Giorgia Testa Vlahov
Università di Milano, Université Paris IV
Abstract
Among Balzac’s tales, Le Chef d’œuvre inconnu is the one which deals with an aesthetic questioning the most. The story of the painter investigates various issues: the pursuit of beauty, the role of mimetic art, the march between shape and virtue. If the mimetic goal in every artistic performance seems to maintain its coercive power along the novel, it will be up to Frenhofer to overturn this mimetic dogma.
Through an historical excursus about the philosophical matrices which legislated on Art, it will be possible to notice that Le Chef d’œuvre preserves the classical settings in order to destroy them. Frenhofer, the last of the guardians of the mimetic mysteries, but also the first of the contemporaries, became the symbol of a tradition that starts to eclipse and fall into the chaos.
Keywords
Tradition – Mimesis – Perfection – Neoclassicism – Avant-garde
DOI: 10.13131/2611-9757.suitefrancaise.n2.11
Foto di Vincenzo del Franco tratta da «Il Capolavoro sconosciuto» (Teatro Parenti, Milano maggio 2019)
