How would you introduce your research to someone at a party?
If I could draw, I’d go around the party sketching cartoons of people’s portraits, explaining that my research is about just that: caricature. Unfortunately, I’m a terrible cartoonist, and so I focus predominantly on verbal caricature. Over the next two years, as part of my post-doctoral research, I will track down the history of Italian literary descriptions of human figures based on exaggeration, overstatement, deformation, that can be framed as verbal equivalents of visual caricatures.
Caricature is fascinating in that it presents a paradoxical form of representation: it creates likeness grounded in deformation. By misshaping and exaggerating particular aspects of representation, caricature uncovers hidden or unnoticed aspects of reality, revealing unconventional knowledge about objects and people, and providing an enhanced perception of facts and feelings.
Through caricature, we can trace reactions to conventional representations of the human figure and social facts. Provided that conventions change over time, the sense of deformation, the way the hyperbolic thought pushes forward our knowledge of the world, is also historically changeable.
How did you find your way to this project?
I studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and I was lucky enough to work with a research group engaged in studying the relationships between literary and visual culture during the High Renaissance. The group was created and coordinated by Lina Bolzoni, a renowned scholar who has studied the deep interrelations of words and images in Early Modern culture.
This is where I learned to detect images within words, to spot traces of figurative culture into literary works. I started noticing the recurrence of misshapen verbal portraits and representations of literary characters based on emphasis and deformation. I developed the suspicion that caricature could be analysed as a verbal/visual device triggering the same perceptive effects in literature as in art.
At the end of my PhD, which focused on the hybridization between literature and criticism in twentieth-century Italy, I became interested in the tricky application of neurocognitive approaches to the study of literature, after collaborating with professor Alberto Casadei. In researching the workings of the creative process, I learned that hyperbole is one of the fundamental working principles of human cognition. I kept finding publications by cognitive psychologists and neurobiologists quoting caricature as an example of how deformation and exaggeration enhance our comprehension of reality. And this is where I found my current project: studying caricature as a gaze on reality encompassing words and images, addressing it from a both historical and cognitive perspective, thus building a theoretical framework based on a challenging methodological approach.
Why should people care about your research?
Research on caricature directly addresses deep human issues and concerns. It offers an expression of fundamental human emotions, such as fear, anger, hate and disgust, elaborated in order to produce a deconstructive laugh or a thinking smile. As I mentioned, caricature is rooted into the inner dimension of the human mind, and can help us to highlight how we understand reality, realising that there is no objective reality, only the one we misshape in order to grasp it. Studying caricature raises fundamental questions about how we describe and represent the human being, as well as the limits of humanness.
Furthermore, caricature and satire represent a permanent challenge to socially authorised representations of reality. Caricature comprises a radical critical function and provides a way for us to question the status quo. Additionally, caricature is important in a broader reflection on freedom of thought and speech (and their limits), in the role caricature has historically played in the creation and representation of the public sphere.
Discussions about power, humanness, and freedom are crucial for the present and future of Europe. I hope that my research, funded by the European Commission, will contribute to the compelling debate on the preservation of a common, shared, open European cultural heritage.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve found so far?
Through focusing on caricature, and reading texts as culturally meaningful images, I have been able to re-interpret some well-known texts. For example, in one of his Rhymes, Michelangelo portrays his physical and psychological dejection, creating a misshapen and degraded self-portrait that can be considered a very early example of self-caricature:
“My eyes are a bluish colour, as if they had been ground and punded; my teeth are like the keys of an instrument, for as they move my voice sound out and ceases.
My face is fit to terrify; my clothes, without further weapons, would be enough to scatter to the winds crows feeding on seeds in a dry field.
A cobweb sits brooding in one ear, in the other a cricket sings all night; and I cannot sleep and snore for my catarrhal breathing.
My scribblings about love, the muses, flowery grottoes have ended up on tambourines, or as wast-paper in inns, latrines and brothels.
What was the good of having set myself to make so many rag-dolls, if they have led me to such an end, like someone who crossed the sea only to drown in snot?”
Surprisingly enough, the self-caricature involves not just the body of the artist, but also his own work of art: his writings become valueless scribbles, and his sculptures are seen as useless rag-dolls. The artist exposes his bare life as a denial of the supreme, idealised, spiritual beauty of his works. I observe a double, simultaneous transfiguration: while we observe Michelangelo’s face becoming ugly, misshapen and tortured, we also see his masterpieces, usually associated with an almost supernatural sense of strength.
Something analogous happens in an equally surprising caricature engraved in 1540 by Niccolò Boldrini after a drawing by Titian, satirically evoking the celebrated sculpted group of the Laocoon.
The deformation of such a renowned and almost worshipped image confirms caricature as a deviation from the idealization implied in the Renaissance revival of antiquity, and ridicules the obsession for the imitation of classical models of beauty, perfection and symmetry. Caricature misshapes the mask that power, be it cultural or political, tries to apply to the human figure.
What does it mean to you to be a historian?
This is embarrassing. Strictly speaking, I’m not a proper historian – I was trained as a literary scholar, and my research focuses mainly on literature. However, because my research (as per the Italian tradition) has always been imbued with a rigorous historical perspective, and I have always aimed to use an interdisciplinary approach, I consider myself a cultural historian. Moreover, I’m convinced that literature is a historical record of humankind’s inner lives: a record of the emotional, psychological, cognitive, and existential reactions to specific contexts of living.
But – what does it mean to be a historian? I will quote a famous and often misread sentence by Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, who stated: “All history is contemporary history.” This doesn’t mean ironing out the otherness of the past, but I think it means that we always question the past from the present. A historian’s job is not to make the past suitable for the present. Rather, it is about creating frictions and tensions, and bringing the difference provided by the past within the present, preserving that difference and playing it against the laziness of the present, in order to enrich and augment its awareness.