by Umberto Eco
Aquinas was to respond in much the same way, albeit in greater depth. The fact is that this concept of perfection as wholeness was still being preached centuries later by the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who in the Zibaldone said that “the perfection of a being is none other than complete conformity with its primordial essence.”
Very well. But the stamp known as the Gronchi pink was imperfect, showing Peru with the wrong borders, and indeed it was withdrawn, but precisely because of its imperfection it went on to become a rare and very expensive piece, much sought after by collectors.
The Venus de Milo, which is missing its arms, is also imperfect but crowds flock to see it in the Louvre.
If a fur-covered cup were put on sale in a department store it would be imperfect, because it is not suited to its purpose, but as a work of art by Oppenheim it is certainly perfect.
Sometimes we see seductive glamour in a person marked by a slight squint, a mole, a nose that would look very wrong on a sculpture by Canova, or an asymmetrical face. Montaigne (Essays III, II) hailed the attractions of lame women:
’tis a common proverb in Italy, that he knows not Venus in her perfect sweetness who has never lain with a lame mistress.… I should have been apt to think; that the shuffling pace of the lame mistress added some new pleasure to the work, and some extraordinary titillation to those who were at the sport; but I have lately learnt that ancient philosophy has itself determined it, which says that the legs and thighs of lame women, not receiving, by reason of their imperfection, their due aliment, it falls out that the genital parts above are fuller and better supplied and much more vigorous; or else that this defect, hindering exercise, they who are troubled with it less dissipate their strength, and come more entire to the sports of Venus.… I have formerly made myself believe that I have had more pleasure in a woman by reason she was not straight, and accordingly reckoned that deformity amongst her graces.
Giambattista Marino (La lira, 14) found the pallor of a sick woman irresistible:
My pale little sun,
Before your sweet pallor,
Crimson dawn loses her colors.
My pale little death
Before your sweet, pale violet
And amorous purple
The rose is vanquished.
Oh, may it please my fate
That I may grow pale, with you,
My pale little love!
In Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1956 novel The Key, we find praise for the legs of Japanese women, which Tanizaki says westerners find imperfect compared to the long, straight legs of western women:
For the first time I could enjoy the full sight of her, I was able to explore above all the lower part of her body, its secrets so long concealed. Ikuko, who was born in 1911, does not have a western figure, so common among girls today. She is well proportioned for a Japanese woman of her age; yet she does not have particularly full breasts, nor is she large in the buttocks. Her legs, long and graceful as they are, could not be called straight. They swell at the calf, and the ankles are not thin enough. But instead of slender, foreign-looking legs, I have always preferred the rather curved legs of the old-fashioned Japanese woman, like my mother and aunt. I’m not interested in those thin, tubular legs.
The fact is that when we talk about human beings and even animals, even if we have some criterion of perfection, we are willing to make exceptions in many cases—because we make a distinction between beauty as regularity and attractiveness, which is indefinable and often varies depending on taste.
There can be no argument about attractiveness, and so maybe what we need to clarify better is the criterion of imperfection in art. For a start, at least in our time, we can no longer apply an idea as a rule—otherwise, a face by Picasso would be imperfect—but it is the work of art that applies the rule to itself. What we look for in a work of art (at least these days) is not a correspondence to a canon of taste, but to an internal norm, where economy and formal consistency regulate the text in all its parts. And so, we would define the representation of a human being made by a four-year-old (who would have liked to make a human figure as it appears to us) as imperfect, albeit touching, whereas we would describe Keith Haring’s puppets or Cy Twombly’s scribbles as perfectly calibrated works within the stylistic criteria adopted by the artist.
Both a painting by Raphael and one by Twombly could conform to this definition of artistic form given by Luigi Pareyson in his Estetica (1954):
In a work of art the parts have a dual kind of relationship: each with the others and each with the whole. All the parts are connected together in an indissoluble unity, so that each is necessary and indispensable and has a determined and irreplaceable position, to the point that a single missing part would break up the unity and one variation would spell a return to disorder.… If the alteration of the parts means the dissolution of unity and the disintegration of the whole, this is because the whole itself governs the coherence of the parts among themselves and makes them contribute to form the whole. In this sense the relationships between the parts reflect the relationship that each part has with the whole: the harmony of the parts forms the whole because it is the whole that establishes their unity.
So two forms of imperfection can be attributed to a work of art: the absence of some parts that the whole would require or the presence of more of them. One artwork that certainly has too little is the Venus de Milo, mutilated for centuries. Many imbeciles have tried to make her perfect again, and I saw one of these, complete with arms, in a Californian waxworks museum bearing the legend “as it was when conceived by an unknown sculptor.”
Why do we consider any attempt to perfect the Venus de Milo to be foolish? Because on contemplating it, we are fascinated by trying to imagine a whole that is now lost. This feeling has something in common with a taste that arose in the eighteenth century, which can be summed up in the term the aesthetics of ruins.
