The fact that in 1910 Russolo worked on a painting titled Autoritratto (con doppio eterico) demonstrates that at that time he was already well informed about the key notions of occultist thought popularized by theosophy. The various bodies (material, mental, astral) and the etheric double are frequent topics in theosophical literature. Leadbeater mentions the etheric double in both Thought-forms and Man Visible and Invisible, as well as in his 1913 book The Hidden Side of Things, a collection of articles that had appeared in various theosophical magazines (principally The Theosophist) over the preceding twelve years.66
The subject of the doubling of the material body was eventually treated in Alla ricerca del vero, the first of the three parts of Al di là della materia, Russolo’s most ambitious work in his later period; the first edition was printed by Bocca in 1938.67 In the paragraph titled “The doubling of the body or etheric double,” Russolo explains how the densification of two masses (presumably mental body and astral body) into a single form vaguely resembling the human body—here still defined as “etheric double”—is the result of magneticizing a subject once the subject has passed the phase he calls “exteriorization of the sensitivity.”68 The etheric double is thought to be linked to the human body that produces it through a sort of umbilical cord attached to the solar plexus.
In this paragraph, as we have seen, Russolo mentions experiments conducted to verify the existence of the double: “A screen of calcium sulfide becomes brilliant and luminous if this double, which one can also move to a nearby room, passes over or near to the screen.” He adds, “It is possible to cause this [etheric] double to execute actions, like moving light objects: it is in short something resembling the manifestations of ectoplasm that occur and have been photographed in séances by William Crookes.”69
In the same paragraph Russolo again takes up the subject of Uomo che muore, this time in the form of a rhetorical question: “And isn’t it true and established that this astral body with its etheric double, when death occurs, is seen by clairvoyants or magnetized subjects under magnetic sleep, to leave the physical body, its separation determining, in such physical body, death?”70 The theme of the etheric double recurs in Zanovello’s description of the event in Cerro di Laveno with which this book opened.71
The etheric double is not the only evidence of occultist themes in Russolo’s painting. Another doubling is represented in Nietzsche e la pazzia (the etching and aquatint of 1909; the canvas of the same name, from 1910, is lost). In an article cited by Zanovello, Amedeo Mazzotti explains that the woman’s image, which appears next to the philosopher’s head, is “that which Plato would have called his daimonos, his genius, which talks to him, drives him, incites him.”72 Martin has read the feminine figure as the philosopher’s alter ego, a muse, or the prosopopeia of madness.73 Madness is not simply a tragic reference to Nietzsche’s biography but a celebration of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the irrational, which, for Gasparotto, was one of Russolo’s avenues to overcome the reductive positivistic view of the world.74 The uncanny, Freudian trope of the double seems just as evident in this allegorical representation.
According to Lista, Ricordi di una notte of 1911 deals with an experience of hypermnesia: it is in all probability a pictorial transcription of mental images produced by a subject (presumably the artist himself) during a metapsychic session (fig. 12).75 The artist’s sensitivity, empowered by the state of trance, permits him to reconstruct in this painting a nocturnal experience as a hallucinatory simultaneity of the images that surface in his memory.76 The result is a re-creation, for Russolo perhaps the most faithful and spiritual, of reality and of life. According to the occult aesthetic the futurists espoused, reality could be observed, produced, and endowed with its own spiritual life only through a medium able to help spirits reincarnate. To the eyes of the “clairvoyant painter (pittore veggente),” as Boccioni called it, reality reveals itself for what it truly is: as chaotic as the universe, a monstrous cacophony of many events and sensations all occurring simultaneously.77
In this canvas Martin has noted the influence of Bergson’s theories of psychic time, which in these years also influenced Marinetti and Boccioni. In particular, Russolo applied Bergson’s theory of the interior duration as a “qualitative multiplicity [. . .] an organic evolution [. . . whose] moments [. . .] are not external to one another,” and for that reason they interpenetrate and overlap.78 This theory here results in a highly chaotic quality, which finds order only in the mind of the subject perceiving—and perhaps, as implied by Boccioni’s concept of complementarismo congenito, generating—such complementary chaos. Yet this theory not only provides a spiritual key to understanding the futurist poetics of optical-mnemonic synthesis—or the “synthesis of what one remembers and what one sees”—but is also fundamental to understanding the occult direction of Russolo’s research and how it led naturally to the art of noises.79
FIGURE 12. Luigi Russolo, Ricordi di una notte (1912). Location unknown.
