The importance of art and its history

The meeting The Importance of Art and its History was held today at 6 p.m. at the Carrara Town Hall, at which our Federico spoke to the audience in the room about the usefulness that art and art history play in today’s society. For those who missed the meeting, we publish the full text below. Instead, by clicking here you can download the PDF with the slides projected in the hall. Happy reading!

Before I start talking about the importance of art and its history, I would like to express my due thanks to the Permanent Assembly of Carrara and in particular to Manuel Dell’Amico who kindly invited me to hold this meeting, this talk that I hope will provide the audience with some small insights on which perhaps to reflect, discuss and share. I would like to thank the culture group of the Assembly, which organized the meeting, and of course I would like to thank the participants of the Permanent Assembly who welcomed this proposal with interest. I would also like to publicly express my support for this Assembly and I would like to express my appreciation, heartfelt, for the work that it is doing, and for the fact that it is making a great show of civility, demonstrating to the whole country that a group, a large one, of citizens who are united, and who have the good of their city at heart, can really do a lot and can be the beginning to change its fate, in a careful and conscious way. I want to emphasize this first of all because it is what I really feel about the citizens who are working to try to give a better future to the place where they live, and then because during this meeting of ours we will get to see that art history and love for one’s city, for one’s territory, for one’s artistic and cultural heritage, go hand in hand and are intimately linked to each other.

So it only remains for us to get to the heart of the themes of our meeting. And I would begin by saying that what I want to take you on this evening is a journey. A journey that spans centuries of art, and works by some of the greatest artists in the history of art. The goal of this journey will be to answer some questions that may seem obvious and trivial, but in a world and in a country where art and culture are increasingly being put on the back burner, it is always right and necessary to reiterate the answers. At the end of our journey we will therefore understand what art history is for, why to study it, why to cultivate a love for works of art, why to immerse oneself in art by going to visit a historical building, a museum, a church: why, in short, we should not be disinterested in art, but rather we should defend and protect it.

Before we begin this journey, however, I would like to remember one person, to whom I dedicate this talk: he is Gordon Moran, a great American scholar and art historian who left us on Christmas Eve, exactly one month ago. This remembrance is not meant to be rhetorical, but is functional to the journey we are about to take. Many of you are probably unfamiliar with the human and professional vicissitudes surrounding this great man, whom I had the pleasure of meeting, getting to know and with whom I also had the pleasure, on several occasions, of exchanging views, receiving advice, encouragement and appreciation in my work of popularizing art history. Gordon Moran came from the United States to Siena, he who had graduated from his neck of the woods, from Yale University, with a thesis on the history of Sienese art, on Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a great artist of the fourteenth century, and he arrived to prove a theory of his own: namely, that the very famous fresco depicting Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the siege of Montemassi, which decorates one of the walls of the Sala del Mappamondo in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, was not, as was thought until then, the work of one of the most celebrated artists in the history of Italian art, namely Simone Martini, but was the work of a more modest painter who lived perhaps even centuries later, a modest painter whose name was still unknown at the time of Moran’s studies, and whose identity we are still not certain of today. Well, Gordon Moran had to brave a hostile environment, that of Italian academics, who would not allow a scholar who had come from overseas to try to question theories that had been established for centuries. Gordon Moran had to endure the ostracism of Italian academics because he was not even invited to conferences on Simone Martini, he had to endure mockery, easy ironies, and he endured all this with the elegance and style befitting his figure of a great gentleman, such as there are few of today. Yet Gordon Moran continued his work always with great seriousness, and with evidence that was difficult to refute: and finally, after a few years, his theories began to convince even many Italian scholars, first and foremost Federico Zeri, one of the most celebrated and esteemed art historians of the twentieth century. Some academic critics still do not believe in Gordon Moran’s theories, but many are convinced that this American scholar is right, and further developments in recent years would seem to precisely confirm Gordon Moran’s theories: that is, the Guidoriccio da Fogliano would not be the work of Simone Martini. From Gordon Moran’s story we can draw an important lesson: and that is that with tenacity, with stubbornness, with passion, with culture especially when these qualities are combined with elegance, refinement, and respect, it is possible to achieve great things and to reach goals that until before seemed unhoped for, and for this we will always be grateful to Gordon Moran. And this is already, after all, a first confirmation to the fact that art history has important utility.

