For an interpretative reading of L’airone, from the art writings to the "Nouveau Roman"

Abstract

Although Giorgio Bassani’s relation with the visual arts has often been discussed, his critics remain convinced that the writer’s artistic preferences have been irreversibly influenced by his mentors and, for what relates to painting, by Roberto Longhi e Giorgio Morandi in particular. While acknowledging the impact of Longhi e Morandi in the formation of Bassani’s imagery, this article looks at Bassani’s aesthetic itinerary, by focusing on L’airone as a watershed moment. Indeed, it is in this last great novel by Bassani that is possible to fully understand Bassani’s distance from the cultural universe of his previous works. Inspired by the aesthetic discourse advanced by the pictorial movement of the Realismo Esistenziale, as well as by the narrative experiments of the Nouveau Roman, Bassani depicts here an upside-down version of the Ferrara described in his first stories.