La fiaccola e la maschera: didascalie in immagini per il pensiero. Un esemplare pendant di Paolo De Matteis

A kaleidoscopic synthesis of the Latin eros, Ovid’s Metamorphoses have been a
fundamental point of reference, since ancient times, for the many painters who drew their
subject-matter from this text and also undertook the far from simple task of using the static
nature of the pictorial medium to represent the narration of what is – by definition – in
motion: metamorphosis. A pair of paintings, now divided between Italy and the United
States, depicting Apollo and Daphne and Pan and Syrinx, offers a significant case study
for an initial reflection on the subtle relationships between the invention of a subject, a
text by the poet Ovid, the theoretical mode of representing such a subject, devised by the
English philosopher and patron, the Earl of Shaftesbury, and the artistic realization of such
a theory carried out by Paolo De Matteis, a painter from the Cilento. These reflections
ultimately aspire to a better understanding, as regards both history and phenomenology,
of the intelligence underlying a pictorial language that gives internal structure to images,
enabling them to convey both what is narrated by words and what is theorized by thought.