Resumen de "Un mio perché", le ragioni di un artista. Un breve saggio dimenticato di Stanislao Lista
The essay "Un mio perché" was written and published in January 1880 by Stanislao Lista (Salerno, 1824 - Naples, 1908) soon after his defeat in the competition for the coveted chair of Sculpture at the Real Istituto di Belle Arti in Naples, held in Rome between September-November 1879. The examining committee rooted in the classical-academic tradition, did not understand the innovative value of the sculpture by Lista, voted completely for 'truth' and 'reality' according to the process of renewal introduced during the end of the 50's and start of the 60's, decisively shown in the following decade by his pupils.
The "pamphlet", consisting only of seven pages, explains the ways in which Lista performed for the competition tests and, most of all, explicitly rendered his poetics. With Lista, Neapolitan sculpture (painting already had done it) allowed the human figure its pure and simple form, but also its deviate shape, into his iconographic repertory. This direction did not only permit an excellent rendering of details but imposed upon itself to seek the significant correspondence between the image and its meaning, the exact equation of form and context. Such a position implied to make the 'ugly' yet 'beautiful' that is 'true' enter the world of sculpture, a prerogative consecrated to classicism (an example is his "Portrait of Father" in marble).
In this essay, besides going over the circumstances of the competition through a mass of unedited documents, the first part presents some new work of Lista the sculptor, draftsman, and painter, and gives clear events, dates and details of the vicissitudes of his biography and artistic activity, clarifying his story which had fallen into oblivion.