So our journey can begin, and this beginning takes place just a few meters from here, from this place where we are now: our journey starts in fact from our cathedral, the Carrara Cathedral. It is here that we find the first work I want to illustrate, which is the decoration of the main portal, the one we find on the facade. As you know, at that time, we are between the 11th and 12th centuries, so not long after the year 1000, the people who could read and write were not many, in fact they were very few, and moreover at that time every aspect of daily life was regulated by the Christian religion. A problem therefore arose: the problem of imparting some sort of education to the masses who could neither read nor write, because in any case it was necessary to make sure that the masses learned the precepts of Christianity, its norms of behavior, and of course its stories as well. One of the favored ways was therefore to speak through images, through symbols, which enriched the works designed for a wide audience: that is why when we pass in front of ancient churches we see them so richly decorated and figured. And this is precisely because those figures had the function of speaking and teaching, a bit like what happens today with books: those works of art were the books, in our case, of the carrarines of the year 1000-1100. And, in this sense, the main portal of the Carrara Cathedral is an interesting compendium of precepts that were to regulate the life of the Christian: today we need a guide to make us understand what their meaning is, but once upon a time the perception of these symbols was much more immediate, also because they gave a sense of community, and the people, the carrarini of the year 1000-1100, recognized themselves in these symbols, in these symbols they found their identity, for them these symbols were a real linguistic heritage. So starting from the top, in reading the portal symbols, we have an eagle holding a book in its talons, and on the sides we have an ox on the left and a lion on the right. These are the animals of the so-called tetramorph, a Greek word meaning from the four forms, and representing the symbol of the four evangelists, each represented by an element, although this tetramorph is a bit atypical because one of the four traditional elements, namely the winged man, or the angel, symbol of the evangelist Matthew, is here replaced by the book held by the eagle, probably for needs of compositional balance, because Romanesque art is an art always devoted to strong harmony among its elements. For the sake of completeness, let us say that the ox represents St. Luke, the eagle St. John, and the lion St. Mark. This symbolism derives from a passage in the book of the prophet Ezekiel, in which a vision is described that the prophet himself would have had: that is, he would have seen a cloud with a creature, the tetramorph precisely, consisting of the four elements we mentioned earlier: winged man, eagle, ox, lion. Since the beginning of Christianity, theologians have associated the symbols with the evangelists, each providing their own interpretation, and by simplifying the interpretation proposed by St. Jerome in the fourth century A.D., we can find out why these symbols are used. The winged man symbolizes Matthew in that his Gospel opens with the genealogy of Jesus, thus a story of men; the lion is symbolic of St. Mark because his Gospel begins with the preaching, in the desert, of St. John the Baptist, defined as a voice crying out in the desert, thus a voice as strong as that of a lion, the ox is symbolized by St. Luke because the Gospel he wrote begins with a sacrifice made by St. Zechariah, and the ox was a sacrificial animal, and finally John is symbolized by the eagle because the prologue of his Gospel contains the famous hymn to the Word, seen as a kind of flight to God, like that of an eagle.

These four symbols, the symbols of the evangelists, are the most important ones in the portal, and in fact they stand at the top, and they are so important because of the fact that the gospels were the books that every Christian had to be inspired by, and people had precisely to go to church to hear the reading and interpretation of these texts. Then that this was just an intention and that in fact the gospels are the most misrepresented and misinterpreted books in history, and that the Church itself followed their message very little... let’s say that’s not the point, but it is important to know that the gospels were supposed to be, and if I’m not mistaken I think they still should be, the book by which Christians should be inspired. Coming down, we find under the ox an ass and under the lion a dog. The donkey is the animal with which Christ entered Jerusalem, so it is a symbol of humility, because Christ was humble, and therefore humble must also be the Christian, but the donkey is also the animal that helps man in his work in the fields, so it is a symbol of work. The dog, on the other hand, is a symbol of fidelity, another characteristic that the Christian must have, but also of hunting, thus another activity that at the time was an indispensable source of livelihood for the local community. Below these two animals we have two griffins, which symbolize Christ, because they are animals with a dual nature, that is, half lion, thus an animal that is on earth, and half eagle, thus an animal of heaven. Like Christ, who according to the Christian religion is the son of God, therefore inhabits the heavens, but became man, and therefore came down to earth, to save humanity: that is why the griffon is a symbol of Christ. Finally, below again, the two lions with open mouths: a symbol of the fight against sin as they are about to devour sinners. Plants also play a key role: we have the acanthus, the one we see above the lintel, a symbol of immortality; we have the palm tree, a symbol of martyrdom and therefore of faith in Christ; and these plants are intertwined in a spiral to symbolize the cycle of life.

