I have wanted to interview her for ages. The book that introduced me to her, her “Enigma di Piero” recommended to me on a winter afternoon a few years ago by a local historian, in a half-deserted bar of a small provincial bar in my region, Le Marche, had simply amazed me.
Coincidence or not, at that time I was already absorbed in reading the texts of James Hillman, who I only later discovered had been interviewed by her. So I began to put one plus one together, coincidence does not exist, that world that I kept secret to myself and so outside of that immanent that haunts everyone a bit, timidly began to reveal itself, only to then return to the ranks, in front of my sudden outbursts of an atrocious obviousness, either you are or you are not in short and I definitely was not: not a historian or an intellectual, rather an enthusiast, ignoring that passion, pathos, has unknown and unexpected origins, that what hurts you and nothing else, deep down, is precisely the origin of all things and that is where you have to start.
I finally left.
I meet her in Rome, in an unusual guise. She and her assistant, Prof. Monticini, are waiting for me so that they can all go to a conference on a text that they and Moreno Neri must present, that Synesius of Cyrene, a student of Hypatia, whom years before she had highlighted by writing a book about him, and shortly after a film was also made.
Against the backdrop of a staircase of an ancient villa with a centuries-old park, I patiently wait my turn so I can have a few minutes with her and ask her those questions that have always piqued my incurable curiosity.
Lorenza, I have some time now, she tells me. Let's get started then. I'm so nervous I don't even thank her. I'll start with the questions right away without going through go.
– How did you do it, how did the idea come about? Was it like Constantine's dream? – I ask her, showing her her book which is mine, “The Enigma of Piero” in a crumpled and lived-in version, like a battlefield full of names and crosses, references to periods and characters that I fear I would otherwise forget. Who knows what use it is to me.
He smiles. In that way that is all his of reacting to things, I think, halfway between sweetness and circumspection.
SR -Since my university years, or rather since childhood. There was a RAI program in which in each episode a writer was asked to talk about his favorite painting. When it was Paolo Volponi's turn, a great friend of my parents, he spoke about the Urbino Painting and one evening at dinner he spoke about it again with such intelligence that from that moment on The Flagellation became for me one of the most interesting and engaging paintings in the history of art.
LC – So what? –
SR – I recently found a note in my diary in which I wrote: but does the Flagellation of Urbino represent the fall of Constantinople? Which in Piero's depiction has not yet happened, the fall in fact, because the painting shows a Christ-Constantinople at the column flagellated but not yet crucified. It is clear that we are in an earlier moment. We are in 1439. We have c in fact on one side Pontius Pilate/John VIII Paleologus, as he was portrayed by Pisanello in 1439 in Florence on the occasion of the Council he attended, and on the other Bessarion, at the center of the scene, as if between East and West, trying to direct the reins of something that was slipping through his hands. Between the two who are conversing, between the learned prelate and the lord of Ferrara, host of the first phase of the council, we have a young man depicted as a representative of Christ on earth: he could be the future Basileus, and this would explain the purple-red dress given only to the heirs to the throne because they were born in purple.
LC – But who is this angel, this central angelic figure in truth? It seems that he has something to communicate to us, even now. Is he an anghelos, a messenger? This makes him still relevant to me, inexplicably… –
SR – Yes, of course, it has features and attributes similar to those of other angelic figures portrayed by Piero…. –
LC – It would be a thriller, a Netflix series, with one twist after another and they would be true, things that really happened.
SR – The truth is that the reality of history is often much more compelling than fiction.-
LC – I mean…. I wonder why no one has ever asked him yet.-
SR – Who knows, maybe a successful series would come out of it. Take “The Name of the Rose”, if I can make a bold comparison: it seemed like it was going to be a divertissement, a niche book and instead what came out of it?
LC – Piero's Enigma is also a thriller, but it tells of real events, with real characters, and deals with our most fascinating history: the Renaissance.
SR – It must be admitted that for an essay it sold well, the publishing house called it an unexpected best seller, but why are they unexpected? because there is no risk. Obviously I am not talking about my publisher, Rizzoli, who took a risk and published it, but about many others who often try only to play it safe. –
LC – So nothing so far?
SR –No.
LC – And yet it is very current. It has some relevance to what we are experiencing. A pre-fall period.
