Rainer Maria Rilke and the art of the Early Italian Renaissance
The fist step towards Primitivism
Keywords:
Rainer Maria Rilke, Poesia del Novecento, Arte, Rinascimento, PrimitivismoAbstract
This article identifies the origins of Rainer Maria Rilke’s taste for the primitive in his encounter with the art of the Early Italian Renaissance. Through the analysis of the most significant passages of Das Florenzer Tagebuch, this study aims at restoring the importance that the observations on the art of the Italian Renaissance provided in this diary deserve within the author’s critical and poetical work. By dismantling Vasari’s organic metaphor, which positioned the High Renaissance at the top of the artistic production of his time, Rilke elaborates his own vision of the artistic creative process, conceived as a life cycle lacking any possible culmination. The poet blames Raphael and Michelangelo’s pride for the decline of the Renaissance art and proclaims himself successor of the fifteenth-century masters. It is these artists – sadly named Primitives – that arouse in Rilke the necessity to identify with a simple and authentic art supporting honesty towards things.
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