…The soul, defrauded in life of its rights/divine, n’ary amongst the shadows finds repose;
but alas, I will succeed with poetry/the holy, essential thing…
I am filled, tho’ it accompanies me not to the depths/my art
One time I lived
Equal to the gods, though not anymore.
(F. Hölderlin, 1798)

The work of d'Artagnan, a personal mythography and cosmography, is instantly recognizable, inimitable, and all of a piece. Its interpretation, however, is more complex, not so much for what it in itself expresses as because one must first enter into his personal "technical" language and draw coordinates from it to arrive at a definition. His creative life can be divided roughly into three periods: the first phase of experimentation (1968-70), which is essentially characterized by the invention of masks, faces, and hairdos, with the first appearances of houses and flowers, as well as squashes; the majority of these works were done with colored pencil and a few timid brushstrokes. In the second phase (1970-78), D'Artagnan reaches his mature style and technical mastery, filling the spaces with an overabundant richness of color; he worked in oils, pencil, brush, tempera, watercolor, whatever came to hand-often not for reasons of choice but of chance, since, through lack of funds, materials were not always available. This phase turns out to be the most productive; he completes his expressive vocabulary with houses, flowers, trees, and phalluses. If the masks continue to be a leitmotiv in his work, these of the central period always refer to the expressive Felliniesque universe, with the addition of a poetic touch that recalls the art of his friend Novella Parigini. The houses, on the other hand, often wavy and twisted, are inspired at least a little by Chagall, whom he loved very much, though the motivation behind the waviness must be the ill wind of the Harpy, or the forces of evil. The great Phallophanies come into play in this phase with “Il Priapo giovane” or “La Danza dell'amore e della vita,” or also in elegant isolated pictures like “Il gondoliere nella Venezia celeste.” The final phase, 1978-84, that airy one dominated by “Angelo invidiato” or “Gruppo” or by the lost “Colli lunghi” (“Long necks”)-numerous at the time, but of which only three sketches and a drawing survive-are founded more on movement and liberation-purification of the white space. The rage to fill in every available corner of the painting-the rococo instinct?-dies down. The brilliant oils fade and there is a return to colored pencils with a touch of either pen or brush. I remember that D’Artagnan in the period of “Trattoria degli Studenti” (1974-80 and 1981-83), a guest in the studio/rehearsal space of our group, Spettro Sonoro, influenced perhaps by the informal music and dissonances that we were trying out in the trattoria of the studio, tried a kind of modernizing of his drawings, experimenting with the technique of dividing and taking apart his own symbols, almost as if to make them real. Unfortunately these marvellous attempts, truly surprising and clever, were destroyed by water. A few finished works, of 1977-78, and others, sketches from 1981-83, remain, enough to understand what direction he was moving in in these last years of his life.

Let us proceed now with an attempt to gloss the symbols constituting the poetic and expressive vocabulary of D’Artagnan.

The squash, the first object of interest, is drawn and painted in 1939. Before he takes up drawing again, almost thirty years pass, and there it is again. The squash appears, small or large, in many, many works, up until the last years. D'Artagnan said that it was a symbol of his peasant background and that it tied the fertility of nature to its fattest fruit, namely, the squash: earth, water, eros, labor, and food were considered its components.

The haystack, with its splendid yellow hay, appears always near the houses as a kind of decoration; it, too, functions as an evocation of his peasant background.

The mask (and the face) is the other perennial symbol in the works of D'Artagnan. Are the painted faces perhaps a memory of the masks of the Commedia dell'Arte of Venice? When asked about the origin of these masks, D'Artagnan referred directly to the fascination with faces and masks in some films of Fellini. Later, he adds a touch in the manner of Parigini. These are not to be treated as direct influences but, rather, as stimuli, in so far as the masks are tied to the willingness to express a world distorted, sick, deforming the beauty of the individual. They must maintain, however, the character of the absurd, the ironic, and some hint of a humanity that lies beneath the mask, made bored and astonished by the disappointment of existence. Under the mask-not like the “Pulcinella” of Luigi Serafini, where there is nothing and the appearance therefore coincides with the reality-D’Artagnan hoped one day that, in an act of divine justice, the truth would rise again. He himself lives inside those casings, fruit of a sick civilization; waiting out the epidemic, he jests and lives in that nightmare dimension, searching for asylum, seeking to better his condition. The masks and faces are applied to the phalli, to the Harpie, to the witness, to the feet with heads. In the phallophanies, the mask often has a tongue sticking out or is embellished as in “RËve d’une jeune fille.” A detailed discussion of the masks examines:

The Hairdo. With great intensity in 1969 he draws an extravagant number and variety of hairdos and decorative combs, what amounts to an anthology of hairdos. Why this frenetic inventiveness with hair? D'Artagnan spoke of showing externally, on top of the head, the richness of the imagination that goes on inside the head. It also signified how much can come out, be put on display, be externalized of a brain that is free, original, creative, artistic.

The Witness, or spectator , generally appears behind the houses or flowers in a scene, with an ambiguous comic smile; as in the definition in the Poetics of Aristotle: “The ridiculous [that which moves one to laughter (riso); or geloion (laughable, absurd)] . . . is characteristic like the mask of comedy: something that is ugly and distorted without inflicting suffering.” The mask of the Harpy appears in the final period of D’Artagnan and testifies, as in antiquity, to a force of evil bringing tempests, often with the significance of the Siren, another mythological figure, similar to the Harpies, sometimes painted in the form of a bird’s body and a human head. D’Artagnan possessed a copy of The Odyssey with illustrations of the Sirens and above all, he loved the passage regarding Ulysses suffering but resisting the mortal song of the Sirens. Four or five sketches have survived among those that were destroyed: they represent the eternal presence that opposed him, ruining his plans, especially those for a home. Wherever the Harpies or the Sirens are present, all the figures in the picture are moving and confounding themselves in an abstract interplay, illustrating the presence of a tempest and of the furious wind that destroys everything: but the Harpies’ tempest is not always in full swing, and often displays itself as a mere threatening presence. D’Artagnan often recited the strophe on the Harpies from Orlando furioso: “They were seven in a line, and all/Face of a bird-woman, pallid and wan,/ For hunger made thin and lean/Horrible to see and worse than death…” Then he refered to other myths and played with the numbers: Hesiodus mentions only two Harpies, other writers count three, and he noticed the differences with Ariosto, who numbered seven. He cited Dante: “Here the ghastly Harpies made their nests/…Wings on their sides and human necks and heads / Feet with claws…” But he loved the verse from Virgil’s Eneide: “Virginei volucrum vultus…”, because the devastating fury came from beings that were hungry, but also pure and vergine. Perhaps wishing to confess, as in a transfert, that the reason for his social catastrophe was of his own making, as a vergin to the world who needed to meet him, and at he same time, infuriated. Certainly this symbol, coming late in the mythography of D’Artagnan, is one of the most negative of any found in his works. Perhaps it is to be ascribed to the particular “heroic furor” described by Giordano Bruno in his essay of 1585? Here is how the philosopher, burned on the Inquisition’s pyre, defined it: “The heroic fire is part of the lucid spirit…that, pressed by the play of desire and set into motion by an internal stimulus and a natural fervor for the truth, shines more brightly than the ordinary rational light.” Had he envisioned the impossibility of success and of social recognition? The head or mask on the feet is an obvious symbol of the mutilation of modern man as a consequence of a Freudian renunciation of the pleasure principle for the principal of reality or, in general, the renunciation of love for the fetishization of the marketplace. The image leads back to the spirited, brilliant sarcasm of D’Artagnan. In close connection with this last image D’Artagnan uses

The ring of Saturn: recalls the age of gold under the god Saturn, when men lived in happy communion, as in an earthly paradise, and the rivers ran with milk and honey, the animals were all gentle, and the earth brought forth fruit of itself.

Perhaps the most visible display of the exaltation of life in D’Artagnan, and demonstration of what one might call his erotic vitality, is the phallus, which brings us to

The phallus. "Phallophany" is an invented term that means apparition of the phallic divinity, or phallic epiphany. Sileni, the Satyrs that file by with erect phalli in the ritual processions of the god Dionysus (Bacchus), including the Maenads, sacred animals, musicians, and thyrsus-bearers, who carry on their shoulders representations of the phallus as a symbol of fecundity and fertility. The same with the son of Dionysus and Aphrodite, Priapus: his phallus represents the eternal regenerative force of nature. Hera, the mother of the gods, wanted his face to be really ugly, and he is therefore often represented as a coarse fellow, stocky and bearded, endowed with a disproportionately huge phallus. Furthermore, D'Artagnan uses the tree of life, the squash, the house, the vulva, and the flowers in his paintings in the same manner as the phallus, to show the explosion of life in the regeneration of nature. From two brief excursions to Naples and to Pompeii, in 1969 and 1982, he brought back accounts of statuettes, paintings, and mosaics in which he had seen various phallic representations and erotic scenes that were marvellous to him as symbols of life. He had also deepened his knowledge of them through books on art. The bronze statuette of Mercury Pentafallico (Five-cocked Mercury?), in the National Museum of Naples, enchanted him so much that he kept a photograph of it. That would explain why sometimes there are more than one phallus attached to a single subject. Often he transforms the phallus into a divinity similar to the sun; see “RËve d’une jeune fille” and “Il trionfo di Priapo,” or into ejaculations of petals and flowers that color the sadness of an earth abandoned by love, as in “Quo vadis petit” or “Miracolo di Priapo.” That such visions recall Alberich (of the Rheingold of Wagner), who for the power of gold, for material goods, renounces and repudiates love, or Freia, the goddess of love, raped by giants, whose absence will make the earth dry up, old, gray, and wretched, was a recurring motif in discussions with D’Artagnan, naturally always addressed with sarcastic remarks. In effect, the love that inside he felt had been lacking since birth he imagined would rise from this, his colorful, life-giving universe.

