Il Tempio Malatestiano tra il sacro e il profano: lo sguardo di Joséphin Péladan e Henry de Montherlant

Malatesta Temple emerges from the works of Joséphin Péladan (1858-1915) and of Henry de Montherlant (1896-1972) as a mental place where the authors project their aesthetic ideal without quitting ideological over-determinations. The temple imagined and told, but never seen in reality, constitutes a kind of palimpsest prone to new writings and interpretations. In the image of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, who ordered its construction, it attracts Péladan and Montherlant exactly because they are both charmed by this character as a figure of excess and transgression against the mediocrity of their contemporaries. In their eyes Malatesta seems to summarize in himself the contrasts as well as the Temple contains, by harmonizing, the opposites: the sacred and the profane, paganism and Christianity, the human and the divine. Place of memory (Aleida Assmann 1999), it constitutes a cultural hybrid (Peter Burke 1989 and Edgar Wind 1958), emblem of that Renaissance artistic ideal by which both the French writers are inspired. But if Péladan’s celebration of the Renaissance Art finds in the Temple an ideal where each part is in harmony with the whole, Montherlant’s exaltation, instead, attains the aesthetics of fragmentation and of the incomplete by finding in the image of the Temple destroyed the most extreme ending, echo of those tragical bombardments which, between December 1943 and June 1944, hit the building. So this one rises to a polysemic object forming narrations which find in the knowledge combination (literature, philosophy, politics, history, art) its own essence.