SR – We live in such an apocalyptic time! The truth is that history opens windows and then closes them. Instead, if we did not forget the past, as we did with Constantinople, maybe we would not repeat the same mistakes. And the future would be better. –
LC – Can Byzantium still teach us something? –
SR – Of course! If we look at Byzantium, for example, we could understand Putin and what is happening, much better. The third Rome and the idea of the empire that has moved to Moscow. As if we were to delve deeper into “The Memoirs of Hadrian” we would understand why Yourcenar wrote it – Hadrian, despite the full success of his empire, is not unaware that Rome will one day end up in decline – and speaking of Hadrian, if we knew Flavius Josephus and the Jewish war, we would find surprising anticipations of today’s events and dilemmas, we would engage better with that part of the world. But we don’t do that!-
LC – Returning to the Enigma….. finally our Adriatic would return to light.-
SR – It has been at the center of exchanges in the Mediterranean world, and not only, for such a long time! –
LC – I try to revitalize Ancona, the Marche and the entire central Adriatic in my own small way…and then we want to include the story of the beautiful and very young Cleopa Malatesta, a mystery with fascinating undertones. An unpunished murder in the center of the Peloponnese. She wasn’t from Ancona but from Rimini…-
SR – Yes indeed!…. But Ancona was very important! It had a central role between East and West. The Crusade started from Ancona, Thomas, the last of the heirs to the Byzantine throne, landed in Ancona, the people of Ancona had a fundamental role in the defense of the city, a community that in Byzantium was very large, mercantile but also intellectual, there is this consul: Benvenuto d'Ancona, who I am trying to study in depth, who also reveals to us the importance that the Ancona community had within this fascinating oriental world. In trade, we know, stories, figures, songs travel….-
LC – And we know how many books have traveled in the Adriatic. Nobody read Plato until Marsilio Ficino – here I get fired up, I try to stay calm in the end but I can't: – you know, I am the daughter and granddaughter of merchants from the port of Ancona and for our family trade has always meant exchange of cultures. –
SR – Without it, we would remain closed in our own tradition, instead innovations start from trade, from the knowledge of other forms of humanity, think of painters and colors, visual and artistic forms, forms of life, ways of living and of perfuming oneself, of dressing. Think of the portrait of Battista Sforza. But do we want to talk about that other genius that was Federico da Montefeltro?
LC – Oops… if I knew! Studying his biography at university as a monographic course I was so fascinated by him that I told myself that perhaps he was the only interesting man I would marry.
SR – It is the representation of the strength that the West can offer to the East. Never before have these two worlds merged as in the Renaissance, an East with superior knowledge that yields to the West in a perfect, equal communion. And the Malatesta temple in Rimini is the greatest example of this. –
LC – I discovered that Piero della Francesca stayed for some time in Ancona and there he gave some information to our Renaissance painter who is Nicola di Maestro Antonio, a painter completely forgotten by the Ancona community, just imagine that the most important paintings are in Pittsburgh or Oxford, there is something left in Jesi but nobody pays attention to it, this is the state of the art at the moment. But returning to Piero, who was he really? –
SR – He was an initiate of the Platonic Academy.-
LC – And where was this Academy located? –
SR – There were various locations at the beginning, probably the first was in Rimini. Piero belonged, it seems, to the one in Forlì, where Thomas Bodley was also initiated, from which the name of the Oxford library, the Bodleian Library, comes.
It was an international network where the structure of the unwritten Neoplatonic, Neopythagorean esoteric teaching also included figures of the calibre of Bessarion, Plethon and many others, including, precisely, Piero della Francesca.
LC – And Piero's table…-
SR – It was a message, which had to do with politics, or rather an exhortation. Definitely an exhortation to politics in the constructive sense of Paidia Greek which is made of spiritual consciousness and collective and common construction work. And it is clear that from the moment there is an ethic, there is also a vision of the world that is not necessarily metaphysical but philosophical and cannot but be political. –
LC – So the figure of the intellectual…..-
SR – The figure of the intellectual must try to moderate extremism, must act and make others act according to conscience, a moral conscience that cannot but come from knowledge. Piero della Francesca was a multifaceted intellectual, a mathematician, a brilliant scientist as well as a painter. An intelligent and free man, at the service of no one. He was eventually at the service of a service, in the sense that he wanted to serve a common conscience together with a circle of people who were part of the intellectual community that would later have its most famous expression in the Platonic Academy of Florence. –
LC – And this consciousness can be even higher, right? –
SR Let's think about psychoanalysis and the idea of a mystery that is not transcendent but immanent, the unconscious, the mystery, let's call it that, inside us. We cannot transfer the contents that are not clear to us into a key of interpretation accessible to all but we can still access the general idea of aanima mundi , which is what characterizes Renaissance Neoplatonism and which science today seems to want to bring back into play. An animated universality, a collective intelligence from which it is possible to trace the individual aspects of nature of which plants, animals and human beings are a part.
We get up, Sinesio's presentation is about to begin.
LC – One last question, which goes beyond all the rest, I know. What is your sign? –
SR – Of the Fishes –
I smile. I imagined it. It is the sign of spiritual people, of mystics.