In the presentation catalog of works exhibited at London’s Sackville Gallery in March 1912, Russolo described his Una-tre teste (1912) as a study of the transparency that light confers on bodies.80 That work is now lost, but judging by the photographic reproduction, it seems to lack the technical, compositional, and conceptual sophistication of other coeval works by Russolo. It is therefore difficult to say whether or not the three heads here represented are the result of the optical, frame-based breakdown of the movement of a single head, shown in three different positions in three different moments in time, a technique also found in the hands of the pianist in La musica and in the horse’s legs in Ricordi di una notte, both from the previous year.
Russolo’s application of the techniques of optical synthesis are primitive variations of those that became central in Balla’s works of 1912 (Le mani del violinista, Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio, and Ragazza che corre sul balcone), which Boccioni criticized for their frame-based, discontinuous portraying of movement, as well as for being the center (and essence) of these paintings.81 Russolo’s optical synthesis is technically more primitive than Balla’s, but he employed the technique sparsely, never exclusively, and in a conceptually more refined way that resembles Boccioni’s use of it (consider the blurs of the men in Città che sale).82
This similarity with Boccioni is also revealed in another aspect of Russolo’s Una-tre teste: the painting can be read as an optical-mnemonic simultaneity (i.e., as a synthesis of what one sees and what one remembers), but the three heads, diaphanously illuminated by light, which in all probability comes from a window, can also be read in another way: as a physical body accompanied by its mental and astral bodies, the two elements that according to theosophical teachings constitute the aura.
Russolo’s reading of Thought-forms and Leadbeater’s essay on sonic forms probably influenced one of his most icastic canvases, Linee-forza della folgore (1912; fig. 13), which, according to Zanovello and Martin, the artist broke into pieces in 1943 while experiencing a raptus.83 Russolo treated the same lightning theme in a more traditional manner in the series Lampi (1910), only to repeat it two years later in a far more personal and not the least impressionistic form.
This masterly stylization of the rapid course of a bolt of lightning across an urban sky, and the spectacle of elemental, electrical, luminous, and sonic power thus evoked—reflecting Nikola Tesla, Henry Adams, and Benjamin Franklin—suggests an animistic and pantheistic devotion to the forces of nature.84 At the center of the painting, the complex of forces becomes concentrated in the lightning, creating an electrical unity of remarkable formal and visual power.85 The undulating bands represent the shock wave—the sound wave—that according to scientists is as dangerous to contact as the lightning itself.
FIGURE 13. Luigi Russolo, Linee-forza della folgore (1912), central panel. Portogruaro, Collezione del Comune di Portogruaro.
Russolo portrayed the sonic forms of this shock wave with great care, as can be seen in the newly rediscovered central panel of
the painting as well as in some of the other remaining fragments. The figures, like triangular yellow-green rays on a dark blue-black background can in my opinion be derived from the thought-forms depicted in plates 22 and 23 of Thought-forms (fig. 14). In that book, the two stiletto-like figures on the illustration’s black background are explained as follows: “The keen-pointed stiletto-like dart [#23] was a thought of steady anger [. . .] murder, sustained through years, and directed against a person who had inflicted a deep injury on the one who sent it forth. It will be noted that both of them [#22 and #23] take the flash-like form of a lightning bolt.”86
FIGURE 14. Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, illustrations 22 and 23 from Thought-forms (1901). Reproduced by permission of The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai 600 020. India. © The Theosophical Publishing House. www.ts-adyar.org & www.adyarbooks.com.
