before the digital age
twelve o’clock, June 24, 2021 – 08:17
Until July 26, the exhibition “An immense scandal” reveals the details of the “Apologetic Letter” with a touch screen
of Natasha Festa
The intonation in a sentence (and therefore in life) is everything. Raimondo di Sangro di Sansevero knew it well, whose 250th anniversary of death occurs this year. In his Apologetic Letter (1751), the work that unleashed “an immense scandal”, as Luigi Capuana would have written a century later, invents what can be defined as the first emoticon in history. The exhibition “An immense scandal” tells the story, dedicated to this, which is the most important work of the alchemist prince. Entering with the usual sinking heart in the Chapel-icon, to the right of the Veiled Christ, a reliquary tells through first editions the ideological dispute triggered by the publication of the Letter. Fabrizio Masucci, curator of the small and precious exhibition, flipping through a providential touch screen that reveals all the secrets of the text, points to the page that certifies the birth of the “ironic point” or rather a graphic sign that is ancestor of the smiley faces that we can no longer cope with. minus: a parenthesis with a dot in the center, practically an upside-down and monocle smile, like Polyphemus.
“Irony not meant for Irony”
The prince writes: “What else is an Irony not meant for Irony but a solemn lie? It will be said good of whoever was the author’s mind to say evil; and said badly of those who intended to say good; praise be given to those who deserved blame and blame to those who were worthy of praise. Do you think this is a small danger for good people? What is the remedy for so much confusion? The IRONIC POINT ». Sansevero was an Academician of the Crusca with the name of Esercitato, the same one with whom he signed the incriminated Letter. As such he does not joke with his punctuation proposal and says: “If I were in Florence, I would not neglect to expose the need we have for the aforementioned Point in a lesson at my venerable Accademia della Crusca and I would certainly hope to deserve the approval of those virtuous comrades. But since I haven’t had the luck to do it yet, I wanted at least to introduce it into my newly thought-out Quipu ». And he did well to introduce it to leave traces of his far-sighted genius also in terms of handwriting. To find a similar idea, we do not know how much it is consciously indebted to Sansevero, it will be necessary to arrive at 1841 when Marcellin Jobard, Belgian newspaper publisher, conceived an ironic sign in the shape of an oversized arrowhead with a small stem, like a Christmas tree. A point d’ironie – a deformation of the question mark – was finally the found by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (name de plume of Marcel Bernhardt) in his L’ostensoir des ironies of 1899.
Languages
The Letter is above all dedicated to the Quipu, that is to the Inca language of knots, and therefore an exhibition, which can be visited from today until July 26 during the museum’s opening hours to the public (with admission ticket without extra charge). In the case the work is a typographical miracle: it was printed in 500 copies (a best seller for the time) with an innovative method developed by the prince: seven colors in a single impression of the press, an experimental anticipation of four-color printing . Also on display are two very rare pamphlets against the Apologetic Letter attributed to the Jesuit Pasquale De Mattei (1751); the Opinion around the true idea of the Apologetic Letter of the Jesuit Innocenzo Molinari (1752) which represents the most violent attack on the book and the famous Supplica that the prince addressed, in 1753, to Pope Benedict XIV in an attempt to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the Church. Here he used the register of irony as a key of defense. As if to say: I was joking and you took me seriously. We know how it ended. “And he foresaw it – explains Masucci – by adding a postscript to the work in which he hoped not to have to suffer the same attacks that happened to Montesquieu for The Spirit of the Laws”. The reality surpassed the imagination: the Letter was placed on the Index of forbidden books on the same day and with the same decree that prohibited the work of the French philosopher.
June 24, 2021 | 08:17
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