“Vhere are the bones of animals, the remains of girls and boys, in various stages of desiccation or just torn to pieces… they are the victims that the inhabitants of Selene, a city in the East, are forced to feed every day to a ferocious dragon… A sort of sample of the macabre, with livid colours, among which only crawling reptiles move, lizards, toads, salamanders, a viper that devours a frog and in turn seems to be escaping from the bite of a mastiff skull… All these details tell the background; now it is the king’s daughter’s turn to be sacrificed; the astonished population looks out from the terraces of palaces, mosques and minarets… And here a Saint George invades the scene with the impassive face of a conscientious and obstinate performer…”.
With this ekphrasis Italo Calvino “shows” Saint George fighting the dragon, a work by Vittore Carpaccio (Venice, Cycle of San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, 1502), even to those who do not have eyes to see it.
It feels like reading octaves of Ariosto’s Orlando Furiosoto which Calvino also compares the works of Carpaccio, in a game of mirrors which, to tell the truth, before Calvino, it was a great art historian from the Marche, Pietro Zampetti, who understood. Carpaccio is called to decorate the Dalmatian School in 1502the same year as the donation ceremony of the relic of St. George to the School.
Calvino counts Carpaccio among “his masters, among those who influenced his poetic worldhis imagination, and also his style, his way of telling stories…”, a master who “has never stopped posing problems to me” to whom “I feel the need to go back – I would almost say – to consult him, to check if I had understood him correctly, if he doesn’t have something to tell me that I hadn’t grasped”.
Saint George Kills the Dragon, by Vittore Carpaccio c.1465, 1525, 1526 in Dalmatian School of Venice. (Photo by: Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Vittore Carpaccio master of Italo Calvino
The Stories of San Giorgio by Carpaccio, despite the unity of action, like the Sant’Orsola cycle (1490-1495), are characterized by a rambling narrative which, despite the obviousness of the main episode, continually tends to shift the center of attention. This “delirious” spirit, in the true sense, that is, boundless and eccentric, despite a powerful unity, is what deeply binds Carpaccio and Ariosto. As if an underground psychic force tended to counteract the unity (which resists) by pulverizing it, shattering it into details of extraordinary pictorial perfection.
Let’s look The Triumph of Saint George: the main scene of the saint with the dragon is underlined by the centrality, of Perugian origin, of the temple in the background, slightly offset from the axis. Yet the most enthusiastic of those in love with Carpaccio and the Saint George Cycle, Ruskinvictim of Carpaccio’s spell, as if not caring about the victorious saint, advised to look away from the centre: “Take a pair of binoculars, and look long and hard at the two princes, who come riding on the left; the Saracen king, with the tall white turban, and his daughter, behind him with the red hairstyle, as tall as the tower of a castle.
Look at them carefully for a long time. Because in truth, and I tell you with the sure and well-earned knowledge on the subject, in this entire globe of ours, seeking the most splendid thing his best life has produced, in all times and in all years, you will not find anything that truly equals this small work, for the supreme, serene, sincere, sure sweetness of the perfect pictorial art”. Ruskin hereby signaled the absolute equivalence of every portion of Carpaccio’s painting, which is promptly presented in next telero with the Baptism of the Selenites where the group of musicians has no less weight than the main episode, claiming a role in the values of pure painting that only Paolo Veronese (who certainly learned a lot from Carpaccio) or, in the last century, Pierre Bonnard will have along the same lines.
In a famous page, Roberto Longhi anticipates and explores Calvino’s suggestions: “From this continuous proportional harmony, from this tireless dosing of colored forms within an unprecedented spatial lucidity, comes the enchantment of Carpaccio’s narrative. But the spectator’s ultimate persuasion would not be without the continuous ingenious denunciation of the shadow. Sundials in the setting sun are Carpaccio’s canvases, where everything – from the man to the hanging sock, to the struggling blade of grass, to the giant gigaro, to the flapping weather vane, to the minaret, to the colorful architecture it extends its longest shadow for more certain proof”. Carpaccio is a true narrator, because he is a narrator of shadows.