Ragghianti, l’arte paleostorica. Tra divulgazione e dibattito storico-artistico

When in 1981 Carlo L. Ragghianti published the volume on the studies about prehistoric art, almost 24 years had passed since the exhibition at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, organized with Paolo Graziosi and conceived as early as 1954. The book «focused on certain basic topics», intended to «convince to new interpretations» of prehistoric art (cit. From Conoscere l’Homo sapiens). The interlocutor of this work was once again mainly Graziosi himself. The art historian collected in the Uomo cosciente unpublished and published texts that are characterized by the overturning and expansion of the Croce’s esthetics perspective from which the young Ragghianti started. Like a kind of karst river, the reflections on the visual expressions of the Paleolithic made their way into the consciousness of the mature Ragghianti. The volume is methodologically outlined in harmony with all the critical production, including the visual and kinetic approach of which the critofilms are an apex of Ragghianti’s discourse on the arts. Surprisingly, the volume did not have the critical luck it deserved and was not received as others, among essential productions even among its admirers. This marginal consideration seems to have prevailed due to refractoriness on the part of the academic world of art historians towards the artistic languages about the Paleolithic sense of art, not very popular, especially in Italy by the non-archaeologists. Even in the context of the studies for the art-historian centenary in 2010, the volume «Luk» has remained almost in the shadows if it wasn’t studied by A. Ducci, which I followed with a study about the philosophical, methodological and conceptual questions posed by the volume: Ragghianti e la paleostoria: intuizione e attualità di pensiero (2015). The contribution intends to briefly hint at the critical debate, the differences in Ragghianti’s critical thinking compared with G.C. Argan and others, including the indifference shown in the Italian academic context. A comparison is also offered to some approaches regarding the reflection of the origins of arts by scholars such as E. Gombrich.