As we have seen, in this portal is everything a Christian should be: attentive to the reading of the gospels in church, therefore attentive to their message, humble, faithful, hardworking, far from sin, strong in faith. Obviously nowadays on the one hand we have lost the perception of these symbolisms, and on the other hand, having to show us what is the way to live well, more than the Church, are our universal values, which have been formed by history and events: the work of art thus undergoes a transformation of its meaning. So if that work, in the year 1000-1100, found its own usefulness in communicating to people how to live well, according to the morals of the time of course, today this meaning is no longer relevant because the work has taken on another meaning, namely that of being a witness to a historical time and making us understand what the values were that people once believed in and that created the identity of a community, of a society. And we know very well that knowing history is one of the best ways to learn from it: art therefore helps us in this process of knowing history.

To get more familiar with this concept we can take another example, again very close to us. The church you see here in the picture is the church of San Lazzaro, you can find it on the Aurelia going to Sarzana, just after Fosdinovo. It is a church that, looking at it like this, might not say anything, because it is sober, almost anonymous, in short, we would never say that inside it might contain great masterpieces. But instead, this church, which of course is absolutely worth a visit, holds one of the greatest masterpieces of seventeenth-century Liguria: it is a painting by Domenico Fiasella, who was one of the greatest artists of the time, and it depicts St. Lazarus asking Our Lady for protection for the city of Sarzana. Regardless of the very high artistic value of the painting, an artistic value that in any case would be worthy of attention, I would like us to focus rather on the content level for this evening: in this painting there is... a saint, Saint Lazarus, who is the saint to whom the church in which the work is located is dedicated, and this saint is asking Our Lady to protect the city of Sarzana. Specifically, he is asking her to protect it from the plague. In the painting, the threat hanging over Sarzana, which we see in the background, and whose profile we recognize, is symbolized by the clouds that are obscuring the buildings of the city. This is 1616, and at that time the plague was a very serious problem. Modern science, science as we know it today, was coming into being in those very years, and since, as we can well imagine, the great masses had no perception at all that modern science was coming into being, the only way to protect oneself from disease, other than relying on the cures then known, was the belief of vowing to a saint who would mediate, so to speak, with Our Lady, in order to obtain precisely protection. Curious by the way that the saint we are talking about, Saint Lazarus, protector against the plague, is a purely fictional character in that he is the leper who appears in the parable of the rich man told by Jesus in the Gospels, the one that says that there was this poor leper who every day hoped to get a few crumbs of bread from the banquet of this arrogant rich man, and then it happens that one day this Lazarus dies and is rewarded with a place in heaven for the sufferings he endured with dignity in life, as opposed to the rich man who would instead be destined for hell. The rich man, aware of his fate, would pray to Abraham to send Lazarus to his children, to the rich man’s children, to tell them not to repeat his mistakes and to be charitable to the poor. So, we said fictional character elevated to the status of a saint, although in any case it is not uncommon for many of the saints the Church venerates to be more legendary figures than real ones ... and patron saint of diseases since he himself, according to the parable, was a sick man. Here, this painting tells us something very peculiar, namely, the fact that in ancient times men, in order to find relief from their anxieties, turned to supernatural entities to obtain benefits, and art was therefore considered the conduit for obtaining them, these benefits. Here, too, we see a transformation of meaning taking place: the work, from an instrument endowed with a let us say practical purpose, because it was painted anyway with a view to obtaining a benefit, again becomes a testimony to a way of life, a belief, the way of thinking of a civilization. And then it is not necessarily the case that even today there are those who believe in the fact that with a painting one can protect oneself from disease, and probably for these people the meaning of the work will still be this, but for the history of art another one is added, which is to tell the story, to tell what we have been, and therefore we study the history of art and protect cultural heritage to protect our past, to protect what we have been and obviously to protect the stages of the path that led us to the formation of what today are our universal values.

