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The last man on earth: what will he do? What testimony will he offer up of man's painful journey? To whom will he pass the torch? The last man on earth, through whose eyes flows - finally liberated - the entire course of humanity. Lorenzo Peretti Junior (1871-1953), 'closed the parabola of four generations of the Peretti family dedicated to art' (Davide Ramoni), apparently in a drastic and pictorially modest way. But we must always be on guard against the pitfalls of appearance as we cultivate the illusion of observing Lorenzo; his life was shored up by mirrors within mirrors, sophisticated conjuring tricks, transparent threads hooked to abstraction, and we risk believing ourselves to be the ambiguous object of one of his rarefied portraits. After all, Lorenzo, who 'never was a professional painter; painting was part of his critical and aesthetic research' (Ramoni again), was raised by a father, Bernardino, who wanted to see him employed in less vague and more profitable activities. Fortunately, Bernardino died when Lorenzo was 18: the boy sidestepped work and made his entrance at the Rossetti Valentini Art School, then the dominion of Enrico Cavalli. There the great adventure began, and avid painters were seduced by the French transgressions of Cavalli: Gian Maria Rastellini, Giovanni Battista Ciolina and, above all, Carlo Fornara.
*
The last of the Perettis. What an immense fit of vertigo must have
seized Lorenzo known as 'Junior' to distinguish him from his
grandfather, 'the Raphael of Ossola', with whose passing 'the Val
Vigezzo lost its greatest painter of frescoes: he brought this art to
its apogee; no one will ever succeed in doing more or doing better'
(again Ramoni, a pioneer in the exploration of
the art of the Vigezzo Valley, whose analyses besides being technical
are often delicately sentimental). The parabola had begun its
descent: Lorenzo's father was an honest, devoted, capable custodian
of the talent of Lorenzo "Senior". The family genius seemed
to be fading out. And moreover Lorenzo "Junior" seemed to
be poking fun at the phalanx of family saints: he used the pictorial
method for his own alchemical tricks, and in the valley had the
reputation of being a madman and a layabout (or a demonic seducer of
dreamy country girls). The man whose destiny it was to
terminate the pictorial history of the Peretti family didn't give a
hoot about painting and made no boast of aesthetic merit.
*
The last of Perettis, the first artist of the new world. Lorenzo
Junior was a man of enormous and unfathomable thoughts. Believing
modern art to be a subterfuge of Satan designed to corrupt the mind
of progressive, rational man (an idea shared by his fraternal friend
Fornara), Lorenzo thought that in order to rise again, art had to
touch bottom, had to express and experience oblivion as a prelude to
resurrection. A cosmic man, Lorenzo had one foot in the mud of this
decaying earth and the other in heavenly Zion, encircled by ivory
walls. One foot in the here and now and the other in the world that
was to dawn - and of which he was the only prophet. The artist is the
being who succeeds in synthesising the genius of three millennia of
Western painting and discovers a new sign.
Is it not true that some of Lorenzo's drawings look like petroglyphs,
scratches on stone, salvific excavations? But primordial disorder is
conjugated with mediaeval wisdom, the Renaissance hand with the
Expressionist, mystical, twentieth-century mind. It remains to be
seen whether Lorenzo "Junior" liked interpreting the role
of the blacksmith who nails Western art to the cross, or that of the
Resurrected One from whose weeping stigmata drops of the new world
emerge (rivers of milk and honey and tumultuous aesthetic visions).
In short, did Lorenzo want to paint the last picture of the old world
(with violence and compassion) or the first picture of the world to
come (in a hopeful spirit that breaks through into the unknown)?
Take the Portrait of the Artist's
Sister [Ritratto della sorella], for example. The conception of
the painting, dateless and timeless, has the naked simplicity of the
future. The demure woman has the gift and the destiny of a survivor.
She looks compassionately on the millennia-long human experience,
with respect, joyfully inaugurating a new, naked humanity. This is
the face of the first man after the end of man.
On the contrary, in his increasingly stark and rarefied
drawings, from Woman with a Pannier [Donna con la gerla] and
The Carter [Il carrettiere] through to the hypothetical
Figures in the Woods [Figure nel bosco], there is something
final, something truly ultimate and definitive. The strokes of the
pencil are like breaths: beyond them lie the wasteland of
nothingness. Silence is expressed, and the certainty of the end - and
therefore, of an imperatorial salvation.