Starting from Petrarch’s day, and then throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ruins were seen as the image of a vanished civilization and they inspired moral reflection on the fragility of human destiny. In his Record of a Journey from Paris to Jerusalem and Back, Chateaubriand mediated on the pyramids, witnesses to a challenge to time:
But why see in the pyramid of Cheops only a heap of stones and a skeleton? It is not through a feeling of his own nothingness that man built so tall a sepulchre, but the sense of his own immortality: that sepulchre is not the boundary marker that proclaims the end of a transient existence, it is a monument that marks the entrance to life without end, it is a species of eternal portal built on the edge of eternity.
But, in the Salon of 1767, Diderot was to say:
The effect of these compositions, good or bad as they may be, is to leave you in a state of sweet melancholy. We gaze on the fragments of a triumphal arch, a portico, a pyramid, a temple or a palace and in any event we always come back to ourselves.… Suddenly, solitude and silence reign around us. We are alone, orphans of an entire generation that exists no more.… The ideas that ruins awake in me are grandiose. All things pass, all things perish. Only the world resists. Only time continues to endure. I walk between two eternities.
But moralistic reflection has slowly given way to a contemplation of ruins that appears fascinating precisely because they are ruins and Piranesi’s engravings come to mind. A taste for the irregular is a part of this contemplation. The aesthetics of ruins overturns the concept of the formal perfection and completeness of a work of art. Diderot wrote: “Why does a beautiful sketch fascinate us more than a finished painting? It is because it has more life, and fewer forms. When forms are introduced, life flags.”
In the aesthetics of ruins the work can be enjoyed in spite of (and perhaps thanks to) its deterioration. Hence the fascination of their malady and the romantic beauty of the death they evoke.
So much for works of art that lack something. But what of those that have something in excess?
This is the problem of the zeppa.
According to the dictionary, a zeppa (wedge or stopgap) is a wooden element used to stop up a gap or to steady wobbly furniture, but in Italian literary criticism it is a word or phrase added to pad out a line, a stopgap, sometimes for reasons of meter or, in a prose passage, to give a sentence completeness.
Intending to make a distinction between the poetic moments in a literary work and elements concerned with structure or support, Benedetto Croce wrote in La poesia (1936):
The poet (like the moral man for his acts, never exempt from some impurities) suffers when he discovers blemishes in his work and would like to get rid of all of them, even the smallest vestige.… But poetry visits the mind with the brilliance of a lightning flash, and the human agency holds on to it, attracted by it, fascinated by it, taking from it what it can and vainly asking it to linger and to let every line of its face be admired, but it has already vanished.… Thus Virgil, in order not to lose the whole for a part or a particle, the maximum for the minimum, and not to let the happy moment give him the slip, resigned himself, according to his biographer, to writing some verses that were imperfect or expressed in a provisional manner, and consoled himself by jesting with his friends and calling those verses “props” (“tibicines”), which served to support the construction until he might be able to replace them with solid columns. And those imperfections make the poet suffer indeed, he would like to make them good, and despite this, as if out of a holy reverence for the mystery that is celebrated in him, he very often hesitates to do this, fearing to make things worse, because a cool head is no longer a heated imagination, and the file is a dangerous instrument, which can polish, but can also exterere, as Quintilian said, namely remove the best.… In poetry one does not come across imperfections alone, which, by definition, are rectifiable … but also things that are not poetic yet not correctable, which do not arouse in the reader … displeasure and disapproval, but are regarded with indifference pure and simple. These are the conventional or structural parts, which exist in every poetical work, sometimes barely visible, sometimes eminently visible, especially in very long and complex works. A very well-known case of these conventional and structural parts consists of those additions and fillers that the French call “chevilles” and the Italians “zeppe.” … What does such padding come from? From the need to maintain the rhythmic uniformity of expression, even at the cost of sacrificing to some extent the coherence of an image or a sound.… Those who remember the four marvellous lines with which Ariosto expresses Fiordelisa’s dismay and bewilderment when the two barons, Brandimarte’s comrades in the hard-fought battle, alone and silent, appear before her:
Tosto che entràro, ed ella loro il viso
vide di gaudio in tal vittoria privo,
senz’altro annunzio sa, senz’altro avviso,
che Brandimarte suo non è più vivo!
(When they enter, and on their faces
she sees no sign of victorious joy
without further notice or warning,
she knows her Brandimarte lives no more)
will note that in the third line “annunzio” and “avviso” are two words that mean the same thing and perhaps that neither of the two is used completely correctly, and that “avviso” was chosen for the rhyme. But the accelerated rhythm obtained through the succession of the two nouns, separated and linked by a caesura, evokes the rapid beating of Fiordelisa’s heart and creates a superior poetic image, and the rhyme at the end of the line reconnects that beating with her looks and dismay at the appearance of the two men, at their faces devoid of any sign of joy.
