Ettore Ghinassi. Regesto

The history of this installation - which is here reconstructed after its disastrous loss, 35 years later, in the gallery of Paolo Tonin, adventurous accomplice - began in 1977, during a walk in the mountains with Franco Torriani, with the reading of a page Vasari's Life of Leonardo.
The page, which I reproduce in full, tells the amazing story of a round, a "wheel of pine, Piero da Vinci would have led to his son because I was painting a fantastic invention.
"It is said that Ser Piero da Vinci, being at the villa, was refined domestically by his countryman, who, on a fig tree he cut in from the farm, he had his hand made a wheel that did gnene to Florence to paint, the which he gladly did, being the villain in a very practical way to turn the bird and it pescagioni, and using him greatly Ser Piero in those exercises. Wherefore, having her lead in Florence, otherwise say no to Leonardo who she was, that it sought you should paint something he upward. Lionardo, arrecatosi one day this wheel in your hands, seeing her cake, ill-treated and the awkward Pointed with fire, and dataHigh a torniatore of roza and awkward that she was, did reduce the delicate and equal . below Et ingessatala et acconciatala in his own way, he began to think about what you could to paint on, he had to scare those who were against, representing the same effect that the head of Medusa already. Lionardo He therefore brought her to this effect at a room, where he would not fit if not only, lizards, lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, locusts, bats, and other strange spices of similar animals from the multitude 'which, variously adapted together, pulled one animalaccio very horrible and scary, which poisoned with the breath and the air was fire. And what did come out of a dark stone and broken, Buffing poison from the open throat, fire and smoke from his nose dagl'occhi yes oddly enough, that seemed monstruosa et horrible thing at all. And I suffer so much in it, that in that room was the disease of dead animals too cruel, but not heard from Lionardo, for the great love he had for art. After this work, which was not looking, neither rude nor from his father, Leonardo said, that would send to his every comfort for the wheel, that what he had done. Ser Piero then went one morning to the room for the wheel and hit the door, Leonardo opened him, saying he expected a little; ritornatosi acconciò in the room and the light in the wheel on the lectern et trim the window, which did light dazzled, then made him pass inside to see it. Ser Piero in the first aspect, not thinking about the thing, suddenly roused himself, not believing that this was the wheel, nor miss the painting and figured out that 'you saw. And with the step back to back, Leonardo kept him, saying: "This work is for what she's done. Pigliatela, then, and take it, that this is the end, that dell'opere expects. "
Awe, wonder, perhaps fear of Ser Piero. Answer terse and peremptory Leonardo. Vasari's admiration for the prodigious artist who contends for God's power and the nature of its generation, who are not content to imitate it, but investigates and transforms the plasma to his liking, he felt the beauty everywhere, even in the monstrous and nell'orrifico, and arouses. In this legend, even with its cargo of ferocious titanism in a nutshell, there is already the whole future secular art.
But above all, the underground, there is, of beauty, a new concept that certain Vasari had become familiar, after Michelangelo and the great splenetici and melancholy of the first anti-classical movement; after seeing the celestial paints a gloomy misanthrope, and his unforgettable blue-indigo and red burning and burns white-hot and sweetness of embodied not settle for the eyes; the sulfur inventions Beccafumi; the mocking cruelty of Rosso Fiorentino: that beauty is not hanging from the edge of a fee, of any rule, is irreducible to its own "Idea." But above all, the underground, there is, of beauty, a new concept that certain Vasari had become familiar, after Michelangelo and the great splenetici and melancholy of the first anti-classical movement; after seeing the celestial paints a gloomy misanthrope, and his unforgettable blue-indigo and red burning and burns white-hot and sweetness of embodied not settle for the eyes; the sulfur inventions Beccafumi; the mocking cruelty of Rosso Fiorentino: that beauty is not hanging from the edge of a fee, of any rule, is irreducible to its own "Idea".
He had already discovered the inventor of perspective and author of the most corrosive text Humanism: "Momus". Leon Battista Alberti, towards the end of "De re aedificatoria," said his check. He tried to capture the beauty with the network of Vitruvian principles - the "disposition", "number", "variety", l, "Eurythmics", the "proportion" - but must yield to an unexpected conclusion: the beauty is "that some more", a supplement, a surplus that can not be measured. A term used to define Cicero's almost untranslatable: "concinnitas." Internal needs, loveliness, grace without concept. Iridescent halo around a shell that is wrapped in its mother of pearl.
Do not you give it, it happens.
And 'the irruption of this surplus elusive - you can not break down, rebuild into a system of traits, return to the order of signification (meaning what?) - Which ammutilisce and enchants. Waiver of the comment. Fascination dragon Leonardo, of all the dragons that inhabit our imagination a thousand years.
Irreducible absolute immanence of beauty wandering. Indivisible unity of pure sensation. "... No makeup ... rhetorical challenge of the poet (and painter) the rules of Aristotelian structure."
Two years after the reading of the passage Vasari, the gallery "Unde" in Turin, a small green dragon, less afraid of the spectators, attracted and repelled by her loveliness together, hopping gait with wildlife on a floor in perspective in two-tone diamond as its long tail. Under a beam of light of a bare outline: two tiny wings shining borrowed from the first flying machine of Leonardo.
Built on the model of Borromini's S. Ivo alla Sapienza, floor, of precious Florentine paper, it betrayed him, to the perspective construction accident, the centralized system, converging on the axis of the lantern. L '"fantastic animal" his virtual vanishing point cannon.
In the present reconstruction, his living presence is replaced, compared to the conscious animal, from a wax sculpture, designed by Raffaele Mondazzi, patient friend, and performed by him with recognized mastery.
In the new floor an unexpected error, let survive, in some areas has produced a dislocation of diamonds in an alternating sequence of the two colors, disrupting the order set, opening gates to a fruitful disorder generated by the case, leaving contaminate the hybrid nature of the polymorphic dragon.
Ettore Ghinassi - Summary -

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