Scorn and contempt have always struck very small people, in spite of their qualities. Against the dwarves, the hunchbacks, the crippled, a long and repugnant sequence of insulting representations
Nature with a fist grinded him: “Sing, she said to him angrily”; and ei cant. Thus the Italian (and Dalmatian) linguist, writer and patriot Niccol Tommaseo, author with Bernardo Bellini of the imposing General vocabulary of the Italian language, scrape with a razor Giacomo Leopardi in a hateful epigram written when the poet was still alive and published immediately after his death, in mid-June 1837.
For him that was, the author of Do you sing and of Zibaldone. A hunchback. Worn out. Nano. Of course, he knew it was extraordinary. This is demonstrated by his judgment on Moral operettas: I have read the book of Count Leopardi: it seemed to me the best written book of our century; but the principles, all negative, not rightly founded, but only to some partial observation, diffuse a coldness that is disgusting in the images and in the style. The dwarf voice of the Vocabularyafter all, it says it all: Monstrous man for smallness. A definition that followed that of the Swedish scientist Carl Von Linn who in 1767 had invented theWise Man Monstrous and the even older one of the Accademia della Crusca of 1612: the monstrous man, for smallness.
An ancient and repulsive definition. Who made people suffer (I am here, mocked, spit, kicked by everyone, beating my whole life into a room …, he confided to Pietro Brighenti in 1821) not only Leopardi, who was bent over with pain and only tall 141 centimeters for chronic inflammation of the spine (ankylopoietic spondylitis, it seems) so much so that he was nicknamed in Naples’ or discarded, but he was not at all affected by dwarfism. Like too many short lines, before and after Renato Brunetta, muddied days ago by the usual splash of stinking guanothey have suffered a thousand pains undergoing the same, despicable, revolting humiliations.
As always, as evidenced by the skeleton found in Calabria by Romito 2 (a twenty-year-old one meter tall 12,000 years ago and buried with an older woman lying to wrap him up as if to protect him), the human being has to do with dwarfism. And as early as 2246 BC an Egyptian merchant went up the Nile from the Horn of Africa to Memphis to donate a court dwarf to Pharaoh Pepi. The first of an interminable series. In reality it seems he was a pygmy, but the differences, for millennia, have not weighed too much. What counted for kings, emperors, Caesars, sultans, popes or cardinals was to have as many of them at court as possible. Suffice it to say that the French diplomat in Rome Blaise de Vigenre told of a banquet by Cardinal Vitellozzo Vitelli, in which we were all served by thirty-four dwarfs, of very small stature, almost all counterfeit and deformed.
It was 1556. Eighty years later King Charles I of England boasted of having in his domains the tallest man (William Evans, 2 meters 20) and the smallest (45.72 centimeters) in the world: Jeffrey Hudson, given to Queen Henrietta as a pet animal, unexpectedly popped out of a cake during a gala dinner and remembered for the verses of The Jeffereide by the poet William Davenant determined to celebrate the victory he won against a guinea cock, but even more for a tragic duel. Tired of the jokes about his stature from a gentleman, William Crofts, he challenged him to a duel. And when that one came armed with a syringe to purge the animals, he no longer saw us, took his gun and killed him. Sent to death (also for having violated his role as a clown chained to happiness) on the journey towards condemnation right into the hands of the Barbary pirates who kept him prisoner (abusing him, it seems) for 25 years. When Henrietta had him redeemed, he was a broken man. An extraordinary portrait of Antoon van Dyck remains of him: Henrietta, Jeffrey and a little monkey. Perhaps the same, who knows, with which one day he had been forced to fight to cheer the guests.
Few figures have inspired painters, sculptors, mosaicists and musicians as much as that of the dwarf. From the dwarf in the center of Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi to Giulio Romano’s Gradasso, from Boy of Vallecas by Velzquez to the Mercdes Prayer by El Greco, from The dancer by Picasso al Nano Morgante del Bronzino up to noisy posters of the Circus Barnum on the tiny Napoleon on horseback Tom Thumb, the dwarfs portrayed are an infinity. All sad. Melancholy. Emptied. There is not one who smiles. Worse still in the cycle of Passion by Hieronymus Bosch, in particular The arrest of Christ. Where Jesus surrounded by executioners with monstrous faces is the most hideous of all, of course, he, the dwarf. Ugly. Crooked. Ambiguous. Always in the wake of the idea of the pivotal beauty and ugliness of Western culture with the combination kals kai agaths: the beautiful was identified with the good, the ugly with the bad.
Yet the story full of low people, but of the highest quality and intellectual, artistic, political stature. From Aesop, one of the fathers of literature described as repellent to sight, disgusting, paunchy, with a protruding head, snub, humped, olive, dachshund … to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who apparently did not exceed 152 centimeters, like Henri de Toulouse -Lautrec, who suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta, the disease of crystal bones exposed to continuous fractures, but represented the Belle poque like no one. From Antonio Gramsci who did not reach 149 centimeters, he had been struck by Pott’s disease and uselessly as a child was hung from the ceiling in the hope it would stretch, to the father of modern Mexico Benito Jurez, who barely touched 137. Up to Matthias Buchinger, the he little man of Nuremberg, only 74 centimeters tall, born in the late seventeenth century and described in Book of Wonderful Characters (1826) as a prodigy without equal: Born without legs and without arms (…) he was little more than a man’s trunk except for two growths starting from the shoulder blades, resembling fins of a fish more than human arms with which he built minute nibs to write poems and songs loved by noblewomen and play the harp and chisel precious miniatures and even a self-portrait with a huge wig (now in the British Museum) where each curl was a biblical psalm in micro writing. A monster him?
Not to say to Michel Petrucciani, the brilliant French pianist of Italian origin who conquered the world when he was still almost a teenager. He too suffered, like Toulouse-Lautrec, from the disease of crystal bones and, like him, he left at thirty-seven, never reaching a height of one meter. When John Paul II opened his arms wide at the Eucharistic Congress in Bologna in 1997, the cameras caught him as he walked forward on two crutches that looked like sticks. As soon as he touched the keyboard, for him, it suddenly appeared immense.
August 1, 2022 (change August 1, 2022 | 21:21)
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