It should be noted that, if this is indeed the case, that annunzio and avviso are not padding, but precisely the poetically correct words that prompt Croce to say that the four lines are marvelous. But his determination to make a distinction between structure and poetry leads him to continue in this vein:
But the correct acceptance of these “structural pieces” must not be corrupted by their incorrect acceptance as poetry: which is the error committed by critics of limited understanding, both because they allow themselves to be mastered by a sort of superstitious reverence for the renowned poet (to whom, moreover, they do no honor by putting his poetry on the same level as his activity as an author) and because of a very frequent lack of intelligence and artistic sensibility.
Instead, subparagraph 3.10 of chapter III (“The parts and the whole”) of Luigi Pareyson’s Estetica is titled “The essentiality of every part: structure, padding, imperfections.” One of Pareyson’s central concerns in Estetica, in his polemic against Croce’s idealism and its most detrimental effects on militant criticism, was a claim for the totality of artistic form; in other words, a refusal to pluck sporadic moments of poetry from the work as if they were flowers blooming among the brushwood of simple structure, highly functional as it may be. It is not really necessary but it is worth repeating that “structure,” in the Italy of those days, was a mechanical artifice that had nothing to do with the moment of poetic intuition, and at best stood out in a Hegelian sense as a negative instance, a conceptual residue, which could at most serve to make the moments of poetry glitter like solitary gems.
In devoting a chapter of his Estetica to padding, Pareyson thought instead that structure and padding were essential to the work, which was to be seen as an organic whole in which everything has a function and in the finished work (and indeed from the first moment in which the idea triggers the formative process) tout se tient, and it hangs together from the standpoint of the organizational schema that supports it, and of the forma formante or “forming form” that obscurely precedes it, controls it in its coming into being, and appears as the result and revelation of the forma formata or “formed form.”
Perhaps Pareyson was thinking of the idea typical of the Neoplatonic tradition according to which the perfection of the whole is also supported by imperfections that are so to speak redeemed by the totality of the form. See this passage from John Scotus Eriugena (ninth century), in his De divisione naturae V:
What is considered deformed in itself in a part of the whole, not only becomes beautiful in the totality, because it is well ordered, but is also the cause of general Beauty; thus wisdom is illuminated by its comparison with foolishness, science by comparison with ignorance which is only want and privation, life by death, light by the opposition of darkness, worthy things by the deprivation of praise; and to say briefly, all the virtues not only derive praise from the opposite vices but without this comparison they would not deserve praise.… As true reason does not hesitate to affirm, all things that in one part of the universe are bad, dishonest, ugly and wretched and are considered crimes by those who cannot see all things, in the universal vision, as happens with the Beauty of a picture, they are neither crimes nor foul or dishonest things, nor are they bad. In fact everything that is ordered according to the design of divine Providence is good, beautiful and just. What could be better than the fact that the comparison of opposites leads to the ineffable praise of the universe and of the Creator?
So for Pareyson, if “the whole is a result of parts united in order to constitute a whole there cannot be any negligible or irrelevant detail.” And padding is seen as a support required for the outcome of the whole, a sort of bridge or weld “in which the artist operates with less care, with greater impatience or even with indifference, almost rushing through the task as if it were a passage that, precisely because it is imposed by the need to proceed beyond it, may be left to convention without detriment to the whole.” Nevertheless, padding is a part of the internal economy of the form, because the whole requires it, albeit in a subordinate position.
Pareyson is telling us that padding is an extremely cunning artifice that allows one part to bind with another; it is an essential coupling. If a door is to open smoothly or with majesty it must have a hinge, as its function is mechanical. The bad architect, addicted to aestheticism, is vexed because a door must be hung on a hinge, and redesigns the latter so that it appears “beautiful” as it pe
rforms its function; and by doing this he finds that the door often creaks, jams, and will not open or opens badly. The good architect on the other hand wants the door to open and reveal other spaces, and after having redesigned everything in the building, he does not care if he has to rely on the eternal wisdom of the ironmonger.
Padding can provide a mediocre start, useful for the attainment of a sublime finale. It was three in the morning, on the hill near Recanati immortalized by Giacomo Leopardi in his poem L’infinito, where the first words of one of the finest sonnets of all time are carved in the stone, when I realized that Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle (“This solitary hill has always been dear to me”) is a pretty banal line, which could have been written by any minor romantic poet, and maybe even by poets from other periods or movements. What is a hill supposed to be, in “poetic” language, if not “solitary”? Yet without that humdrum opening the poem would not have got off the ground, and perhaps it was necessary for it to be banal, so that the reader might get a full sense of the sense of panic at the poetically memorable “shipwreck” with which the poem closes.
I would dare say, albeit for the sake of a theory, that a line such as Dante’s Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita (Midway on our life’s journey) has the dignified ring of padding. If the Divine Comedy had not followed we would not have attached much importance to it, and maybe we would have taken it as a manner of speaking.
I am not identifying padding with a striking start. Some opening bars of Chopin’s Polonaises are not padding. “That branch of the lake of Como” is not padding; nor is “April is the cruelest month.” But let us consider the end of Romeo and Juliet, and tell me that the ending would not have been better without the phrase in italics:
