Carbone, Elettra;
(2009)
Consistere and Muoversi: The Meeting of Human Being and Statue in Henrik Ibsen’s Når vi døde vågner and Luigi Pirandello’s Diana e la Tuda.
Scandinavica. An International Journal of Scandinavian Studies
, 48
(2)
pp. 5-24.
10.54432/scand/LIOG1341.
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Abstract
The compelling mystery of sculpture as an art form – the shaping of a three-dimensional body from a lifeless material – has exercised writers, philosophers, anthropologists, and dramatists, among them Henrik Ibsen and Luigi Pirandello.This article poses the question: what happens to the verisimilitude of the statue on stage? Is there potential for fruitful confusion, hybrids, blendings, between human being and statue in drama? To explore this question, the article considers Ibsen’s dramatic epilogue Når vi døde vågner (1899, When We Dead Awaken), and Pirandello’s tragedy Diana e la Tuda (1926, Diana and Tuda).The petrifaction of the human being and the animation of the statue do not happen explicitly in the two dramas, but we are induced to imagine them through a series of symbols and allegories: characters become stone-like but not of stone, and statues become life-like but not alive. Both plays use these illusory metamorphoses to examine ideas such as the pseudo-artist, the artist, the model, the statue and the ‘enemies’ of art. To frame the discussion, this article adopts the concepts of consistere, to stand, and muoversi, to move, terms defined by the Italian philosopher Adriano Tilgher, particularly in his Studi critici sulla estetica contemporanea (1928). The analysis begins with a discussion of those artists in the two plays who strive to immobilise their own existence and that of the people around them; we then consider those characters who confront the artists and shift the balance in favour of movement. The article ends with a discussion of the complex balance achieved in each play between consistere and muoversi.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Consistere and Muoversi: The Meeting of Human Being and Statue in Henrik Ibsen’s Når vi døde vågner and Luigi Pirandello’s Diana e la Tuda |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.54432/scand/LIOG1341 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.54432/scand/LIOG1341 |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Henrik Ibsen; Luigi Pirandello;Adriano Tilgher; sculpture; Pygmalion myth. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > SELCS |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10114311 |
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