I cani del tempo. Filosofia e icone della pazienza

We owe to Saint Augustine (354-430) one of the most powerful reflections on the theme of time that have ever been elaborated by Western thought. It is a meditation stimulated by the difficulty that the Tagaste philosopher experienced in answering those who asked him what time was. He himself declares it in the Confessions, where he writes: “What then is time? If nobody asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to anyone who asks me, I don’t know”. This Augustinian question has crossed the centuries, reaching us: Andrea Tagliapietra also asked himself, who, to give an answer to it, chose a particularly original and complex, making use of an accurate investigation and a profound analysis of the presence of the dog in numerous pictorial works. The discussion starts from the painting “Two hunting dogs tied to a strain” by Jacopo Bassano, a work dating back to the years 1548-1550, now exhibited in the Louvre Museum, and then unfolds through the interpretation of numerous other paintings, as if we were in front of the catalog of an exhibition. Tagliapietra writes: “The individual paintings are accompanied by more or less detailed ecphrases, but the purpose that brings them together concerns neither the history of art and painting, nor iconology, but rather ideography, or the thought that these images arouse and bring with them to the understanding of the meaning of patience”. In an era such as ours, characterized by haste and boredom, the icons of the dogs of the time “lead us… to the antidote of the simplest form of patience, which is also the most difficult to achieve… It is about patience as act of attention without purpose or object, or rather the disposition of one who abandons himself to the immanence of pure duration”. In the author’s opinion, following this line, “one will discover the non-anthropocentric topicality of patience”, which is not expectation, expectation or hope, but “discipline of attention… understanding of mortality as a common horizon of the living and full responsibility in comparisons of lived time”.