Oltre il secondo spazio. Balzac, Henry James e altri pittori

Abstract

This essay aims at reflecting on painting and the position of the painter facing his work by analysing two interdependent short stories from the XIX century: Honoré de Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu (1837) and Henry James’ The Madonna of the Future (1873). The main characters, the old demonic master Frenhofer and the ghostly idealist Theobald, both obsessively involved in realizing a female portrait, represent two opposite yet complementary concepts of painting, as well as mystical paradoxes of visibility: the informal magma of an expressionist orphism and the lightless transparency of a transcendental vacuum, respectively. Through a theoretical premise and a comparative textual analysis, the paper shows how this case of literary influence helps in rethinking the figure of the modern artist in relation to the interference between reality and imagination.