However, this is not the only purpose of art, of course. For art does not only look to the past. Art is also a way to represent dreams, and it is not certain that these dreams, in the more or less distant future, may also become reality. And to understand how art can represent a dream that in the future might be destined to become reality we need to go further back in time: our journey from Italy moves to France, to a precise date, 1893, and to a precise location, namely Saint-Tropez. In Saint-Tropez we find a painter who has just turned thirty: his name is Paul Signac, he is one of the greatest artists who worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as we can consider him, together with Georges Seurat, as the father of pointillisme, and at this time he is painting a work to which he has decided to give a very strong, emblematic title. The title, in Italian, is this: Al tempo dell’anarchia. The golden age is not in the past, but it is in the future, and the painting is what you see here. Signac, a militant anarchist painter, would later be forced to change the title: no longer Al tempo dell’anarchia but Al tempo dell’armonia. This was because it was not an easy time for anarchism. Anarchists were frowned upon, especially after an Italian anarchist, Sante Caserio, stabbed and killed the president of the French republic, Marie-François Sadi Carnot, in Lyon on June 24, 1894. It matters little that Sante Caserio had declared that his act was not against the person but against the system he represented, as he had written to his mother from prison. He wrote to her: if I committed this deed of mine it is precisely because I was tired of seeing such an infamous world. In short, it was the same idea that would move, very few years later, Gaetano Bresci, who following the killing of King Umberto I declared that he had not wanted to kill the person, Umberto, but had wanted to kill the king, the principle. I was saying, it matters little what the idea was that moved the hand of Sante Caserio, because in France a very strong repression was unleashed against the anarchists, and given the climate that had been created, Signac preferred to change the title of his work. But not the content of course. And the content of this painting, what this painting represents, is nothing but an ideal society in which anarchy prevails: a kind of political manifesto, therefore, which I discuss in this talk also because Carrara, in Italy, is the most representative city for the anarchist movement. What we see in the painting is a society in which men can live in harmony, a society where there are no differences due to physical appearance, money, social class, a society where each person guarantees to his community the contribution he is able to bring, and where there is also plenty of room to devote oneself to one’s favorite activities, because a society where everyone works and where wealth is equally distributed is also a society where there is more free time for everyone. And so here is the meaning of the title of the painting: anarchy becomes synonymous with harmony because in a society where there is a perfect anarchic system, people must be able to organize themselves without prevarication due to any form of hierarchy, and by breaking down social barriers. So here we see on the left the man picking the fig tree, which is a self-portrait of Paul Signac, the painter, shown here with his wife, Berthe Roblès, giving a fig tree to a child. There is a man reading, symbolizing culture, the fundamental value of this idyllic society; there are men playing boules, signifying precisely the playful activities, the pastimes. There are two people in love, because love is fundamental in a society, and if love is missing we can say there is no life, there are painters, there are people bathing in the sea, there is a woman picking flowers, in short, everyone is engaged in their favorite activity. And then, in the background, we have work, represented by farmers in the fields resting in the shade of the tree. They rest because of the fact that the machines, which we see further back, allow them, according to an optimistic view of progress, to do the work instead. Signac in this painting looks forward to technological progress precisely because it frees man from the most difficult and risky tasks: and progress also means more wealth to be distributed equally among those who belong to this society. And if wealth is equally distributed, there is no abuse, and everyone can live happier.

Many have described this painting as a utopia, and others simply as an ideal society: through this painting we can understand that art is a means of shaping an idea, a dream, and of involving as many people as possible in this idea and dream. All the more so because the work you see here is exhibited in a public space, which is the city hall of Montreuil, France: and exhibiting a work like this in a place that belongs to all citizens has a very high meaning because it allows everyone to get excited and to reflect on the contribution that an artist has made to show what a happy, free and nonviolent society means, and therefore a contribution to a better world.

