employed by the painter, it simply means that you do not observe.

R.M. - No, it means that I do not reason in front of the artwork. Because among other things I am not interested in that little expedient – the means whereby Titian’s sprit, or another spirit became form; but precisely that spirit and that form. And there is no sense for me in general theories on colours, the contrast between grey and poikilia…

T.T. – Which moreover, influenced Bernardo di Clervaux a lot as well, like you he was a strange mixture of traditionalism, purism, intolerance and hyper-activism.

R.M. – He railed against rose windows because natural light contained all the colours. And then they made him a saint.

T.T. – Frankly I believe you cannot aspire to that!

R.M. – I have had a good knowledge of the sphere of sin. I did not get free of it. And everything that I said about money being the fuel of a social mechanism that devours mankind, I understood because I had participated fully, consciously. As an alcoholic can speak about his vice, in other words.

T.T. – Those were the days of your advertising agency. Carried out with brilliant results it seems.

R.M. – Yes. Twenty years in which I led a double life, by day obedience, therefore despising the image, of commercialised genius: in fact I painted by night, or during breaks. But there was not all that much distance after all. It is like when you hate and love the same girl.

T.T. – But dealing with advertising is not like prostitution. There have always been commissions and they have often dictated a theme – whatever, a portrait, the life of a saint, a theological representation. And the freedom of invention is no less, if the objective has already been established: only it is a bit more difficult to obtain an original result.

R.M. – A good advertising agent has to be versatile and effective, to handle different material, connected with different “traditions” of image and aimed at different audiences. It is a matter of saying, in a few seconds, buy it because it is the product you need; and it is here, right at your fingertips. A painter seeks depth, he needs time for contemplation, to shift attention onto what you would like to forget and it gives you back an image of what is not here, not right at your fingertips: he deals with pain, death, eternity. The horizon onto which he projects his existence is the sunset; material takes on the consistency of shadow, everything is ready to fail at any moment, because failure is the truly the intimate nature of things: not only because they are destined for destruction, but because destruction is constantly working in them, and for every one of us, for every object, for creation in its extreme bounds, life is a candle that gives off light as its consumes itself and dies.

T.T. – You have also done cinema so you are not against image in motion, that is you accept the idea of “speedy contemplation”. And it is undeniable that the quality of communication, the depth of many advertising campaigns is superior to a lot of great filmmaking: those twenty seconds really demand extreme concentration of technical and poetic means. Of those that are currently on TV there is one for jeans that I find exceptional: two kids who running, break through dozens of walls one after another, they fly through a forest and climb very high trees fresh as ever finally they reach the sky, with a movement that almost recalls the ancient catasterisms, the Coma Berenices whatever, and deep down it is an image from erotic life and the desire for freedom, that wins over all constrictions, from social limits to the force of gravity.

R.M. – Over the last years advertising has tried more and more to tell of extreme situations – like a short film – with the result that most people do not remember the name of the product advertised, just like what has happened to you now with those trousers. This is in fact an example of where the conveyance of a commercial message is incompatible with a work of art, which – when it is there – coincides with the pure part of the film or the graphic layout of a poster. Many campaigns, offering product images with the objective of presenting it at a form of climax, tend instead to force the product out. And in any case if the two young people were to stop before their jump into the sky the clip would be much better. We tried to express such a feeling, wanting to be free and at the same time be in communion with the world, with the embrace of a couple under the rain for the digestive Jörge... the flavour recalled vegetation and moist earth... that sense of warmth of skin against skin...

T.T. – Naturally I remember it. It belonged to a golden period of advertising – seen also, for example in Carosello - where the product was the protagonist of the message, without however being degraded.

R.M. – In Carosello the spot lasted one minute, where for three quarters no illusion was made to the product, it was only towards the end that the product was openly advertised: an old rule that dies hard as you see. And in any case I don’t know if we would appreciate those adverts today, freed from a certain nostalgia for our younger years. For an artist it was entertaining, but not an objective: like for a cartoonist to produce vignettes.

