A bocca aperta. Riflessioni sul grido e sul canto nelle immagini

Screaming and singing mouths are often amusing, and wide-open mouths in paintings are often the outcome of a lack of skill or pieces of evidence of a risky attempt to depict in a too simple way something elusive like sounds and voices. According to Schopenhauer, paintings representing screams and cries, choirs and concerts create in the spectator a strong feeling of stillness, which seems to be at least disappointing and unexpected. The paper aims to show that Schopenhauer is wrong because he doesn’t take into account the role of imagination in our pictorial experience. On the other hand, pictorial narrativity depends on its nature on pictorial medium – a subject on which I try to cast a glance in the concluding remarks of this paper.