Marco Minghetti

Microstory of Art IX –
Marco Minghetti


(Picture: storiaefuturo.com

(Picture: corriereirpinia.it)

(Picture: biografieonline.it)

Marco Minghetti (1818-1886) was a politician. A Risorgimento politician, minister, prime minister, statesman. Those interested in Italian history know that. And so, they might ask, but not everyone does know that Marco Minghetti was also an interpreter of art. I am saying »interpreter« because in his relation to art Marco Minghetti’s world view as such, the essence of his attitude towards life (and thus also the very frame of reference, by his own standards, of everything he did in politics) was rooted – in a »mild« Catholicism, as well-informed journalist Sigmund Münz did put it (who translated Minghetti’s book on Raphael), best represented by the St Cecilia shown above.

»He loved the blessing Pope«, Austrian journalist Sigmund Münz (http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11227-munz-sigmund) did write in his portrait of Marco Minghetti (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Minghetti), »but he asked himself, if the hand that was blessing was also destined to hold the sceptre of rulership.« And one might attempt one day to write a Risorgimento history, a history of Italian unification and the the two biographies of Marco Minghetti and Pope Pius IX (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Pius_IX) in particular, that were so deeply intertwined, as a history of gestures.
But here it is only about the relation of statesman Marco Minghetti to art. To religious art, because it was religious art, the art of Raphael, that Marco Minghetti was particularly interested in. And the one who knew not only the politician Marco Minghetti well, but also the interpreter of art, because he had translated Marco Minghetti’s 1885 work on Raphael into German, was Austrian journalist Sigmund Münz (whose books, which are sometimes a bit hard to find, we do warmly recommend without exception). And in his portrait of Marco Minghetti (published in: Aus dem Modernen Italien. Studien, Skizzen und Briefe, 1889) he does sum up the »aesthetic confession« of Marco Minghetti as to art:

»If it was true that art was only the mimesis of Nature, then photography was a higher art than painting. Yet true art was not destined to represent the objects existing in Nature all alone, but in fact the ideas associating with these very objects. True art art had to go for the beautiful, and if it was presenting ugly things, it had not to render them for the sake of a representation of the ugly, but rather to represent the limits of physical and moral nature, the passions and the fault of men. Shakespeare and Dante did indeed render ugly things too, but these great poets did this only in an alluding sense. He does recall that Raphael, in his creative productivity, was brought into a situation to present ugly creatures yet only twice: the hunchback on the wallpaper that is healed by Peter, and the boy being posessed by a demon in the Transfiguration. Yet on these occasions the legend did force the master to a representation of the ugly, and Raphael having done this only with inner resistence. Toward a certain modern Naturalism Minghetti does confess to adhere to the sentence: Nature is an open secret that nobody is capable to demystify completely. On all beauty lies a certain veil; who tears it off un-chastely does harm beauty.«

(Picture: bozosapiens.blogspot.com)

(Picture: 150anni.it)

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