The only truly alien planet is Earth. - UniCA Eprints - Università degli ...

cerchio 409 . Un altro dipinto riconducibile a William Blake e al surrealismo, sempre in termini di
ipotetica anticipazione, è L’annunciazione con Sant’Emidio (1486) del pittore quattrocentesco
Carlo Crivelli. In un’intervista concessa al critico William Feaver per The Art Newspaper a Ballard
viene chiesto di scegliere sette quadri. Tra questi Ballard inserisce quello di Crivelli, con questa
motivazione:
This is the only Old Master here. Anyone who knows my work will be mystified as to why I've
chosen Crivelli's Annunciation from the National Gallery. One might wonder how this Renaissance painting,
with its explicit religious subject, could have any bearing on my fiction. I first saw it when I was eighteen in
1948, a couple of years after I came to England. I was born in Shanghai and I was completely unaware of the
existence of twentieth-century art, or the art of the Renaissance. Shanghai was a complete cultural wilderness
then. But within a couple of years, I absolutely tuned into the art of the twentieth century. It gave me a
powerful charge, one that has not left me to this day. Surrealism was my instinctive first love. But it was very
difficult to see Surrealist paintings in those days. There were very few works on view, and even a major
museum like the Tate displayed only a handful. The critical establishment absolutely disdained Surrealists
and World War II seemed to confirm their hostility. I completely embraced Modernism. It seemed so
enormously exciting, so new, so powerful an engine of novelty-seeking. Picasso was still painting, Matisse,
Braque, Leger. But I spent a lot of time in the National Gallery and I went to see these Renaissance
paintings, such as Crivelli's Annunciation. […] I used to look at all the Renaissance paintings in the National
Gallery, and I still do to this day. […] Not being able to see any surrealist paintings in London, halfconsciously
I had created a sort of virtual Surrealist museum in the National Gallery. If you have no
Christian belief and know nothing about the Christian faith, what is going on in this painting is surreal. […] I
think my ambivalent reading of this and other Renaissance paintings reflected my personal uncertainty at that
time in my life. I'd spent two years reading medicine, given it up, wanted to be a writer, but wasn't sure
which way to go. This painting and lots of others like it in the National Gallery, the Louvre and all the other
galleries that I visited in Europe in the late Forties and Fifties, were saying to me, “Surrealism. This is the
way to go.” 410
Al di là della dicotomia figurativo/non figurativo, possiamo riscontrare in un dipinto come
questo una tendenza al misticismo che si riflette anche nell’arte moderna 411 . La pittura, come il
409 «Dr. M.-L. von Franz [in this book] has explained the circle (or sphere) as a symbol of the Self. It expresses the
totality of the psyche in all its aspects, including the relationship between man and the whole of nature. Whether the
symbol of the circle appears in primitive sun worship or modern religion, in myths or dreams, in the mandalas drawn by
Tibetan monks, in the ground plans of cities, or in the spherical concepts of early astronomers, it always points to the
single most vital aspect of life – its ultimate wholeness.» A. Jaffé, ivi, p. 240.
410 William Feaver, “The film of Kennedy's assassination is the Sistine Chapel of our era”, 01/07/1999
(http://www.jgballard.ca/media/1999_art_newspaper.html) [Ultima visita 23/07/2012].
411 «[…] [W]hat these artists [Kandinsky, Marc, Klee, Mondrian] were concerned with was something far greater than a
problem of form and the distinction between ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’, figurative and non-figurative. Their goal was the
center of life and things, their changeless background, and an inward certitude. Art had become mysticism. The spirit in
whose mystery art was submerged was an earthly spirit, which the medieval alchemists had called Mercurius. He is a
symbol of the spirit that these artists divined or sought behind nature and things, “behind the appearance of nature.”
Their mysticism was alien to Christianity, for that ‘Mercurial’ spirit is alien to a ‘heavenly’ spirit. Indeed, it was
Christianity’s dark adversary that was forging its way in art. Here we begin to see the real historical and symbolic
significance of ‘modern art’. Like the hermetic movements in the Middle Ages, it must be understood as a mysticism of
the spirit of earth, and therefore as an expression of our time compensatory to Christianity. No artist sensed this mystic
background of art more clearly or spoke of it with greater passion than Kandinsky. The importance of the great works of
art of all time did not lie, in his eyes, on “the surface, in externals, but in the root of all roots – in the mystical content of
art.” Therefore he says: “The artist’s eye should always be turned in upon his inner life, and his ear should be always
alert for the voice of inward necessity. This is the only way of giving expression to what the mystic vision commands.”
Kandinsky called his pictures a spiritual expression of the cosmos, a music of the spheres, a harmony of colors and
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