The triangular image of the shock wave in Linee-forza della folgore is extraordinarily close to the description of the sonic forms of a tempest found in the chapter on sound-forms in Leadbeater’s The Hidden Side of Things: “The majestic roll of a thunderstorm creates usually a vast flowing band of colour, while the deafening crash often calls into temporary existence an arrangement of irregular radiations [. . .] or sometimes a huge irregular sphere with spikes projecting from it in all directions.”87 These irradiating spikes resemble projectiles of sound, which can wound the astral bodies of surrounding persons like swords.88 In this excerpt the image of the lightning and the metaphor of the sword are intertwined.
In Solidità della nebbia of the same year, Russolo once again confronted the problem of representing waves, though the type of wave remains unclear (fig. 15). Evangelisti has read the painting as a representation of sonic waves radiating outward and propagating themselves in an atmosphere of different levels of density like that offered by fog banks; these waves are thus related to the wave forms of Romani’s La campana of 1912.89 Lista thought that the painting represents the “materializing of waves of an energy field” and refers therefore to the waves of an electromagnetic field.90
FIGURE 15. Luigi Russolo, Solidità nella nebbia (1912), Gianni Mattioli Collection (on long-term loan at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice). © 2010 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.
In my opinion, however, the painting has to do with light rather than sound waves. The concentric bands of color of Solidità della nebbia represent the banks of fog influencing the light and the visible surrounding bodies, almost giving them different degrees of density. In this way, the images are spiritualized, like incorporeal phantasms or spirits; with these images Russolo again “destroys the materiality of bodies.”91 Here I agree with Martin, who maintains that the canvas shows the “gradual approach and ultimate union of two independent, slowly expanding, curving rhythms—those of the street light above and the pavement below,” effectively transforming the fog into “a potent conductor of universal dynamism.”92
FIGURE 16. Luigi Russolo, Compenetrazione di case + luce + cielo (1912), Basel, Kunstmuseum.
In Compenetrazion di case + luce + cielo (1912), a work of surprising economy of pictorial gestures, Martin notes a similar attempt to represent the spiritual union between earth and sky, a union that evokes images of an unknown world that is pure and ethereal (fig. 16).93 The buildings are the bridge between the earth and the sky, and in fact Le case continuano in cielo was the alternative title under which the painting exhibited. The buildings symbolize the work of man upon nature, of technological artifice. As it was for such futurist heroes as Mafarka and Dro, the futurist credo of technology is here the principal means of spiritual elevation—true catalyst of the union of earth and sky. Both Solidità della nebbia and Compenetrazione di case + luce + cielo anticipate by a couple of years the principles that became fundamental to various works by Balla (for example, Mercurio passa davanti al sole, visto da un cannocchiale, 1914), which, in representing the union of two opposites, bright and dark, light and shadow, can be read as an allegory of the alchemical process.
As discussed in the previous chapter, Russolo’s paintings also manifest the relationship between synesthesia and the occult. At least two works by Russolo, Profumo and La musica, clearly reveal his interest in synesthesia and therefore highlight the correspondences between luminous and sonic vibrations. In this field, Russolo was probably influenced by French symbolism, Italian scapigliatura, and theosophical texts.
Profumo exists in two versions, both from 1910, and both in some way linkable to Boccioni’s Studio di testa femminile of the previous year. The mezzotint is probably the first version, since it retains a distinctly art nouveau flavor that can be seen both in the slightly curved upper side of the frame (this appears not only in Boccioni’s Studio di testa femminile but also in Romani’s Ritratto di Dina Galli) and in the way Russolo represents the ramifications of scent in the lower right corner.94
The diffusion of light came to symbolize in Russolo’s painting the spreading of a scent, suggesting that luminous waves and scents of perfume were in some way secretly and elegantly linked. (Boccioni’s work completely lacks the synesthetic reference present in these two works of Russolo.) Profumo, as Carlo Cohen wrote in the Florentine Nazione on May 25, 1911, “indeed gives a sense of voluptuousness and of the indulging.”95 The title’s suggestion of olfactory perceptions can be related to Russolo’s reading of one of the most important reference texts for D’Annunzio’s decadentism, Huysmans’s A Rebours, where, in chapter 10, the protagonist, Des Esseintes, experiments with exotic perfumes and rare essences, intoxicating himself to the point of physical collapse.