*
In a vision of art as a privileged tool of knowledge - a means of
realisation, aesthetics as the achievement of
wisdom - what does Lorenzo learn? In
1897, his friend Fornara obtained a precocious, luminous success with
the epoch-making picture En plein air: he became, with all due
proportion, the standard bearer of Divisionism (art's umpteenth new
Science&Religion). Lorenzo refused all the labels, and did not
permit the intrusion of rationalism into art; he was a painter of
violent, disharmonic inspirations who looked determinedly to the
East. France was the privileged terrain of japonaiserie and
the echoes of Chinese art. Prints of Hokusai, Hiroshige and Utamaro
flooded the imagination of Van Gogh, Manet,
Klimt and watered the magnificence of Art Nouveau. After the
extemporaneous insights of Goethe and Schopenhauer, the link between
poets and the Orient was consolidated by the works of Victor Segalen
and Hermann Hesse, Thomas S. Eliot and Saint-John Perse. The studies
of Richard Wilhelm were widely disseminated, and in 1924 he published
his definitive translation (ten years in the making) of the
IChing, the ancestral text on which Chinese religious (and political)
thought is founded. The East was a place of escape and ambiguous
aesthetic encounters for Westerners who had lost their own identity:
the dull tolling of a Tibetan bell in place of the crucifix. However,
Lorenzo Junior cared little about the fairly superficial aesthetic
dialectic of the various vague imitators of oriental knick-knacks.
Instead of the result, the artifact, he set his sights on the
gesture.
*
'In ancient times there were no rules, and extreme naturalness had
not yet been infringed. When naturalness is
infringed, rules appear: they are based on the single stroke
of the brush. The single stroke is the origin of all things, the root
of all phenomena.' The aesthetic concepts written down by the Chinese
painter and theorist Shitao (1642-1707), or Stone Wave, also
known as Kugua (Bitter Gourd) and Dadizi (The Cleansed
One), are the lens through which to read the work of Lorenzo Peretti
Junior. 'The single stroke holds within itself the totality of all
beings'; 'The landscape expresses the form and the tensions of the
entire universe'; 'Everything dwells within the human being, through
the free flow of brush and ink'. The universal poured
back into the particular, the fusion of opposites, the quest
through practice of authenticity, of the supreme law that 'is based
on the absence of rules': this drastic vision of art, diametrically
opposed to ornament or the refinements of art as an end in itself, is
Lorenzo's. Art is the way of the mystic. But woe betide anyone who
thinks they can get somewhere: the mystic passes through art to
return to himself, and the blind, the hapless,
take him for an idiot. Lorenzo backdates the Peretti dynasty to a
primordial idiocy. The villagers considered him a madman and a
sorcerer: in truth, he was a saint.
*
Settling accounts with the earthly world. In 1894, Lorenzo Junior
completed Portrait of the Artist's Father Bernardino [Ritratto
del padre Bernardino]. He was 23 years old and he practised on
a photograph of his father. The portrait proved to be a murder.
Lorenzo produced a magnificent, fluid, modern work: his father looks
like a decrepit statue. The fractured masses manifest old age,
decay, mummified tradition, deaths. Thus, with a sublime artistic
gesture, Lorenzo freed himself from the spirit of his father, who had
died five years earlier (Lorenzo's destiny is crowded with deaths,
with offences uncommitted, affections still to
be reclaimed, sentences awaiting the adjective that will
justify them: Lorenzo is the unexpected, improvident artist who
creates the link that binds the living to the dead, who contracts the
pact that admits this world into the world beyond). Then,
judiciously, he stopped dating his pictures. As if everything were
vibrating in a limpid "beyond time": and what is this? A
barbarous, pre-mediaeval painting, or a picture yet to be born, set
in a far-off future? We possess no photographs of Lorenzo. He can be
glimpsed, half-hidden, crouched down, in an image that captures his
fellow painter Giovanni Battista Ciolina (standing upright, gaze
proud, thumbs in pockets) with his wife (kneeling, in front of her
husband) and their little daughter (in her mother's arms). Lorenzo
looks like an intruder, a piece of cardboard stuck onto the family
cornucopia, a stranger. His hat casts a shadow; the face - one senses
the corsair beard - is a black splotch, unrecognisable, as though
concealed by a veil. The modesty of the saints. Immodesty, careless
"showing-off", recalls our origins as slaves, as bodies put
up for sale in the butcher's shop of mortality. The noble spirit
conceals itself, it needs no stage; the Saint lives in the invisible.
*
Contemplate Lorenzo's landscapes. The glimpses of woods, the uneasy
glow of the Val Vigezzo, the narrow lanes of Toceno, the oratories
that suddenly appear, dazzling, divine. It is like approaching the
Himalayas, places and radiances in which
everyday illuminations occur, are awaited. The face of a mad monk in
the bushes, a herdsman all of a sudden happens to discover the law
that regulates the world and accedes to other peaks, in
addition to those enclosing the repertoire of his destiny. The
washerwomen seem to be praying before a baptismal font or a chasm
into which the earth is falling, into which man is falling. Lorenzo's
paintings are like a sacred place, the quiet square of the cloister,
a place of endless space and endless beauty. The story of Lorenzo
"Junior" is analogous to that of Dino Campana, the
poet non-poet, alien to the affected tastes of the literati, out of
fashion, outstanding, out of his mind. Dino rotted in an asylum (and
self-published the work that changed the canons of Italic poetry);
Lorenzo was disintegrated by indifference. In a poem dedicated to
Mario Novaro and dated 'Domodossola 1915', Dino uses slivers of
lyricism and myth to recreate the extreme city, the outpost, the
place of transit for traffickers of dreams and bandits like himself
('As steel towers / In the dusky heart of evening / Recreate my
spirit / For a taciturn kiss'). In the nocturnal city that springs up
between steep mountains, I imagine an oneiric encounter between Dino
and Lorenzo. The poet is thirty years old, the painter forty-four.
Let us listen in silence to their dialogue, the overpowering voids in
which the mystic and modest rite of art is performed.
*
An idler and a magician, a sensual and mystical
demon: the villagers believed that Lorenzo Junior, a disreputable
type, performed all sorts of astonishing acts of magic. Superimposing
alchemy on perversion, they said he could turn himself into a
lithe black cat dying to sneak under the skirts of the village
beauties. Insatiable, unquiet Lorenzo. Who entrusts his knowledge to
an esoteric spiritual testament, an irrevocable prayer. As if to say:
I am nothing other than this oration,
this humble cleansing of words from the
unfathomable face of God. In light of this legacy, every artwork of
Lorenzo's has to be inserted into a precise spiritual journey.
Each work is an experience, a fact-finding experiment. Not only the
most obvious (the Woods of the Druids [Bosco dei druidi], for
example, which dates back to 1898 and manifests Lorenzo's "pagan"
interests and "Celtic" intentions), but above all the most
remote and difficult works to read (the crystalline, disturbed
drawings, the landscapes over which drifts a
pleasurable sense of the mystical). Something like a
procession, a steady climb towards the heavens by a monk without an
order ostracised for every heresy. Alone.
*
Then there's the story, as mysterious as its creator's identity, of
Lorenzo Junior's private library. Lorenzo was a spiritual person, a
pneumatic, who practised his spirituality and his own personal
infernal and heavenly way in art. However, the instinctive act at the
origin of art is the result of indefatigable, brusque, chaotic study.
Indeed, Lorenzo possessed an esoteric library, unique and bizarre in
the pleasant blue grotto of the Vigezzo Valley (formed, if one
believes in appearances, of places where every spiritual quest is
mere vain twittering, places of shelter and panaceas, in which to
die). The library was thoughtlessly spoilt, dismembered and ruined:
sold to some antiquarian who in turn resold it. Lorenzo's study has
vanished, like a glass that shatters into dust, revealing itself to
be a cloud of ash. Two clues can help us
to recreate, albeit in the abstract, the
painter-shaman's library. The first we can extrapolate from his
Testament: 'bless René Guénon, my venerated instructor here on
earth'. The work of the French scholar (which enjoyed an
immaculate success precisely in this period) is marked by a fruitful
religious syncretism. Guénon's research roamed through Islam and the
Tibetan tradition, Hinduism and Taoism, the esoteric Judaism
explicated in the doctrine of the Kabbalah, and did not disdain
admission to the Masonic rites. The name of Guénon leads us to the
second clue: Lorenzo Peretti was one of the young "French
Vigezzini",
his cultural formation was rooted in Paris, in those days "the
navel of the world". Given the theses of Guénon, it is highly
plausible that Lorenzo read Édouard Schuré's The Great Initiates
[Les Grands Initiés], published in 1889, in which the author earlier
and more forcefully than others runs through the 'essential
principles of esoteric doctrine' (the fundamental one: 'The spirit is
the only reality. Matter is only its inferior expression,
ever-changing and ephemeral, dynamism in space and time). Equally
evident is his knowledge of (or at least his philosophical proximity
to) the theosophical thought of Rudolf Steiner and the teachings of
the Armenian master G.I. Gurdjieff (and perhaps, too, the literary
interpretations of his thought by his pupil René Daumal). Syncretism
was significantly influencing the arts.