I just used a word, get excited, which represents another important concept to associate with art history and its usefulness. Yes because the first approach one has to a work of art is always an emotional one. There is little to do, the first judgment we all make when we approach a work of art is a judgment I would say an aesthetic one, a judgment that comes from the perception we have of that work, and therefore it comes from the suggestion that the painting exerts on us, whether it is a positive suggestion, because that work exalts us, moves us, provokes us, or simply because we find it aesthetically pleasing, or whether it is a negative suggestion, because perhaps it disgusts us, saddens us or horrifies us. And the beauty of this power that art has over us lies in the fact that these emotions are not universal, because a painting that perhaps moves me does not have the same power over another person, who will probably feel nothing in front of that painting, and vice versa. Then there are perhaps paintings that have a fascination for many people, and one of those paintings is the one you see behind me, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, a work from 1538 that I also always linger on for a long time when I go to the Uffizi, where it is kept. I chose it because it is a work that, in addition to really pleasing so many people, said just in a very simplistic way, also exerts a very special fascination, because it is provocative not only in its body, which is offered without hiding anything from the viewer, but it is provocative in its pose, gesture, expression just think that a great writer like Guy de Maupassant had to say, on the occasion of one of his trips to Italy, that in his opinion the most beautiful woman he had found in Florence was precisely Titian’s Venus. What I want to say, however, is that this assumption may make sense to Guy de Maupassant, but it may also make no sense at all to another person, just as Titian’s Venus may exert a fascination on me, but not on another person: precisely because of the fact that emotions are something deeply intimate and personal, and because of this nature of theirs, emotions can neither be caged nor even less sold. That is why I do not believe, and I tell everyone not to believe, those art critics who set all their exhibitions, most of the time ugly, poorly organized, without a logical thread, on the assumption of emotions, especially where they want to make people believe that these emotions are to be opposed to knowledge. Personally, I believe that there is no worse approach to art than that of an exhibition set up with the stated intention of exciting all its visitors. Because emotions are an extremely personal thing, and no critic can excite you on command with an exhibition pre-packaged with this purpose: here, when this happens it means that we have also lost the taste for our own and personal emotions, and I believe that there is no worse conformism than the conformism of emotions. Art therefore has this usefulness, in quotes, this power: that of moving us and making us understand that what we feel in front of a work, a painting, a sculpture, is something totally our own, which no one can take away from us, and which no one can tell us how we should live.

I would like to come back now to talk again about the symbolic aspects of a work of art: if up to now we have seen works of art that try to communicate something, works of art made to ask for a grace, works of art that are transpositions of dreams and ideals, and works that excite, we now see a work of art that tells a story, a story that actually happened, but that is also told through a point of view of the author who, by the devices we will see, wants to communicate values to the viewers, values in which he strongly believes. What you see here is the so-called Tavola Doria, which is so called because it once belonged to the Doria family of Genoa. It is a copy of the famous cartoon that Leonardo da Vinci made in preparation for a fresco he was to create in Florence, in the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio. Now we don’t really know if the Doria Table was made by Leonardo himself or if it is instead a copy made by some other artist, the debate is still all open... but let’s leave aside for now questions about attribution to focus on the significance of this work. In 1503, the Republic of Florence, which had ousted the Medici a little less than ten years before, had the idea of decorating what was then the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, known today precisely as the Salone dei Cinquecento, with frescoes that were to depict scenes of the battles in which the Florentines had defeated their enemies and thus battles through which the Florentines had increased their power and prestige. The Republic thus decided to entrust Leonardo da Vinci with the realization of the Battle of Anghiari, and Michelangelo, a year later, with the realization of the Battle of Cascina: it was a great moment in the history of art, because two of the greatest artists of the time, and of all history, found themselves working in the same settings, and on similar themes. Neither of them then completed their task, for various reasons, and even the original cartoons have been lost, so we know the works of the two artists only through copies, although as I said before, for the Tavola Doria it is assumed that Leonardo himself painted it.

As mentioned, Leonardo had to create the fresco that was to depict the Battle of Anghiari. The battle took place on June 29, 1440, in this small town, Anghiari, near Arezzo, and was opposed on one side by the Florentines and on the other by the Milanese: the latter, the Milanese, had the goal of extending the dominions of the Duchy of Milan into central Italy, and the Florentines were obviously defending their interests against the advance of the Milanese. At the end of a very difficult day Florence succeeded in defeating Milan, and this defeat dealt a severe blow to the Milanese, who, after a few months, decided to abandon their expansionist plans against Tuscany.