Just as loaded with unrestrained vitality is the trunk or tree of life or of knowledge, a direct biblical reference to the first humans eating the forbidden fruit. Also, sacred to Zeus was the oak Dione or Dia, goddess of the sky, who was the supreme god's consort at the ancient Greek oracle at Dodona. There is also the image of the great tree of the world that reaches as high as the sky and, with its roots, into the bowels of the earth to regenerate the universe, as is explained in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson. The Finns venerated the cosmic tree whose branches of gold filled the sky: the prosperity and abundance of life on earth is its fruit. And in the Tao of the ancient Chinese the breath of the creator emanates from the primordial darkness "like a tree." I could go on indefinitely about the various significances that trees have always had for people. The ostentation with which they are presented in so many drawings of D'Artagnan demonstrates just how important it was for him to dream of the tie with his celestial father, with whose fruit the earth brimmed, as well as for the attribute of knowledge, and for beauty, sovereignty, and strength. His trees, together with:

Flowers flood nature with beauty and color to the point that in D'Artagnan they become symbols of orgiastic explosion, merging and binding with phalluses, vulvas, and:

Houses. The house is the most prevalent image in his entire output. There are houses and shacks everywhere. It is clear that the house in D'Artagnan-for reasons contingent on and inherent in his own terrible history-represents that which he has always been denied. It is the house he never had, the hearth fire, the domestic life pulsing within, the warm affection of the mamma, the sexual pleasures of the nuptial bed; it is the place where one takes cover from evil and hostility, from stormy weather; it is the yearned-for life within, whose heat we see represented always in his chimneys that belch smoke. Denied this fervent desire, he constructs it in the painting as he pleases, and adorns it with flowers, walkways, fences, streetlights. Yet the approach and entry are difficult. Often, in fact, one arrives at the houses by climbing a

Ladder or bridge. A ladder, like that of Jacob, at the top of which is Paradise, is God himself, and ... a house, as if the bridge points to the desire for passage to the shores of a new home, in the Garden of Eden. Multifarious types of stairs conduct one graciously to the main door of the house. A kind of animal much beloved by D'Artagnan,

The bird, often present all over the drawings, functions as an animal witness, follows the scene, observes, and in some drawings comments directly, as in his pornographic little house picture "Pax et bonum madam." It is an animal friend that in life he defended against "the hunter assassins," and in fact D'Artagnan was one of the first in Italy to speak out against hunting. Birds are also represented by

The nest containing two eggs. The nest is a synonym for a home, which even the animals can call their own, and where life quivers in the two eggs that will hatch. Not being able to show or paint the insides of houses, because reality denied them to him, he uses the nest to investigate a natural "inside", en plein air.

Around the house in the imaginary world of D'Artagnan are important realistic details of daily life, with autobiographical overtones. In fact he put into his work an often-used image, that of

A clothesline hanging outside the house, which also signifies the garments that he himself washed and hung outside his shack in the shantytown.

The trumpet is another autobiographical element that is sometimes there as filler, and sometimes takes the form of a chimney or other object.

The spiral evokes the snail, another symbol of the house, but is also a signal of danger; it is like an ambivalent desire to carry the outside to the inside or vice versa, in a continuous motion of filling and emptying, collecting and letting go.

The candelabra is also a recurring image in his vocabulary of symbols: it is the light of his beloved three-pronged candelabra; it was the gleam produced by the candles that permitted him during cold sleepless nights to warm himself a little and to continue to draw and paint. The candelabra in addition is a triphallic form: always lit, erect, and desirous of spending itself in pleasure. It is often associated with other things that come in threes, like the triplet of eighth notes, the three suns, the three eyes in the painting "The Trinity." It is in close relationship with the

Streetlight, and they come together to bring light and warmth to the houses in the drawings; the streetlight makes plain the beauty of the home but is also reminiscent of spotlights on film sets. So the streetlight sheds a realistic, autobiographical light on these images.

