This sort of typically medieval blind faith made it possible to face even the most demanding feats, such as explorations, with special naturalness, together with never-failing wonderment. And even the contrary could happen… that a small episode could turn into a memorable epic feat. This same spirit can be found in Beato Angelico’s or Sassetta’s altar steps, never defeated, indeed exalted by an extenuated exquisiteness. There is simplicity and sophistication, impetus and industriousness. I would like to wake up and find myself embarked towards a dream such as that of Saint Brendan, who did not know what sort of knowledge he would have reached, but surely he had organized himself well on departing.
An initiatory journey strewn with encounters, such as that with the Little Prince: it is a fox that teaches him how to light up life: “… Cornfields do not remind me of anything. And this is sad! But you have golden hair. So it will be wonderful when you have domesticated me. Corn, which is a golden colour, will make me think of you. And I will love the sound of wind blowing through corn…” The fox teaches the Little Prince the value of rituals and how to be happy.
The secret lies in maintaining harmony. “I have gathered and accumulated in me great wealth. And death no longer scares me. I have recovered that harmony which I possessed as a little girl”: in this case it is Alma Mahler speaking. A medieval saint, an “extraterrestrial” child, a special woman… whether invented or real, each of them in his or her own way has his or her experience take root directly in that Universal Life whose sense is seldom understandable, except maybe through art.
It could not but be a great actor (Barrault) to provide an extremely poetic image of similar, fleeting achievements… trophies of love, to see trophies of love in works of art, the only tangible result of the relationship between an artist and Universal Life. If I look at these things of mine, I realize that it may have been a somewhat pathetic relationship, like that between certain men and certain women…, leaving grotesque, ridiculous marks, hateful wastes of a (failed?) aggression of passion. They are like monstra [monsters], as disagreeable as certain primitive idols, through which one had the pretence of making characters and situations come back to life, but - why not - also like small Wunderkammern, in which one capriciously ties up in bundles, one next to the other, childhood memories, poetic, artistic or musical fetishes in the shape of microscopic quotations, suggestions, passions, with an often kitsch result, as may be a souvenir from the Coliseum or a crystal ball with snow falling on Fatima’s Sanctuary, though inside myself as grand as the scene of an opera or a painting by Rubens.
Everything overlaps as inside a diorama of the Barnum Circus, with hyper-realistic backdrops, against which real stuffed animals, wax figures dressed in exotic costumes were silhouetted, equipped with an authentic anthropological museum cross-section. Just as everything overlaps, also in the sense of the technical realization… what happens inside these swarming boxes is not achieved by assembling, but rather by stratification. And, although it is true that what counts in the end is the formal result, it is also true that a certain type of slow achievement made of waits and accurate rituals, transmits a magical value to the finished objects, as if they were coming out of an extremely slow long metamorphosis, which will have made them eternal or, at least, only very apparently ephemeral. Just as images, feelings and episodes very slowly settle inside ourselves. It calls to mind my grandmother’s ancient house, where I seemed to get bored in the summer which had its foundations somewhere near the Cave of the Sybil (Palestrina); apparently the Prince of Music (Pierluigi) was born in its cellar, and although it was a hen-house, it contained a marble plaque in memory of that event; before the shelling it had all belonged to the Barberini family… the leftovers of their archaeological excavations were uses by children to play with; many faces which are wrinkled today lived on endless tales of the Belle Époque, of sailing towards exotic or colonial lands, and of taking part in religious popular rituals, of which a classic was represented by the Clothing of the Madonna del Carmelo; and what I used to call boredom was just a whirl of suggestions destined to settle.

Maria Cristina Crespo