Leonardo depicts a crucial moment of the battle, namely that of the struggle for the banner, that is, the banner of the Milanese that the Florentines are trying to conquer--and succeeding, although we do not see the banner well because it is covered by the figures of the characters who are clashing and contending for it. At the top we see four figures: the one in the center, with the red hat, is Niccolò Piccinino, the commander of the Milanese army. He was from Perugia and was a so-called captain of fortune, that is, a condottiere who fought not for his country but for the state, which offered him a command post for a fee, in essence a mercenary who sold his services to the highest bidder. At the time, Piccinino was working for the Duchy of Milan. The one on the left, next to him, is his son, Francesco Piccinino, also a mercenary like his father, while instead the figures we notice on the right are Pietro Giampaolo Orsini, the commander of the Florentines, and Ludovico Scarampo Mezzarota, commander of the troops of the Papal States, which was at the time an ally of the Florentines.

I would like us to focus on the expressions of these characters. Look at Niccolò Piccinino’s scream, a scream that makes him fierce and brutal and almost deforms his face, and you also see the evil, almost bestial look of his son Francesco, who, moreover, is also fleeing trying to take the banner away with him. And even more rabid is the fight of the two characters who are fighting furiously under the horses-their blind fury makes them not even mind the danger they are in by staying under the horses’ feet. The one above is fighting with his bare hands, we see that he is only about to pierce his opponent’s eyes with his fingers: to understand why this detail is so, it is good to know a detail of the story. Thus, we need to know that Niccolo Piccinino, when he went to war, took with him a rabble that historical sources describe to us as a group of rough, animalistic, straggling soldiers who looted the villages they came across, stole and raped. Lo and behold, as this rabble approached the battle sites, they happened to recruit all the men they found along the way, men who were mostly peasants or at any rate poor people who were hired with the sole promise of the sharing of the spoils resulting from an eventual victory, and these people, in the hope of slightly increasing their economic status, joined this horrendous army, and most of the time they were not only people without any military experience or training, but they were even people who went into battle without weapons, because they did not have them, and precisely fought with their bare hands: hence the reason for this detail that Leonardo includes in his work. But in Leonardo’s work there is also another expression worthy of mention, the expression of the two horses: they have a fearful, indeed frightened look, and it does not matter that one horse belongs to the Milanese and the other horse belongs to the Florentines. They are both afraid of the fierce struggle of men.

At that time, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, a time when our peninsula was ravaged by the so-called Wars of Italy, war was part of everyday reality, it was experienced as part of everyday life, but in spite of this, Leonardo had the courage with this painting to denounce the atrocity, brutality and stupidity of war, through the expressions and poses of the men who in war are deprived of their dignity as human beings, but also in the expressions of the horses: they are expressions of condemnation, the horses are afraid, showing that animals also reject war, and prove themselves in this case far superior to human beings. This is not an interpretation made up in the air or bent for ideological purposes, for Leonardo da Vinci was indeed against war: in his Treatise on Painting, in suggesting how to compose battle scenes, Leonardo da Vinci gives this definition of war: bestial madness. For Leonardo, war is a pazzia bestialissima, therefore far from reason, and one that makes human beings resemble beasts more than men, and indeed even makes them inferior to beasts, as is evident from reading the figures in the painting. Here, then, art becomes at the same time a way of recounting an event that really happened, the Battle of Anghiari, but it also becomes a means of conveying an idea, that of aversion to war, and here, then, is a work that, despite having been created a good five hundred years ago, is still of very strong and compelling relevance.

This journey of ours ends in Florence, and ends in front of what for many is the highest expression of art of all time, one of the most famous works in history but also one of the most mistreated and trivialized: Michelangelo’s David. And in this highest expression of art there is also a lot of Carrara, because Michelangelo’s David was made with marble quarried from our mountains. A work that we admire today both for the exceptional technical skill with which Michelangelo executed it, because he managed to carve it from a very difficult block of marble, already rough-hewn, before which other very great artists to whom the work had been commissioned, such as Agostino di Duccio and Antonio Rossellino, had surrendered, and both for its immeasurable beauty, for this ideal representation of the human body: suffice it to say that, in 1564, during the oration given at Michelangelo’s funeral, one of the greatest intellectuals of the time, Benedetto Varchi, said that Michelangelo’s David had surpassed every sculpture in ancient Rome. To understand the significance of this phrase, of this compliment, one must remember that at that time, in the 16th century, the works of ancient Rome were seen as the supreme model of art, as the works of perfection never again achieved, which artists could only imitate.