T.T. – And so on Philip Morris, Romeo Gigli, Levis, Bluvertigo, Richmond and the others that are in this book, inspired by you…

R.M. - “Images of many gods and goddesses, here dead before me”. However, poetry apart, I have little or no interest in the relationship between art and advertising. I have already dealt with it to the point of boredom in aura viandante. And in any case I think that advertising is the pure communication of a commercial message, which tries to present itself at its best by leaning on art: two areas that are physically close but not relatives, lacking any communication between them that goes beyond a common expedient or technical means: the voiceover, the video camera, the team. In America during the fifties and sixties there were some very famous advertising tunes and they were whistled everywhere. But in this case too of apparent coincidence between artwork and advertising message, where there was an artwork, it was the rhythm and sound, totally independent from the image of tennis shoes or the latest snack.

T.T. – What I meant to say is that advertising is often inspired by, if you like, “pure” art, and between them there is a relationship. If this were not the case there would be no sense in this study.

R.M. – There are works of art that are extraordinarily communicative: I am thinking for example of the “L'Origine du monde” by Courbet, these two thighs of a woman spread open, everything visible, a huge scandal at the time… In this sense you can believe that art, with its statute of extraterritoriality – for that same opportunity to express which was given to the madmen of ancient times, divinely inspired and therefore superior to ordinary morality – opens new roads for others to take. Other times, in a more prosaic manner, interest coincides: In ‘76 Virginie made use of some of my paintings from ’68. As I see it, the artist is simply more sensitive and senses sooner that which in a short time will belong to everyone; or that already belongs to everyone but has yet to be perceived. For example, it is obvious that the x-ray image has belonged to a vast part of humanity over the last fifty years at least, since it has become an everyday medical practice, yet nobody noticed what had been right under his or her nose for such a long time. I can give you another example: cubism. In a mechanical society, the society of the cog in movement, the superimposition of squared and broken images was really the most obvious thing. Yet artists noticed this long before advertising agents: they simply explained to the masses that had lived through that time without realising it. So the artist, after all, is a sensitive fellow and in this sense he seems to be almost a prophet, he anticipates fashions and customs, tastes and trends: which are all inconsistent things. But if you are standing before Virgil or Giotto, or Picasso, the issue is totally different and you see vinegar, the dregs of the bottle and the mother who gives you vinegar, that is to say those usual matters that make your mornings bitter and that have embittered every man under the sun for several million years.

T.T. – So art has a liberating sense and the artist, if you like – I am saying something I will regret now – is a bit like a psychologist who tells you what you fear.

R.M. – I do not know. I think that the artist worries very little about the public and in the end is not even fully in control of the images he creates with his own hands.

T.T. – “2001 A space Odyssey” has really anticipated much of what we now have. Perhaps it is still ahead of our times… It seems to me to be a singular example of what you are talking about.

R.M. –Verne said so much about us in his unfinished booklet, in 1864 I think, “Paris in the Twentieth Century”, where he imagined the French capital in 1960. It was a success when it was found and published by Hachette in ’94. However, when it is writing, in its various forms – the novel, or the screenplay – things are immediately different. Fantasy extends to the extreme desires of man, for example to reach the moon, overcoming technical defects simply with daring images, it remains a play on words and can be with a cannon or on Astolfo’s horse that terrestrial skies are pierced. In painting it is a different matter, and a painting with such a solution would be simply surreal or descriptive. Painting demands a different level of truth and it usually deals with much less limited and concrete matters: it is so even when celebrating the foundation of a city or the glories of a townsman or sovereign. Painting – I tell you - is this space of myth, it belongs also to ancient poetry: this is why the Iliad feels much truer than Ariosto. And myth is that shadow area between light and darkness, a blurred, undefined shadow, whose real nature evades you and takes part in two opposite worlds.

T.T. – So you give it the role of the raven, the merchant of doom and gloom, the announcer of secret truths with its cavernous voice. Or of the owl, a night animal so close too to your idea of clearly representing that which others have seen but not understood. But I think that your argument has been stolen for the most part form philosophy.

R.M. – Painting as the merchant of doom and gloom? It is the first time I have heard such a comparison: I imagine it more as an ancilla bona or, what could we say, a misleading siren. But the raven is also a guiding spirit and I deal a lot with spirits. Perhaps this is why I have investigated the x-ray. When it was first discovered it was considered a photograph of the soul or of actual ghosts.