Another source of natural light in the painting, full of life-giving religious significance, is the shining star of:

The sun, which represents, as for everybody, the origin of life but is also a divine witness to social needs. It contains in itself all the attributes dear to D'Artagnan: in the first place, light is the origin of color; in some paintings, D'Artagnan ironically invents (unique, as far as I know) a world with two and three suns! He needed, I believe, as much warmth and love as he had been denied, and so he wanted the most sun possible. In relation to the earth, it is literally the source of the regeneration of flowers, trees, fruits, animals. For D'Artagnan it was also the sovereign father that was taken from him, as if, outside of the painting, darkness surrounded him. Otherwise, as everyone knows, the force, the energy, the heat that is released by the sun drive humans and animals to erotic desires, and therefore to fecundity and the propagation of life: these obvious truths D’Artagnan will seek always to live and bring to life in his paintings.

The foot with four toes is a pure invention of D’Artagnan and represents again a species of primitive humanity, almost a bestial state, as well as a mutilation. But such a four-toed foot doesn’t evoke anguish in the observer; instead it awakens a certain sympathy from its being so strangely ridiculous.

The long necks cannot be sufficiently explained, because, except for a few sketches, they were destroyed. I can speak only of those which I remember, and the fact that these astonishing creations no longer exist is very sad. Maybe with the long necks he meant to detach the body from the mind in order to put it closer to the sky; heads in the clouds, four-toed feet on the ground! Long necks the better to hear the music of the spheres? the language of angels?

The umbrella and the column are related symbols: both are shown mended with patches; both give shelter from bad weather. But the column supports no roof and refers to history, especially personal history: to have been born a column without function and without roof, with neither bas relief nor tympanum, gone to ruin or destroyed-an explanation of the family history. The umbrella, on the contrary, is uniquely designed to be repaired: it is his little portable roof. The umbrella was always with D’Artagnan, even on hot summer days. He used it like the blanket of Linus; without it he was powerless. It was also a substitute for the foil, and he used it to demonstrate his fencing skills for friends. Often he carried umbrella and foil together, as in his last period. In the paintings, it is folded and frequently holds the shape of a feminine figure: an extension of the phallicsignificance? Or the need for a woman and a roof?

The rhythm of three eighth notes in a triplet refers to his signature, which contains a foil and a triplet. It is a sign, like the house, among those from his creative inventory which appear most often. It does not have only one symbolic significance; it represents a sort of trademark, and again has autobiographical connotations: D’Artagnan had studied and played the trumpet for a few years. But the triplet refers directly to that which made him most happy:

Musical notation on staffs and the desire to bring together music and dreams. When he asked me to play a recording conducted by Toscanini or a song by Callas, he would all but close his eyes, fall into a trance, and begin to sing under his breath or to conduct; at the end, exhasted, he would say, "One can see from how I conduct that I am the son of Toscanini." It was clear that he had travelled across the boundary between an real, unproved possibility and a rapt dream. He would say, after listening to Callas, that he had travelled across the entire universe, so that the whole appeared to him as an immense musical instrument, and with the voice he was united to the music of the spheres and saw the angel musician at the boundaries between matter and spirit. I don't know if he had read Pythagoras or not... The dream, like the music, was for him incorporeal: the dream did not feel pain; it lived divine in the air at the disposal of all, to be embraced and realized. The ethereal dream is similar to the impalpable music that vibrates with spirit in the air and is nourished and made tangible; music also has a solid body, a form: we must render the music true by playing it, the same way we must strive to realize a dream. Here is the reason that in many of his works he drew music on a staff.

D’Artagnan, finally, is the story of an obsession for a dream that wants to be transformed, at all cost, into reality. Or better, the story of a life lived to the final consequence, to the negative heroism of a homeless death: the price to pay to ride the dream of a possible positive realization in our world, without compromises and full of the horror of the existing sickness of society. But what was the principal atom or nucleus of the dream within the Dream? Always the same. The truth of his family origins. To demonstrate to the world that he was not a son of sin; his talent, his genius, his inner forces could not admit to a wanton mother and father. This is the driving force in the life and the works of D’Artagnan; to imagine, to think of that origin, the domestic hearth: the houses always present, the erect phalluses that spurt out flowers, joy, life, love… one of those phalluses had put him on the earth and it could not be evil. He was certainly not a pudic moralist; instead, his eros was serene, free, aristocratic and libertine, but certainly not petty bourgeois. D’Artagnan, finally, was the story of one versus the moltitudes, lived on the edge of the Dolce vita, in a monodimensional familiar world, a sweet and tragic trap, that excluded him from affection, from his civil and social rights, where he could create for himself a family and have a hearth, like everyone else.