I shall note in passing that Rainer Maria Rilke's The Duino
Elegies [Duineser Elegien] draws on the mystical Islamic doctrine
of the 'celestial hierarchy', and that T. S. Eliot ends The
Wasteland by telling us '... these fragments I have shored
against my ruins', fragments of a dialogue he created between
Biblical prophecy (Isaiah, Jeremiah), Dante Alighieri and Gérard de
Nerval, the Pervigilium Veneris and the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad, in a longing for the final peace (Shantih), the
fusion of all cultures. Both these poetic works, which were
aesthetically foundational and verge at times
on texts of mystical wisdom,
were published in 1922, a legendary date for modern Western
literature. In short, a highly aristocratic vision emerges of the
spiritual quest, which heaps together in sovereign creative freedom
all the sacred texts (which all lead ultimately to the same goal),
annulling the particular, the religious regionalism, the popular
folklore (although later, indication of the power of the mass media,
syncretism itself in its New Age involution became "pop",
and esotericism an enormous treasure trove for advertising). Alone,
preying on God - perhaps with the map of a guru - despising the
vileness of man.
*
The Testament of Lorenzo Peretti could
therefore be fatally written off as a curious and voluptuously Art
Nouveau artefact of its times, when in reality, in light of the
spiritual coherence of Lorenzo Junior, it should be interpreted as a
Gnostic prayer. The theologically audacious text proclaims that there
is an unbridgeable difference between earthly life, dominated by evil
and meanness ('I have fallen into the abyss of darkness and filth,
where I stumble around craving you'), and the heights of a
loving, compassion-driven God. This is precisely one of the criteria
on which Gnosticism is founded. Lorenzo's prayer
seems to have been hauled out of an apocalyptic revelation or a
Gnostic gospel, perhaps the remarkable sapiential poem Pistis
Sophia, from the 3rd century AD. A
deeper look at the theological verve of Gnosticism (craved by artists
because it is creatively productive; while the Christian faith finds
solidity in the regularisation carried out by Saint Paul, Gnosticism
is recast by each voice and each teacher who professes it) was made
possible by the remarkable discovery of the manuscripts unearthed in
the Egyptian locality of Nag Hammadi in 1945. Lorenzo could not
possibly have known the results of this discovery.
*
But what matters, and what remains, is prayer. After paring away the
culture, the books and the French library, there remains the hymn.
And here, curiously, Lorenzo the eclectic rediscovered himself
to be a Peretti from Toceno, more peasant than Parisian
sorcerer, more concrete. Fascinating, for example, is
the dialogue Lorenzo carries on, unashamedly moved, with the dead:
'And you, my venerable forebears, stripped now of this, our miserable
flesh, freed now from our earthly passions, purified, enlightened and
therefore closer to the Truth, forgive the many grave failings of my
life, watch over my future'. I find people who have rapturous
relationships with the dead more reassuring than the rhetoric of
those in the trade of huckstering the living. A greater and
better articulated family unites the living to the dead. The living
live out their lives through the intercession of the dead (and not
vice versa). It seems then that Lorenzo, in his prayer-testament, had
made a salutary peace with his forebears: he asks for help from his
grandfather, and forgiveness from his father. He smiles. So Lorenzo
"Junior", Bernardino and Lorenzo "Senior" are
still together, united.
*
'Beyond the frontiers of impassibility, when
your intellect in its ardent desire for God begins little by little
to emerge, as it were, from the flesh, and succeeds in turning away
all thoughts caused by the senses or by memory or temperament until
gradually it is filled with reverence and joy, then you can say you
have drawn near to the borders of prayer.'
