Painting with words. Some considerations on the picture of women from The Child of Pleasure to The Virgins of the Rocks by Gabriele D’Annunzio

Abstract

The essay deals with a fundamental aspect of D'Annunzio’s research which is the fusion of writing and figurative art, and its declination according to the dictates of end-century aesthetics. The study intends to highlight the stylistic and compositional modalities, in addition to the poetic purpose and ideological values, of the ecphrastic experimentation carried out in the transition between the debut novel (The Child of Pleasure) and the novel of superomismo (The Virgins of the Rocks). The textual analysis will examine how the portraits of female characters, constructed through the comparison with objects of art, rest at the same time on the narration of the effect produced on the Self of the protagonist who chooses and looks at these works of art. The vision turns out to be crystallized in verbal images which adorn the pages of the book which in turn becomes a museum and offers itself to the eye of the reader of the time, proposing a new aesthetic canon of Beauty.