I believe it can be pacifically agreed that in these pages Croce affirms the exact contrary of the truth, if the truth is what common sense concedes in the light of a thousand recorded experiences. I am not sufficiently familiar with the entirety of his works to know whether Croce ever commented on the sonnet in which Michelangelo reminds us that: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto / c’un marmo solo in sé non conconscriva / col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva / la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto” [“The best of artists does not have any concept / that a single [block of] marble does not encompass / with its excess, and only to that [concept] arrives / the hand that obeys the intellect”]. If he read it, he forgot it, on purpose. Because what Michelangelo is telling us here is that the artist finds his intuition-expression in a dialogue with his materials, with their vein, their bias, the possibilities they offer. Indeed Michelangelo goes still further, for the sake of hyperbole: the statue is already present in the marble, and all the artist has to do is to remove the excess that conceals it.
And here we have Croce, as it were, contradicting Michelangelo, speaking of the “piece of marble that embodies the statue of Moses and of the piece of coloured wood embodying the Transfiguration” (p. 112, my emphasis). The citation leaves no room for doubt: what we consider works of art (over whose deterioration, restoration, counterfeiting ,or theft we agonize) are merely the containers of the only, unique, true (and at this point unattainable) works that existed in the completely inward intuitions of their authors. Elsewhere, speaking of how the judgment of taste retraces the genesis of the original intuition, Croce will refer to these physical embodiments as mere “signs,” instruments practically didactic in nature that facilitate the process of reconstruction. Not realizing that, for a philosopher reluctant to acknowledge the social existence of systems of signs, with their own laws and definable unities, who sees instead every expressive act as a unicum in which the language is, as it were, reborn as though for the first time, a sign ought not be something negligible, and the relationship between sign and intuition should be understood to be less accidental and external.
Croce tells us that that block of marble and that wooden panel are said to be beautiful only as a metaphor. Then it occurs to him that we really are using a metaphor when we say the score that contains Mozart’s Don Giovanni is beautiful, and he recognizes that the first metaphor is more immediate than the second. But, for an author who has refused to define metaphor, the solution leaves something to be desired. What does this difference in immediateness between metaphors conceal? And what is the status of the Don Giovanni contained in the score? Is it something that exists in the realm of sound (and therefore physically externalized and externalizable) or is it the original intuition that Mozart could even have refused to perform? And why does it continue to be performed today, rather than simply evoked by reading the score, as Croce believes dramatic works should be read, instead of seeing them externalized on the stage?
It seems clear that what Croce is articulating (encouraged by his lack of interest in everything that goes by the name of “nature,” and dominated by his humanistic education with its verbo-centric model, whereby beauty is inevitably defined with reference to verbal poetry) is a complex paralogism whose phases it will be useful to follow.
(i) First of all he is aware that there exist volatile expressions (in the sense in which verba volant [“words fly away”] and do not congeal in mid-air as Rabelais put it) and permanent expressions, such as statues or drawings. The difference is so evident that humankind has developed means by which to make the first permanent, from writing to magnetic tapes—authentic physical vehicles for the recording of previous expressions in the realm of sound.
(ii) From this correct empirical observation he draws the erroneous conclusion that volatile expressions are not material facts, as if writing and recordings did not record sounds. His verbal experience must have made him think of poets who mouth their poems to themselves, thinking of the sound they could give them. But they do so because they have already had experience of what sounds they could produce, so that an experimental psychologist (a category Croce didn’t have much time for) might argue that, when we think of Pavarotti hitting a high C, our organs of phonation, however imperceptibly, imitate the externalization we are thinking of. When we intuit, what we intuit are externalizations; when we think, we do not think outside the body but with the body. Croce is sufficiently well aware of this to have devoted a rather memorable passage to the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which he says that words on the page evoke not just thoughts but auditory, tactile, and thermal sensations. If Michelangelo had been born blind, he could never have “intuited” his Moses.
(iii) Beguiled by his (empirical) experience of discourses that take place in the mind (of which, however, we become fully aware only when they have been “minted in the currency of words”—and the physical metaphor of coining is worth noting), Croce makes this possibility into an absolute and extends it to the arts of permanence. Of course, we can all imagine a sculptor who, away from his workshop, imagines down to the tiniest details the statue he could produce with his chisel. But he can do so only because he has sweated over marble before, because he has hammered away in his shop; he can do so in the same way anyone can intuit that if they swallow a cube of ice they will feel a pain in the middle of their forehead, because they recall having already felt it under similar circumstances.
Without the memory of our previous natural experiences we can intuit nothing, and someone who has never smelled a verbena can never intuit the scent of a verbena, just as someone born blind can never intuit what a dolce color d’orïental zaffiro (“sweet color of an oriental sapphire” [Dante, Purgatory, I, 13]) might be.
When we consider these paradoxes we understand why the generations that came after Croce were fascinated by alternative theories: by Pareyson’s appeal to the fundamental importance of the materials in the genesis of a work of art, by Anceschi’s concern for the artist’s poetics, by Dorfles and Formaggio’s emphasis on artistic techniques, by Morpurgo Tagliabue’s return to the hoary concepts of style and rhetorical apparatus, by Della Volpe’s insistence on the “rational” moment in the artistic process, not to mention the liberation that came with reading Dewey’s Art as Experience, in which the fullness of naturalistic empiricism is revalued. The question was what was the place of “the philosophy of the four words” (the polemical characterization is Gentile’s) within that vital flux to which Croce was after all so attentive.3 How to do justice to Croce himself, in whom there was constantly “a hiatus, as it were, a hidden conflict between his extremely detailed analysis of vast sectors of human experience and culture, and his ‘system.’… On the one hand, part and parcel of the precise discussion of cultural data and experience, we find ‘concepts,’ extremely ‘impure’ if you will, but precious if we are to understand, in other words, connect and clarify, the multiple forms taken by human action and history. On the other, a few extremely abstract ideas, whose development is affirmed rather than demonstrated” (Garin 1966: 2:1315).
- Perhaps, however, it is the unresolved persistence of this gap that accounts for the influence Croce’s works have enjoyed: readers grasped the abstractness of the few ideas, but they were attracted to them because they saw them as the logical conclusion of the concrete analysis, admirable for its common sense, clarity, and penetration. In the hotchpotch the readers recognized both the embarrassments of their own personal experience and their longing for an uncontaminated idea of beauty, truth, goodness, and the useful itself—values that all the metaphysical systems so abhorred by Croce had defined in their hyperuranic spiritual nature, without descending to compromise with that corporality that is mere envelope, mortal coil, the prison of the soul. In Croce they saw both the confirmation of the inevitable and the promise of the desirable, interpreting as systematic mediation what was instead an unresolved contradiction.
These readers were delighted to be told that art was fundamentally what they were hoping it was, and non-art what they—perturbed and disturbed—could witness all around them. What exactly pure forms were they did not know, but they were quick to embrace