T.T. – From some of your installations and from Insania especially you came across as a promoter of dark cults. Even if, to tell the truth, in a rather theatrical manner, a little bloated… of tin, if I may.

R.M. A lot of our life is spent preparing for something like a climax. For this reason every artist aspires to live exclusively off his own works: little, if you look at it in extension, on the surface, everything, if you look at the height, the depth: what in Latin was named with a single term!

T.T. – Altitudo.

R.M. – Altitudo. Which has little to do in effect with my collection of African masks.

T.T. – Which has however at least a dozen really impressive pieces. Though I do not see the connection with this mania of yours for collecting masks, or carpets and painting.

R.M. – perhaps there is none. And however masks and carpets are both ritual objects, connected with ceremony and prayer, both are able to move one, the first within a sacred space, the second, actually changing your features, into another body. Naturally the fullness of these two instruments lies in the flying carpet – a metaphor for the separation between flesh and spirit, or if you like of winged thoughts turned towards the heavens – and the mask behind which no face is hidden: it itself can and wants, it coincides with a representation that is so strong that it makes reality completely useless, non-existent. They are both aspirations of the artist.

T.T.: - You have a constant wish to explain yourself and deny yourself behind metaphors, as if at a certain moment you recognise your failings. As if you were looking for and at the same time running from support. It is a sort of seesaw between the survival instinct and constant insecurity. I spoke about this with ABO. You know, this need of yours for abundance, of wider approval, of exhibitions, catalogues, texts, reveals a basic lack of confidence in your work…

R.M. – This is an old story. By character I tend to overdo things. For a long time I had to fight alone, even my mother tried to deny me painting taking away my paints. I had to improvise canvasses with fruit boxes and cloth; and make colour by mixing kitchen oil with earth and weeds from the countryside near home. Then, work kept me away from the easel for decades and I will not hide the fact that now that I have abandoned everything for my family and for painting, I feel the weight and difficulty of such a choice, and a phrase of my mother’s often rings in my mind: “Renato, all artists die of hunger”.

T.T. – That is certainly not your case.

R.M. – It is to say that still today I do not know if I have made the right choice, and along the way I do not want to be alone, so as not to turn back, not to fall into the suspicion that all this business is a fraud that I have set up for myself, to tell me that I will not be buried entirely and so soon, that in some way what is of most importance for me will extend its life still for five hundred or a thousand years: more or less the life of a painting. Because…

T.T. - … Optimist! Your paintings, to put it mildly, have conservation problems …

R.M. – at the end of the day I cannot judge my works on my own; as a father cannot judge his children, without the risk of preferring the worst because it is connected to a moment of life or because it made me suffer more and makes me feel that there is more in it. You were saying?

T.T. – Among other things, that your paintings fear light… and those who do not look after them properly risk seeing the image turn all grey, after a few years, as if the colour had evaporated or was consumed.…

R.M. – Yes. It depends on the composition of the alcohol colour. We have come up with a chemical formula that overcomes this problem. In any case it is enough to be careful like a good collector of drawings, place the painting far from direct sources of light, when screened glass is not used. Of course, it is still difficult for museums – which exhibit the paintings under continuous light for years – and during exhibitions, which need very strong lighting, even of for a short period. But in this case, however, it is enough to be watchful. In the end I find it poetic that these canvasses, destined to seek the light still fear it, and that the painting exemplifies our common destiny so well, to return to ash.

T.T. – And the serpent, that closes in a circle and becomes a symbol of life and dearth at the same time. You play on this ambivalence. I am referring especially to your installations with the heads of children, or the work you are preparing in Afghanistan. By the way what point is it at?

R.M. – We have found the location, around Jalalabad. I do not know how they will manage to find Bin Laden, because the whole country is like Swiss cheese and the boarder with Pakistan effectively does not exist. However we have a choice of four, five bunkers, one of them – full of celebrating people when the Twin Towers were destroyed – will be filled with coins Bin, Bush, Judas.

T.T. - Bin Bush?

