“Guido, I'd like you and Lapo and me.” Three figures in boats extracted from ivory navigate the “sea of love” in garage BENTIVOGLIO. The iconography of reference of this netsuke is certainly different; but like all objects and forms that cross contexts, it is certainly not wrong to invest them in new meanings, which allow them to survive beyond the culture that generated them. This boat is among the smallest objects that inhabit the spaces of Palazzo Bentivoglio, and it is part of all that myriad things that are among the masterpieces, a necessary pause for the gaze and the thought. In fact, a necessary condition of living in a collection is that of not mimicking the museum institution, which was originally built around the notion of the single work, of the masterpiece capable of condensing all its meanings, leaving out the parts that seem less successful in the history of art. The netsuke, then, rather than being looked at, asks to be touched; its original function, that of a belt clip, is in fact closer to the touch receptor, the hand, than to that of sight, the eye. And so its shapes must be known while hiding it inside the palm, perhaps in the pocket, and following the lines with your fingertips, trying to imagine little by little the shapes, the faces, the bodies, that the carver has managed to create in this microcosm of precision. In the era of the dictatorship of the image, a small tactile object can make us reflect on the saturation of the gaze, which seems to have lost its imaginative power, asking us to sense or reconstruct what the work does not say; so we must go back to sea, like Hume, with the “shaken boat, with the intact ambition to attempt to travel around the world despite these disastrous circumstances”.