Well, Michelangelo made his David between 1501 and 1504. We recalled earlier that the Medici, the lords who had for decades, in fact, ruled Florence, had been driven out of the city: we are in 1494 to be exact, and the Florentines had proclaimed the Republic. Michelangelo, who was a staunch republican, one of the most ardent republicans in Florence, could not back down from the task of creating a work that was to have a very high symbolic value: that is, to represent the values of the Republic of Florence. We know the story of King David, a biblical character who, by force of cunning and with only a slingshot, had slain Goliath, the huge leader of the Philistines who threatened the Jews. Michelangelo’s David is thus a symbol of a struggle that even though it starts from the bottom, even though it starts at a great disadvantage, and even though it can rely on little at its disposal, it can still take down a much stronger and more powerful enemy. Michelangelo’s David is a symbol of the freedom that overthrows tyranny; it is a symbol of the freedom that challenges bullies and oppressors and succeeds in overcoming them; it is a symbol of justice, honesty, and in essence the good virtues that triumph over inequity, dishonesty, and injustice. These are the sentiments that the David is meant to inspire, these are the meanings of a work that, stripped of its guise as a work of religious significance, becomes instead a work of the highest civic significance: courage, justice, freedom. The usefulness of art history therefore lies, in this case, in its ability to share these important universal values. And this in spite of the trivializations that the David has undergone-we see it everywhere now, even in cheap reproductions that crowd even supermarkets. And this is precisely because often the attitude of many toward art history is one of uncritical adoration: so many queue up in front of museums not to derive values from the works of art, but to say I was there, to see and in some cases precisely to adore, I say this because I often go to museums and I notice what is the approach of many toward the works... to adore that particular work of art that they see everywhere, on books, T-shirts, pencils, pasta packages, in short wherever you want, often without even understanding what they have in front of them. A few days ago, in an article published in Repubblica, the director of the Uffizi, Antonio Natali, speaking of the great masters of the Florentine Renaissance whose works are preserved in the Uffizi, wrote these words: if we want to be heirs of those great fathers, let us not limit ourselves to venerating their relics, let us try, if anything, to emulate some of their virtues; inventiveness, for example, unscrupulousness and culture. And that is what the history of art should serve for: to provide an example for all of us, to excite, to transmit values, to recount the past, to represent an ideal. And that is why a city that does not protect its culture but rather, on the contrary, debases and mortifies it, and I think Carrara is a glaring and clear example to all in this regard, is a city that insults itself, it is a city that offends the citizens who live there, it is a city that commits a huge wrong against the generations that came before us, and it is a city that steals the future from the generations to come. If a city does not protect its culture and its artistic testimonies, it is a bit like throwing away a piece of itself, and I think there is no better example, alas, than our Carrara, which entrusts its culture to the municipal waste disposal company: I think this sort of unintentional metaphor is the most fitting to make it clear what consideration Carrara has for art and culture. And a city that mistreats its artistic testimonies is a city that obviously reduces the possibility for its citizens to form their own civic sense, to think for themselves, to live in a place where there is no inequality, where there is concord and mutual respect among citizens, where there is a lack of prevarication: for this is what art is for, since the universal values shared by art, which we have discussed so much during this talk, are precisely meant to make us people who think for ourselves and act accordingly. The word politics derives from the Greek polis, which means city, and therefore literally politics means taking care of the city: so if we want a politics that cares about citizens and a politics that is able to fulfill its task in an exemplary and praiseworthy way, we ourselves must take care of our city, starting precisely with the cultural and artistic heritage, which as mentioned constitutes historical evidence of what our ancestors left us, a set of values to be shared and followed in the present, as well as a way of looking to the future. Once we realize, then, how important the history of art is, we cannot but agree with an important French art critic, who lived in the 18th century, and whose name was Ã?tienne La Font de Saint-Yenne: this art critic, in 1754, in one of his works, asked a rhetorical question, which, however, in my opinion encapsulates what the meaning of art, and of the history of art, is. The question is, do you not agree that painting was invented both for pleasure and for utility? I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we can really agree with him. Thank you all!

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