Esercizi della visione: Rilke e l'arte italiana

Rilke’s dialogue with Italian art is still a chapter to be written within the history of his poetry. Since his verses do not explicitly refer to the masterpieces of Italian art with that frequency and visionary depth characterizing their attention to French and German and Spanish art, very few critical attempts have been devoted to the secret presence of Italian art in Rilke’s poetry, most of them merely focusing on the early poetic experience of Das Florenzer Tagebuch. After reconsidering the classical studies on Rilke and Italy, this article aims at demonstrating that not only his poetic memory is rich of references to Italian art, but brief encounters with the works of Italian painters such as Segantini and Magnasco as well as a lifelong passion for Monna Lisa were no less important to his poetic diction than his more famous dialogue with Rodin, Cézanne, El Greco…