Evagrius Ponticus (4th century AD) in his treatise On Prayer
[De Oratione] traces out a mystical path that leads to John of the
Cross - and to the greatest modern poetry. Its
borders with heresy are a fine line: prayer is a solitary
dialogue between the person who prays and God, yet this dialogue must
not be detrimental to living in a community. In other words, solitary
prayer must not distract man from his social duties. The mystical
aristocracy gives way to a humility attained: I have no words with
which to speak to God. Truly, mystically, 'For You silence is
praise', as Psalm 65 proclaims. A wise scholar
who gave enormous impetus to reflections on prayer was Isaac
of Nineveh (7th century AD): 'When one has been ceaselessly joined to
God in the continuous effusion that takes place in prayer, neither
law, nor canons nor times or distinct and regular hours have power
over him; from then on he is above all things and boundlessly with
God.' Isaac renounced the office of bishop (he was for five months
the spiritual guide of the city of Nineveh), choosing to lead an
ascetic life, in solitude, together with those rare monks for whose
solace he would write down his
"discourses". 'Just as one
cannot learn the art of archery in the midst of a crowd or in a
public square, but only in a completely deserted and empty
place suitable for horse racing and shooting
arrows, where the trajectory to the target is unimpeded, so one
cannot learn the art of spiritual battles and the deliberately
calculated trajectory that reaches the divine target; one cannot
learn the art of thought and the skills of spiritual navigation on
this terrible sea or understand the resources and the numerous
pitfalls unless one remains in continual stillness, empty of
everything which restrains or dissipates the mind or which causes it
to cease from continuous supplication. Whoever does not do this will
fall.' Isaac's stern exhortations - to renounce life and worldly
ambitions, to flee human noise, to live in austere and avowed
solitude without a shadow of pride - seem to be embroidered in fire
on the back of Lorenzo Junior.
*
A (heretical) note on incessant prayer. The spiritual,
and therefore artistic, path of Lorenzo Junior was deliberately
antagonistic, bordering on heresy. In this journey - which traces out
a nebulous path - through the ideas evoked by Lorenzo's testament, I
would suggest there is a disturbing, dazzling affinity with the story
of the Messallians. Founded in the confused and creative period of
early Christianity, this sect was denounced as dissolute by the
Synods of Sida (390 AD) and Constantinople (426 AD), then
definitively condemned during the Council of Ephesus (431 AD). We
know about the peculiar characteristics of the sect, now vanished in
the vortex of time, from a profuse, though ambiguous and partisan,
orthodox literature written by Epiphanius of Salamis and Theodoret of
Cyrrhus, Philoxenus of Mabbug, Timothy of Constantinople and John
Damascene. The canonical accusations of debauchery and sexual
perversion (recurrent for every passing heresy) seem to have been
added by devout orators to spice up the tale. In actual fact, the
peculiarity of the sect is summed up in its name: the Syriac
term Messallians and its Greek analogue Euchites mean 'those who
pray'. Indeed, they 'attributed to prayer and ascesis alone the
power to truly liberate man from the dominion of Satan, and to
achieve impassibility.
Before this state was attained, the Holy Spirit and the Devil were
simultaneously at work in his heart: although baptism was not enough
to completely expel the demonic inhabitant, asceticism and
persevering prayer could, in the end, bring perfect freedom from the
passions and almost a new innocence, so limpid and transparent it
could make any action pure.' (Maria Benedetta Artioli, in
Pseudo-Macarius, The Great Letter,
Gribaudi, Turin 1989). The transgression of the Messallians was not
simply that of contradicting Saint Paul (who in the First
Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter
14, disparaged the value of spiritual gifts and individual religious
creativity, proclaiming that 'everything must be done for the
edification' of the new ecclesiastical community), but of believing
that man could obtain salvation by himself, here on this earth, by
experiencing God through prayer. Among the most impressive and
unique Messallian documents are the discourses contained in the
Pseudo-Macarius (5th century AD, also known as the
Macarius-Simeon), which in addition to defining the fundamental
principles of the sect ('The cornerstone of all genuine solicitude
and the pinnacle of righteous works is persevering prayer, through
which each day we can acquire the other virtues
as well by asking them of God'), leads us, with abundant rhetorical
skill, into the war of the soul: 'Just as when wagons and horses
cross paths, jostling each other, each wagon uses tricks and
