translation and editing by Filippo Scafi and Matthew Didemus
Chaosmotics presents the first English translation of excerpts from 1962 L’antirinascimento by Eugenio Battisti, a deep and multifarious study on the value of Renaissance in order to shed light on the relation between folkloristic belief and the development of humanistic rationalism. That is: a problem of scale of analysis. As Marylin Strathern recognizes 29 years later in Partial Connections, changing scale reveals unforeseeable becomings which are particularly apt to shred into pieces all that was deemed sure just a moment before. And Renaissance, in all its order and clarity opposed to the Middle Ages, reveals itself to be a monstrous living crucible – once again and always as a fierce struggle between the corpuscolar and the holographic. Battisti’s work was neglected at the time of the publication, due to the italian context, influenced particularly by the aesthetic reflection of Benedetto Croce. As Ranieri Varese suggests, “One possible explanation is that the Italian critics, still highly influenced by Croce’s teachings, felt a work like Battisti’s was too incoherent in that it was not the reconstruction of the life of an artist and his catalogue and it did not isolate the author in his presumed grandeur. Instead, he was moved by the desire to reconstruct the dense scheme of relationships and events which lie behind every sort of figurative narration. It might also have been a question of their rejection of certain types of experience, for example Warburg’s, which were everyday events in Anglo-Saxon culture. The lack of any sort of debate was therefore a true loss for scholars.” A forgotten gem that contains the premises for a different understanding of algorithmic collisions between different scales of cultural encryption.
Preface by the French art historian André Chastel.
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The epistemology of the negative imposes itself in all fields. It was Bachelard who showed this, even more than Hegel. In physics, certain terms have proved indispensable – think of the surprising notion of anti– without which by definition no ‘representable’ reality can be posited. In psychology, the unconscious plays somewhat the same role: purely symbolic or not, the unconscious invites explorations that cannot be formulated without it. Obscurum per obscurius – it has been said. That may be, but the order of knowledge is made in such a way that the penetration of appearances today requires negative and paradoxical notions.
I have the impression that Eugenio Battisti wanted to do something similar with his Anti-Renaissance. And in two distinct ways. Firstly, he has endeavoured to introduce a bit of incongruity into the traditional agenda, in other words, to draw attention to a mass of data, images, beliefs… that have no place in the 19th-century syntheses to which we owe the great configurations of the era we are interested in: the Renaissance. Burckardt’s or Wolfflin’s grandiose panoramas require a constant scale of observation, below which it is not possible to descend without altering the phenomena observed. Between the meshes of the “classical” order, there pass manifestations that it does not account for and that belong to other rubrics: the obscure, the common, the experienced. We all know what these are: they are the great and small superstitions, the magic of nature, spells and docility towards the marvellous. The folklore traits that determine how so many works are realised, the legendary elements, whether religious or profane, that affect so many representations, are mixed with art in so many ways that we normally cannot even perceive them anymore, and we need the singularity of an ornament, an attribute or a text to grasp them. It is not possible to leave indefinitely to one side the register of images, of fables, of symbols that embrace the whole of nature and mix it with everyday life. This “micro-weaving” of figurations is brought out in the most lucid manner through the juxtaposition of a quotation with a reproduction. In his expository technique, Battisti has thus renounced the continuous demonstration that we are accustomed to in favour of a kind of corpuscular bombardment, of electric wave passages, of original and rapid flashes. Obviously, this did not sit well with everyone. One might ask is it permissible to evoke the witchcraft of the Zanda studied by Evans-Pritchard, the evil eye of Coptic Egypt with regard to garden figures, automata or Riccio’s bronzes? In this regard, Battisti has taken many liberties. I will merely observe that relating distant registers – esoteric, folkloric, hermetic or buffoonish… – with the worthy and familiar realities of culture has since become fashionable. But Battisti had demonstrated in this a measure and sense of expediency that not everyone after him has had.
Battisti’s work is a kind of centipede; it does not proceed in an easily distinguishable way, it always brings everything into question. In a stream of “unobtainable” references (a bit like Foucault), he finally tends to immerse the culture of the Renaissance, including great art, in a kind of ‘anthropological’ dive, and to step aside to see, with malice and at the same time with honesty, what will come of it. It seems to invite the reader to formulate it on his own, in the ways he prefers. The fluidity of the exposition, excluding the conclusions, multiplies the incitements; one proceeds by swerves and revivals at the edge of the track with a rather communicative good humour. One is involved in a kind of adventure in which anything can happen. From time to time, it comes to mind that all these picturesque, earthy, common and bizarre rubrics are perhaps linked together. The problem at this point is to know whether, from this naturalism of gardens, witches, nymphs and monsters, masks and dances, it is possible to form an overall conception capable, like the anti-matter of physicists, of justifying itself with the novelty of the elements it brings together. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that it is the constant of nature – with its inexhaustible singularities and phantasmagoria – that carries its weight here, as opposed to the narrow and well mannered definition of culture. In this sphere, The Anti-Renaissance occupies a notable place alongside the pioneering work of Jurgis Baltrusaitis and far above Hocke’s confusing booklet, for which Battisti shows an indulgence that I consider unnecessary. H. Haydn had tried to say something similar on the level of ideas, but without re-engaging the problem. Enrico Castelli engages similarly but through the paradoxes of a captivating and stimulating theological thought. On all sides, there was no thought but to lay siege to the superb fiction of classicism; but it was necessary at all costs not to get bogged down in a tiresome war of positions. Battisti launched a movement operation; his unequal and colourful army of charlatans and buffoons reminds me a little of a Fellini parade. It is thanks to this operation, however, that another “face” of the era was revealed, an enduring face that the historian can no longer ignore.
