Carlo Ginzburg

More Snippets I –
Carlo Ginzburg


(Picture: wp.clicrbs.com.br)

(Picture: clarkart.edu)

How do historians look at pictures? Do they evaluate the value of a picture as a source? – Well, that’s not the only way historians might look at pictures, nor the particular way that interests us here. Because Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Ginzburg) shows us a different way of how to look at pictures. At a picture by Goya, and a picture by Brueghel, to be precise. And it is once again about elevations, at least as to the Brueghel (see also: http://www.seybold.ch/Dietrich/RichardSerra ; and: http://www.seybold.ch/Dietrich/MicrostoryOfArtDOCUMENTS ), but in the end it is about the problem of narration, the problem (or: the wealth) of literary means that also historians dispose of (or should dispose of), in their telling of history.

When, in c. 1982, being interviewed by Adriano Sofri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriano_Sofri) Carlo Ginzburg was already preparing his study on the witches’ sabbath (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witches%27_Sabbath) that was to be published, in Italian, only in 1989. And in that memorable interview Ginzburg revealed not only that himself, when being still very young, had once dreamt of being a novelist for some time (when being sixteen he knew that he wasn’t going to be one), but also that he would, as one of the most notable historians of his time, give any history book away, in exchange for the Recherche by Marcel Proust (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time).
And while making clear of what huge an influence literature had been and still was to him in his life, while reflecting upon problems of how to write history and how to deal with the problem of narration, Ginzburg suddenly began to refer to various images. To an image of a mother and a child within a Latin American, probably Peruvian landscape, at first, that he had seen in the journal Lotta Continua (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotta_Continua) wherin also the interview was to be published in 1982, a picture that he had cut out, thinking that it had something to do with the study he was preparing at that time. And then Ginzburg went on to refer to the paintings by Brueghel at Vienna, and to one painting in particular, the Gloomy Day, that had the same effect on him as well (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gloomy_Day):

[…] a small forest, a thunderstorm in the background, people that are very busy, a man that pees at a house, an animal – everything seen from bird’s eye perpective. I like the distance, the difference in altitude between the landscape and the people, setting them into the right proportions. Also in the final scene of Paisà [the film by Rosselini], at the end of the fight with the partisan who gets killed while the automobile is departing.«

The painting by Brueghel shows people in the foreground to the right, rather seen from close by; and people to the left, positioned on a level far below, which, all in all, results in an interesting effect of space. Because if one would imagine that the same group of people would be shown twice (which is, of course, not the case), once from close by, followed by a different shot, showing them more from above, from an actual bird’s eye perspective, it is also becoming obvious why Ginzburg refers to painting and cinema within one and the same breath. And why this all to reflect upon how to write history, how to relate people to their social and cultural context (and where to position oneself, as the historian, with a different conscience, and scarce and ever limited knowledge, as to the past).
Brueghel shows, if one likes so, how to zoom into the social milieu of people, which is to write microhistory, and how to zoom out to show a landscape panorama, still crowded with people, a figure that we see peeing at a house, but people that seem, as Ginzburg says, set into the right proportion in relation to the landscape, which might be due to the historian’s conscience that people are not autonomous actors within the movie of their own history, but children of their time, and their live being only a short flight of a bird across the illuminated palace of life.
The reference to Goya occurs later in that interview, and here it is about a picture that Ginzburg had seen at Williamstown, and more about the intellectual point of view, as to phenomena of history, religious and occult phenomena, that the age of reason would dismiss as superstition. And indirectly it is again about the point of view to take, a respectful point of view, as possibly Goya found in his picture, that shows interest, but no hubris as to the irrational side of people’s history, while it is an actual denunciation of a phenomenon, a demystification and, at the same time, a grasping. A grasping of, we might add, if we do understand Ginzburg correctly, of the actual human condition and the various ways of how to deal with all the challenges life presents us with.

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