119 audience elegantly bored and looking for yet another drink (in plastic). As capricious of freedom, and as figural semi-illiterates, we often neglect to read the context within which a masterpiece becomes a body, which is such because it exceeds its time and makes itself eternal for the centuries to come, because it has crossed the contingency of its present and has decided to put itself at risk, if only for the defense of a freedom – the freedom of expression, art. 19 of the Declaration of Rights, a bulwark of art and culture – which, in its time, demanded help for its own body. Can you imagine it? [warning: what follows is nothing but a figment of the imagination] From the personal correspondence of the secretary of the Ambassador of the Kingdom of Spain in Rome Most illustrious and most reverend Lord, This concept, which is talked about so much here in Rome, flows by word of mouth, but it is always whispered. They call it "freedom". The painters dip the brush into it, the writers the pen, while sculptors and architects cut the stone with it, because it seems to be made of the hardest alloy. If I could, I would tell you that it is a trivial matter, a whim of the artist, a rêverie of the intellectual, but I cannot. It is rather a disease that there is no way to contain, because there seems to be no valid cure or confinement. Those who suffer from it burn more than expected, ready to embrace the flames of the stake rather than being cured. Concealers by nature are the artists of this papal court. Take for example Chevalier Bernini. Many have raised objections to the works of this artist, since he had right begun to make himself known for his merits. Still many here in Rome, to tell the truth, think that some of them are very lacking in decorum, especially those which can be seen in sacred places, but truth has already been discovered by time, and we are all completely enraptured by this obscenity, called "freedom to create". We laugh at the crowned heads that the Chevalier traces quickly in his journals, as the portrayed Cardinals do. We pretend to censor the soft flesh of the females that he draws out from the marbles, we feel we have to reproach the eccentricities of his architecture and so forth, but truth be told we crave for this freedom, and we can never do without. I profess it is too late, I profess that censures, fines, reprimands and prisons are henceforth helpless. Most illustrious and most reverend Lord and my Master, I tell you with guilt and unspeakable delight that we all are, by now, vanquished and lost. in Rome, January 23, 1640 Nothing forbids us to imagine that it could really have gone this way, although these lines are nothing more than a Pindaric flight, played in an attempt to convey the salience of an artistic act that, considered in its context and in view of the advocated achievement of human rights, really had something disruptive. The path towards the conquest of freedoms and rights enshrined in the 1948 Declaration was therefore able to advance also thanks to the contribution of the scandalous Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and of many other scandalously enlightened artists like him who, thanks to their art, were able to move forward the fragile bar of freedoms, by virtue of their very ability to imagine, to foresee, to create, to risk, always remaining faithful to themselves and to art, the real one. The discriminating factor is not then in defining oneself, more or less free of charge, as an artivist, nor are you making the history of human rights by launching yet another pompous exhibition entitled The female gaze, throwing anything into it as long as it comes from a vagina holder and handling the gender question in the same way the infamous quotas for women, or the pandas at the zoo, are still handled. The strength of art, and its disruptive and very powerful ability to enter the debate and allow thought to advance on the subject of rights, can only stay in art itself, and not in personalisms, not in hashtags, or worse still in marketing operations designed to maintain the status quo of a frankly worn-out system: «Today, the exponential multiplication of exhibitions and biennials exploiting themes such as ecology, gender and the racial question as a showcase of liberal emancipation should be read in terms of an art-washing process only tending to reaffirm art as an autocratic system of capital, functional to the reproduction of social hierarchies and to the maintenance of order» (Marco Scotini, in Cos'è la curatela oggi, Artribune, 03 01 2022). Talking about the contribution of art to human rights, it is ultimately not a question of riding on humanitarian emergencies, but rather of knowing how to foresee them, of scandalizing – where scandal does not mean provocation for its own sake, but rather for shining a light wherever one is forced to silence, aware that «Wherever there is darkness, a miracle is always
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