The Unveiled Sheet Music, project for the creation of a mural
Duilio Zogno's work is about a connection between two senses (sight and hearing, painting and music) is a beautiful story of a magnificent obsession that deserves to be told. MacGuffin, Hitchcock would say, or the narrative device that provides the dynamic thrust to the plot, is a painting. The portrait of a flutist by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (c. 1480/1485 - post 1548). As we know, the Renaissance painter's canvas after various changes of ownership - from Cardinal Richelieu to the English aristocrats to a collector from New York - was acquired a few years ago by the Banca Popolare di Brescia and deposited at the Tosio Martinengo Museum.
The painting is unanimously appreciated for its pre-Caravaggesque luminism, for the melancholy of the eyes of the protagonist who is preparing to translate his "loving thoughts" into music. Art criticism has its tools of investigation and an entirely iconic road to follow. Duilio Zogno, on the other hand, moves from a different point of view, he is interested in discovering the relationship between gaze and listening. He thinks that only Caravaggio has included musical scores in his paintings, an indication of an extraordinary multisensory modernity, and discovers that he has not taken Savoldo into account. In the painting, on the back part, there is a musical score, in fact. It cannot be decorative, it is structural.
It is from there that Zogno's investigation starts, who has the nose of a hound. He reads, he inquires, he wants to know more about this Gilbert Creighton, an American historian who seems to be a luminary as far as studies on Savoldo are concerned. He passed away in 2011 and then he writes at Yale University where Creighton held the professorship. He follows an email correspondence with teachers, art historians and museum curators (Penelope Laurans, Carmen Bombach, Mary Miller). Creighton, they reply, was a scholar who thought that in every painting there is an unknown document, a detail that can help give a different reading. This is what Zogno wanted to hear.
A folded sheet hangs on the wall behind Savoldo's flutist, an underrated musical score. It is the tenor part of a lie, “O morte holà perché mi fugi”, by Francesco Patavino, priest and composer of sacred and profane music. The text speaks of a man who, tormented by Love, asks to be visited by Death, which is however denied him because his heart is already occupied. The song had already been identified by the musicologist Colin Slim. Zogno asked for confirmation in the advice of maestro Matteo Bianchi and found in the archives of the Levi Foundation in Venice a 1981 recording - the only one in the world - on vinyl performed by the Voices and Instruments group directed by Pietro Verardo.
"It's not antiquarian philology," says Zogno. Only an increased use, the recovery of a phonosphere that comes from the past with the lightness of a kiss. And call them, if you like, emotions.
I connected the QRCode to the canvas and to the murals (see bottom right of the pictures) which allows you to listen to the song
Nino Dolfo
Corriere della Sera - Tuesday 10 November 2020
