When depicting is saying, and vice versa. The calligrams of Mario Faustinelli

Abstract

The image has always accompanied narration, supporting it; nevertheless, the narration itself has sometimes become the image, taking on the characteristics of iconic language. From the Alexandrian technopaegnion to the Latin and early medieval figurative carme, from calligram to visual poetry, verbum and imago have interpenetrated, becoming one. This unity redesigns the relationship between text and image, in which only apparently the visual part explains, simplifies and makes the verbal part more immediate and comprehensible: as Foucault explained, it complexifies it, makes it more ambiguous, but in doing so loads it with an unexpected density. Therefore, this contribution aims to investigate the technique of calligraphy for children, its origins and, in particular, the forms it has taken in the work of Mario Faustinelli (1924-2006), a writer of children’s books, cartoonist, scriptwriter, who collaborated between the 1940s and the 1970s on numerous editorial experiences dedicated to the youngest, including the ‘Corriere dei Piccoli’. His entire production is built on the joint – and at times overlapping – use of composition and graphic language; nevertheless, it is in the volume Le rime-figure o il gioco dei calligrammi, published in 1973 by Mursia and for which he was awarded the ‘Lina Schwarz’ Prize, that word and image come to a reductio ad unum. Breaking the linearity of verse, as the Surrealists and Futurists had already done, Faustinelli’s calligrams are aimed at fostering the sense of a multiform and multidirectional reading because of the double and overlapping language that makes meanings and signifiers slip and reciprocally move in an articulated game of concealment and unveiling. Faustinelli’s collection of calligrams for children shows, therefore, how the iconic can become in children’s literature not only an aesthetic exercise but a question, revealing page after page its function not as an exemplification or simplification of reality but rather its original capacity to always immortalise an excess of meaning, stimulating the reader and viewer to know how to grasp it.