Massimo Ruggero in Thoughts with Art

STARN NIGHT. ′′ Good night to the world that retreats in the quiet of the evening, natural desio for the troubled soul. A night of rest and silence that distant remember the scanning of hands and everyday life. What a dissolved street embraces with silence the punctual night of shadows and darkness. A destination that makes souls and hard work limbs. And the day already knocks on the frequent soul that stars illuminates the path when the night slowly dissolves. How the sunset discolores and shivers the sunrise ".

Massimo Ruggero in Thoughts with Art

(from Quaderni ′′ Private lectio ′′ #12, Genoa October 7, 2020).

In 1888, before his internment at Saint-Rémy, Vincent van Gogh wrote:

′′ With a picture I wish I could express something touching like music. I would like to paint men and women with an idk of eternal, of which the halo was once a symbol, and which we try to make with the same ray, with the vibration of colors [...]. Ah the portrait, the portrait you show the thoughts, the soul of the model: here's what I believe should be seen ′′ (Vincent van Gogh, Arles, September 3, 1888).

The Starry Night, certainly one of the most famous vangogian works, responds perfectly to this need. In this painting, in fact, the painter certainly sought direct contact with reality, painting what could be seen from his room window in Saint-Remy's mental hospital. Van Gogh, however, didn't faithfully regain this night view, but instead manipulated it with plastic means, internalizing it to the spasimo and transforming it into a powerful dream vision in which he could bring out his emotions, fears and soul journeys .... The Starry Night therefore doesn't offer the observer a faithful image of reality, rather than a form of ′′ expression ′′ of the latter.

The picture has extraordinary strength. On the left the scene is closed by a tall and severe cypress like an ′′ Egyptian obelisk ′′ (van Gogh himself recognizes it) who, standing against the night sky, acts as a vegetable intermediary between earth and sky, between life and death: more than a tree it would almost look like a dark flame that suddenly flames in search of infinity. Next to the lonely cypress we find a small village - maybe it's Saint-Rémy, maybe Nuenen, maybe a reminiscent of the native village - which, scattering over a valley, seems lost in the immensity of the cosmic movement that flows over it: houses are generally bass, except for the acuminata cusp of a bell tower, which resumes the statuary verticality of the cypress and ′′ challenges the forces of nature: it's an antenna and a lightning rod together, a sort of Eiffel Tour, whose fascination is always present in night views of the artist [...] it seems to be dying, charged with electricity ". On the right the rich vegetation of olive trees is enforced, while in the background the diagonal and wavy profile of the Alpilles, an important mountain range of the French South.

The village is wrapped in darkness and sleep and as a whole refers to an ideal of placid stillness. The landscape, on the contrary, explicitly refers to the great nature decanted at the beginning of the century by the romantic Caspar David Friedrich, especially with the retrosting mountains: ′′ The blue hills in the night, treated with wavy and parallel lines, no longer have the reassuring appearance of comb reliefs From the wind, sweet and warmed by the sun (like in Renoir), but they seem threatening waters, of which the olive tree curves are the most advanced and boiling fringe ′′

The artist's disquiet explodes in the upper portion of the canvas, the one related to the sky. These cosmic spaces are lightened by the orange light of the lunar sickle, visible at the top right, and by the quiet pulsating planet Venus, aka ′′ morning star ". But the stars, which seem to capture the attention of the observer, are above all the stars, which seem to be rotating dangerously on oneself in titanic and swirling gorges, as if they were crazy meteors: this is particularly evident in the central vortex, where the intervention of brushstrokes that repeatedly change direction turns the romantic pulse into a spasmodic turbine. The arcane movement of stars, despite its tumultuosity, is in fact driven by brushstrokes that, shrugging and thickening, distribute pictorial matter according to circular radiation. The vision is then made harmonious by the admirable contrast between the ultramarine, the cobalt blue (shades of the sky) and the Indian and zinc yellows (which, on the other hand, go to dye the stars). ′′ The color, of very fluid consistency is laid with a minimal thickness, at small close touches, leaving here and there empty spaces, from which you can also see the storyline of the underlying canvas that, at the stars, simulates its tremble. This way the painting takes on a brilliant yet cold tone at the same time, which gives back the rarefied and almost milky atmosphere of the starry night ".

This pictorial itinerary with sidereal accents reposts the disturbing awareness of a desolate loneliness and a lost and hallucinated soul. The contemplation of this fascinating and terrible starry sky is anything but idyllic, but it wants to face the mystery of the universe and the dramatic vitality of the painter, which no coincidence uses a material, agitated, almost aggressive pictorial sign that dampens only when It draws the soft wave of the Alpilles, which are, among other things, highlighted by a thick black contour line, which probably intends to underline their belonging to the earthly dimension. The powerful depiction of the sky, along with the strident contrast between the vibrant and fiery flashes of the stars and the weak light emitted by the lights of the village below, seems to want to outline an identifiable boundary between van Gogh and the world, between the ′′ feeling of fragility and inconsistence of the individual [e] the sublime and superchiant immensity of the cosmos ′′ So, in this masterpiece of nineteenth century art, the dizzying and dramatic torments of van Gogh find one of their most beautiful and powerful depictions.

Maximus Roger

Club President for UNESCO in Genoa

President of IAA Italy

VINCENT VAN GOGH, De sterrennacht, oil on canvas, 72x92 cm, 1889, MoMA/Museum of Modern Art, New York.