R.M. – When you go there and your see the tribes of militia ready to be killed, responsible for 50,000 civilian deaths in Kabul alone over five years and you compare it to the 50 taleban executions, however atrocious, you begin to doubt our great generosity, our new war of vengeance and humanity. Frankly, if there were not a president like Karzai, it would already be hell. Because you will have noticed that there is no Pakistan and no Afghanistan, just a huge Pashtoon state, on the boarder between the two, where Peshawar is the capital and Karzai guarantee.

T.T. – You see how much you like ambiguity and nuance and how you play on it? Here too, through an operation that is half way between social accusation and publicity, without letting us understand which side you are. You must be careful not to fall into the third figure, Judas, because someone might say to you “do you betray me with a kiss?”

R.M. – What do you mean?

T.T. – I mean that after refusing an artistic solution for advertising you cannot send me off with an advertising solution for art. And speculating then, in a world context on the lives of people who are dead, on one and the other side of our little paradise, Europe.

R.M. – Of course, the victims of New York are not worth more than those in Afghanistan, even if their end was worse, closed into a sardine tin, the body of a plane or in a skyscraper waiting to collapse, surrounded by flames, without any possible defence, without being dazzled by honour or faith. Simply leaves ripped off.

T.T. – I am not asking you for a political justification, or a proof of compassion …

R.M. – Please excuse me, I was thinking back on those last messages… I happened to read them on a newspaper. My work, filling a mouth of terror with false money, represents the earnings that terrorists have had – in terms of credit in the Arab world – and the American economy – in terms of a boom, especially in the arms sector. And anyhow, it is quite ridiculous not to ask oneself what could have happened in the five hours when, on 11 September, the Pentagon, was isolated.

T.T. – What happened?

R.M. – I do not know. I am asking.

T.T. – However this has nothing to do with our subject.

R.M. – And what would that be?

T.T. –Sincerity in the artwork.

R.M. – You mean the legitimacy of provocation? Provocation by definition is affected, construed, but it is not insincere when it touches sensitive issues, open wounds, raw nerves. Thus, sincere does not mean naïve. Even if only a “naïve” artwork, born purely so to speak, infinitely distant from the world and even from its creator, can aspire to the stature of a masterpiece. It has a breath that goes way beyond our little attempts to catch out breath.

T.T.: On the other hand, my friend, you will not deny that Guernica is a masterpiece; and you will not tell me that it has nothing to do with its time, as it is the strongest and most excruciating image of the Second War. Naturally I could say the same of Grant Wood’s American Gothic or David or coming to us, Cattelan.

R.M. You see that a painting is not something distinct from the canvass, from colour, from the frame it is made of. Let us say that this is a canvass, this colour, this frame all set out in a certain manner. This certain manner in which the material is set out forming a certain object was what Aristotle called sinolo, that is the indissoluble union of matter and form. And after you have admired this learned explanation I have given, I will tell you that the artwork is also made of the concreteness of history, just as it is made of matter, and in a precise manner, which is out of proportion, the eye set towards eternity: the artwork is infinity made concrete or if you like the concrete projected into infinity. When you look at the “Baptism of Christ” by Leonardo, that image taken wholly, no longer faces, feet, water, background, clothes, net even any longer the baptism of Christ: wonder overcomes you, you are simply nothing standing before that image, you live in its reflection. What need to know the author, the time the technique? Does the Scribe’s head found at Giza, that piece of stone that has been dated around 2540, lose its importance because the author is unknown? What about that marvellous bronze sovereign’s head – I would die to have it in my collection – found at Ife, in Nigeria? You could ask yourself how you could have lived without having seen it. And how you can live without contemplating it endlessly. And yet, Borges was right, beauty is not rare. This is to tell you that it is something other than history, other than what is miserably concrete that takes hold of us before a masterpiece, and it is precisely when we try to approach it with fussy research that we are going in the wrong direction.

T.T. – So for the second time you have had a go at whoever tries philology, attempts to understand with some effort.

R.M. – Precisely, to understand art requires no effort. Because the artwork concedes itself, like grace, mysteriously and there is no effort that allows one to earn its contemplation: you cannot become sensitive.

T.T. – So all our culture, our knowledge is completely useless.

