Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures: Word and Image Relations in the Work of Italo Calvino

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

Franco Ricci’s study of Italian fiction writer and essayist Italo
Calvino (1923–1985) begins with the observation that “any action
Calvino attempts to narrate has the habit of freezing itself within a
spatial frame.” Ricci bases his examination on two assumptions: first,
Calvino’s “narrative is generated by an imagocentric program”; and
second, “the nature of Calvino’s literary proposals is
ekphrastic.” He goes on to explain Calvino’s preoccupation with
visual images and his use of ekphrasis (verbal descriptions of works of
art), but he moves well beyond these basics. For Ricci, the act of
perception is the key dynamic in the word/image interface: “that act
that transforms a perceived phenomenon into a description, a meditation,
a story, a text.” Here, then, we move into the area of interpretation.

In his discussion of Calvino’s essays on paintings, Ricci argues that
Calvino “corroborates” the stylistic features of a painting in his
writing, generating a supplement to it: “The more, or supplement, is
the homology Calvino creates between his sentences and the deeper
structures of the visual text.” The homologous deeper structures are
“rhythm, description, point of view, accumulation of detail, and
cerebral game playing,” and they are also the constituents of
Calvino’s writing style.

Calvino scholars will welcome this thought-provoking, well-argued book.