The mask in the light of Starobinski Alessio Ramerino
The theater, like any other art, is a world in which use readily identifiable symbols, able to relate to the gradient chronological and artistic in different ways, almost paradoxically masks are capable of acting roles, one of these masks is the acrobat . Topos archetypal representative of the art, the jester has entered the collective imagination with a capacity of Interest endemic and, as always, the sublimation of his task was different meanings of artists: painters, writers, poets. If, hidden behind the function before the fun, make-up look clownish charm, joy, melancholy, sadness and sometimes even anxiety, that it must be a substratum of artistic reworkings that have bothered as constant intermittence our cultural growth.
The route that led to the "substitution of the Gods by the clowns" was superbly drawn by Jean Starobinski in his Portrait of the Artist as acrobat , in which the pen of the critic Geneva emphasizes the stages of artistic a literary-aesthetic seemingly tortuous path and heterogeneous, that passing the instance primitivistic-style romantic come to enucleate stratified and deeper meanings in our reception of the readers and viewers. From Shakespearean fool the twentieth century the artistic imagination has repeatedly revised the meaning of the terrible mask circus artist, of the acrobat and, more generally, the clown, who is freed from its primordial twilight size and tied to the border with world of the dead and has become an ironic reversal of reality body, saving the character and tragic passing figure.
L 'exploits of interest in the circus finds himself in the nineteenth century, evo permeated bourgeois hypocrisy and cruel forms that it imposes, and the first half-century short stories from the early chroniclers and poets - Gautier, Banville - who played fairs and circuses as colorful land between the East and a gray reality bourgeois fairy-tale, the myth of the clown comes to permeate the supreme examples of writing Baudlaire and painting of Picasso, the acrobat becomes ethereal figure in the balance between the gulf and the sky, life and death, able to dream and become his public alter ego liberating for artists dedicated to him their interest in poetry. As the inhabitants of the border, the acrobat and the clown in question is suffering from a strong domestic dichotomy: the poetic moment of their engagement in physical exercise makes them poetic figures and ethereal, while the normal Mortality is made from heavy weight of reality, of a body of flesh and vulgar, although aware of such a nature it escapes the double form, because only sublimated in the transfiguration of poetry or in the "mental effort of the spectator" (p. 87) .
clownish The multiplication constant of appearance in the examples quoted by Starobinski, all Baudelaire - the mask dandy reveals an incredible proximity - and Piccasso but also Flaubert, Verlaine, Lautrec, Seurat, Klee, and continued its appearance in literature and dramatic literature, Poe, Hugo - and then Verdi - Böll, however, to interpret in relation to "an organically structured society" (p. 154) as the post-bourgeois and bourgeois, in which the multiple functions played by the clown is objectified in interference mockery of the myth, the concept of heroism, which models the same company stands out as winners. This is a key to motivating the continuation of the meaning carried by clowns in art and culture: the uneasy feeling created by a multiple role and multisignificante. "The entry of some clown blows up the net, and suffocating in the fullness of meanings allowed to open a gap which will breathe a breath of anxiety and life" (p. 150), this is the function that the clown, as a bearer of disturbing questions, and will always make art.
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