R.M. – If you mean knowledge as a dictionary that you leaf through, providing you with models and guidelines for your thought, well, then it has a sense. But think how much of a book can be read by a blind man, or how much of a speech can be heard by a deaf man. This nothing is the same void left by an artwork in an insensitive man. And so you understand that the entire world, the seasons, the animals, the sea can become poetry in the soul of a person who has the inclination, and you do not need to consult the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, you do not need to go through the entire Aeneid to create three good verses. After all Homer had no need for Virgil and Sapho would have created a marvellous epithalamium from observing a purple lily even without the whole ancient age. So you see that culture is at the most a closet in the universal gymnasium where sensibility is exercised.

T.T. – It is so difficult to write the history of art if you are aware that every work of art is born so far away from history. Thanks to an intimate, secret, impenetrable feeling.

R.M. – Behind a painting there is always that small sensation, usually the reflection of pain. Of a hope sometimes. If hope could ever precede pain.

T.T. – Certainly we hope when there is a reason to do so. And there is never a happy reason for hoping. Even Advent is waiting for the end of pain, if not of history. The entire process of the universe is marked by this universal pain, even when a solution is hoped for at the end.

R.M. – However, much hope is humanity’s north star. You follow it so as to reach a port, when to be wrecked on the rocks would be much better.

T.T. – How your voice has changed. You seem very upset...

R.M. – Because I am waving the flag of Silenus: that it is preferable for a man not to have been born? It is something that everyone knows intuitively yet nobody takes the resolution. Michaelstadter cut it short, but perhaps it was because of love sickness. Behind all the words written in “Persuasion and Rhetoric”, I do not think he decided scientifically. I have a friend in Milan who decided not to have children so as to break the circle of pain. A different way of seeking happiness to the point of desperation.

T.T. – There would be the option of living serenely...

R.M. – But that is something for the wise, something completely outside of my league! (in a ringing voice).

T.T. – There is something very curious... it is that we can understand the feelings of others but we cannot feel them. Feelings cannot be propagated and the face is like the surface of a very deep sea: you will never reach the dark depths. This is perhaps solitude.

R.M. – This is why, when you think of the sea, it is much better if you think of Rimini.

T.T. – Are you telling me that it is better to be a miserable soul...

R.M. – That it is better not to understand, my friend. Not to understand...

T.T. – Not even the reason why one gets dunk... When what is really strange is that there is an abundance of reasons why one should go on, like love, the desire for knowledge...

R.M. – Without end … (singing a song).

T.T. – And then this underlying melancholia in your character, something that Achille understood very well. You know, while reading his essay I thought he had exaggerated somewhat; but now...

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a mobile phone vibrates

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T.T. – Sorry, I’ll turn it off immediately.

R.M. – It has a nice line.

T.T. – By the way do you no longer do design?

R.M. – No. And I think that my sculptures are individually far from such things. First of all they are not useful for anything.

T.T. – Even if the coins for your Pietra del Vituperio have a strong flavour of design.

R.M. – Indeed I consider it to be no more than a game. My sculptures are wind, shadow, stone…And in the end the sea, fog, in this forest of flags that flutter confused, red at sunset. Also the palms… You know that the impression of smoke is so strong when looking at some of them.

T.T. – and so the idea of the concentration camps came into your mind...

R.M. – Maybe I always thought of it. It was a very strong image for me. Like eyes, very often I start out from an eye. And in my eyes I have the roses of Jalalabad... among the 4000 metre high mountains... perhaps an artwork is born that way, from a sudden memory and, you do not know why, so important.

T.T. – Reality is really Alice’s mirror, where all things happen on the contrary… but they function perfectly...

R.M. - Cyrano de Bergerac, madness, the infinite, the last Thule... perhaps order and connection between things is something we only create... and anyhow seen from sufficient distance any beach is a unitary mass speckled at the most. And it would be nice to ask ourselves, after all, what we can know, if our understanding is only a succession of moments, or of atoms, or of even more inconsistent items, for us nothing, yet the only real presence.

T.T. – We have argued enough about science… I would drop the subject at this point.

R.M. – Yes.

Tommaso Trini