Free to whom?

Nothing is more ambiguous than the word "freedom." Was there freedom in ancient Greece, based on slaves, former prisoners of war, indispensable to maintaining its vaunted "democracy"? Politics, we know... but who can place limits on an artist and his creativity? History, for example.

After the Pope's return from Avignon, it was necessary to renovate the Great Chapel (later the Sistine Chapel), which had fallen into disrepair following the papal curia's long absence from Rome. The architect was forced to give it the appearance of a fortress: to defend it from the violence of the people and the Roman barons, who during the last Conclave had attacked the assembly of cardinals with clubs and brooms, shouting, "We want him Roman!" The Pope, of course. Only with a Roman, in their opinion, would there be no risk of another move.

When history isn't the only thing that limits creative freedom, it's the patron who does it. Pope Julius II della Rovere commissioned Michelangelo to fresco the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (renovated by Sixtus IV), but it never occurred to him to give his favorite artist free rein in his choice of subject: he decided the themes himself, together with Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo, a profoundly cultured humanist. True to his motto—"It is men who must be transformed by religion, not religion by men"—Egidio created a truly theological project that brought together pagan, Jewish, and Christian traditions in a single visual communication.

Within this insurmountable boundary, of course, it was the genius of Michelangelo who invented a way of creating figurative art radically different from that of the artists who only a century earlier had painted the scenes at the base of the Chapel. If we then descend from the dizzying heights of great art to the lower levels of television creativity, the limits actually become cages. A "pitch," that is, an idea for a TV program, "passes" if it can be summarized for the producer in a minute and a half; most talk and entertainment programs must remain faithful to a format the network has purchased, under penalty of losing the rights; even fiction is born from a format that must follow the instructions of the attached "bible" down to the last detail, both in episode length and scene structure, in the characters' personalities, in the construction of jokes which, in the case of sitcoms, must by contract be funny and serve to advance the story.

So what? Can free creativity exist? Yes, answers the great Russian Pavel Florensky. The life of our soul provides us with the fulcrum for understanding the boundary between the life of the visible and the life of the invisible. There is a time, brief and concentrated sometimes to the point of an atom, in which the two worlds touch. The veil of the invisible is torn for an instant, and behold, a breath that is not of this world blows within us: this world and the other world open to one another. Our life is as if lifted by a gust of warm air, and creation, free because divine, is possible, even within the rigid "boundaries" of icon art. That atom of creative instant is the truth, says Florensky, a sign of the only authentic art: because it is inspired by God. The art we pray to receive every day, in tatters, amidst the biblical chaos of our daily interior life. So that our poor life may be transformed into a work of art.


NP April 2025
Flaminia Morandi