The analysis of Russolo’s second important synesthetic painting, La musica, demands a separate chapter, as the cornerstone of my investigation of the relationship between Russolo’s visual and aural occult explorations.
CHAPTER 4
Painting Noise: La musica
LA MUSIQUE
La musique souvent me prend comme une mer!
Vers ma pâle étoile,
Sous un plafond de brume ou dans un vaste éther,
Je mets à la voile;
La poitrine en avant et les poumons gonflés
Comme de la toile
J’escalade le dos des flots amoncelés
Que la nuit me voile;
Je sens vibrer en moi toutes les passions
D’un vaisseau qui souffre;
Le bon vent, la tempête et ses convulsions
Sur l’immense gouffre
Me bercent. D’autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir
De mon désespoir!
—Charles Baudelaire, from Les fleurs du mal
THE PROCESS
Russolo’s interest in synesthesia and the occult is most in evident in what is undoubtedly his best-known work, the large oil painting La musica. This painting is centrally important to my investigation, as it sets out the poetics of music that Russolo was working out in the years immediately preceding his manifesto on the art of noises.
Buzzi has confirmed the importance of this work in Russolo’s artistic and intellectual development, claiming that the painting was Russolo’s “work in progress since the years of his earliest youth.”1 The different versions of the painting are evidence of a complex gestation period.
FIGURE 17. Umberto Boccioni, caricature of the futurist serata at the Politeama Garibaldi in Treviso on June 2, 1911, reproduced in Uno, due, tre, Milan, 17 June 1911.
A first version in ink on paper (1911) shows many of the elements of the final version of the painting yet also significant differences. This version of La musica has neither hands nor masks, and its crudity suggests that it may be a forgery.2 If proved authentic, it would most likely have preceded the first oil-on-canvas version of the same subject, which was shown in Milan at the Prima Esposizione d’Arte Libera on April 30, 1911, with its first title, Dinamismo musicale. Early in 1912 Russolo painted the subject again, this time changing the title to La musica and creating the version known today.3
Dinamismo musicale is fully documented in Boccioni’s caricature of the futurist serata held at the Politeama Garibaldi in Treviso on June 2, 1911, and reproduced in the Milanese Uno, due, tre on June 17, 1911. This vignetta shows three futurist paintings: Russolo’s Dinamismo musicale, an early version of Boccioni’s La risata (before it was repainted after having been disfigured by an anonymous viewer), and Carrà’s Nuotatrici. Although Boccioni’s vignette offers only a caricature of Russolo’s painting, it is nonetheless possible to distinguish in it Russolo’s central figure of the many-armed pianist (fig. 17). In place of the masks that appear in the final version of La musica, here the pianist’s head is surrounded by a multitude of insects, which are meant to represent materializations of a spiritual energy that, in the form of a wave, is gushing vigorously from the pianist’s open head.4
WHAT EXPERIENCE?
In a letter to Pratella of January 20, 1913, Marinetti introduced Russolo as a “formidable pianist” and proposed that he be asked to perform a piece of Pratella’s synesthetically titled Poema dei colori at a futurist soiree being planned at the Teatro Costanzi.5 Marinetti’s hyperboles asides, Russolo was likely a competent keyboard player; possibly Russolo painted himself as the pianist in La musica. 6 However, since the central character in that painting lacks the distinctive features that characterize Russolo’s many self-portraits (particularly the spirited eyes and pointy Mephistophelian goatee), this remains debatable.
Luigi Russolo, Futurist Page 12