expedients to knock the other wagon over in order to emerge the
victor, so does it happen in the hearts of those who fight the battle
against the evil thoughts that make war on the soul, while God and
the angels observe the combat'. Lorenzo Junior took part in this
total war too, in the most powerful points of his prayer: 'Deliver me
from greed for earthly goods, from anger, from hatred, from rancour,
from the seduction of libidinous or lustful thoughts, from pride or
prideful gluttony, from injustice, vanity, envy. Father, lead me out
of the darkness and enlighten me, lead me away from uncleanliness and
purify me, and thus enlightened and purified let me live out the rest
of the days You grant me righteously, at the end of which give me a
death not sudden but happy, calm, serene and completely aware in
You.' However, the Pseudo-Macarius has a luminous (and not
Gnostic) vision of creation and man which reduces the battle against
evil to the personal struggle of the
person praying against the twisted thoughts produced by his
abominable viscera, because 'if you say that Satan has his place and
so does God, you are saying that God is not present in all things,
but circumscribed to the place in which he dwells. We say instead
that God is infinite and not circumscribed, and that everything is in
him, and that good is not contaminated by evil.' Even evil, on this
earth, has its own salvific impetus, its own sacred
necessity ('God permitted evil to exist as an exercise for
man'), and "'the creatures are established in their proper
order, and He who made them, and is present within them, is God'. The
dialogues of the Pseudo-Macarius, once the traces of heresy are
sifted away, together with the thought of Evagrius Ponticus and the
Desert Fathers, are fundamental for understanding the ascetic
(Orthodox) doctrine of the Hesychasm, practised on Mount Athos and
articulated in the thought of Gregory
Palamas (14th century AD). The Hesychasm renews the discipline of
incessant prayer through motifs and methods typical of oriental
wisdom (yoga, for example): making it a mysticism that bridges the
religious thought of the West (encapsulated in the Roman Catholic
Church) and the East (in the extreme offshoots of Buddhism and
Taoism).
*
Only a distracted eye could interpret the words with
which Lorenzo Junior ends his prayer as a heap of oriental
abstrusities, of Hindu clichés. In reality they act as a compass, a
code that leads us to the roots of Lorenzo's spiritual thought. The
artist undertook a path of liberation-purification through prayer:
pneumatic man traversing the trauma of mortality can synthesise
opposites within himself and experience what is absolute, indifferent
to any division. An interpretive key is provided by the Bhagavad
Gita, in which the ascetic is
ordered to tame material nature (prakriti) which
'consists of three basic elements: sattva, light, luminous and
pleasurable; rajas, moving, dynamic and painful; tamas,
inert, obtuse and obstructing'. Combined with ahamkara, 'the
sense of self, which associates the knowable with the
ego, the me and mine', they give rise to the senses. The task
of spiritual man is summarised in some memorable verses from the epic
poem: '
Transcend dualities, be eternally fixed in
truth, without concern for material gain, be situated in the self.
(...) Concern yourself only with the action, never with its
fruits. Never let the fruit of an action be your goal, nor become
attached to inaction. Perform your prescribed actions, O Arjuna, with
the discipline of yoga, without attachment, remaining equable in both
success and failure. Miserable are those who seek to enjoy the fruits
of their actions.'
Dwelling in the stillness devoid of opposites
and contrasts, 'the condition of the soul in this state of isolation
is ineffable; beyond pleasure and pain, in a state of metempirical
awareness comparable to deep sleep'. The spiritual journey on which
Lorenzo Junior guides us into the abyss of human passions: instead of
casting them out (episcopal vanity of the self-righteous), we
are asked to take responsibility for them, to tame them. Only by
doing so can one reach the precipice of purity. Lorenzo
unfurls his mystical codex in the course of his prayer, when he
addresses his noblest words to God:
'Bless my enemies. Take away hatred,
resentment, the will to harm from our
hearts and our minds. Pour down on us Your grace and Your
peace, profound, divine, eternal in You'.
*
The destiny of Lorenzo Peretti "Junior" was eccentric and
absurd. Antagonistic painter, misanthropist, accused of satanism,
exponent of every voluptuousness, outside of time and outside mankind
(as if to say: as long as they misunderstand me I am granted the
grace of finding out who I am). In the Testament he draws
a map that leads out of the whirlwind of evil into the good.
It saves us, vanishing into the good. And to accept the good,
one needs the courage of an artist.
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