So, what is an image? If we were willing to settle for unsophisticated definitions, we might say that it is an object that makes us “imagine” other objects 1.In its indefensible approximation, this definition at least has the merit of suggesting that, since images are themselves objects, they can in principle also refer to other images. Put differently, images weave networks of relationships with the world that do not exclude them.
This is hardly surprising: after centuries of visual culture, it is now almost impossible for a new representation not to enter into dialogue with those that preceded it. Indeed, what sometimes happens is that this conversation seems to exhaust entirely an image’s referential possibilities, rendering it incapable of accessing the reality that extends beyond that visual cocoon we are learning to call the “iconosphere.”
But let us set aside the more dystopian scenarios and dwell instead on the metaphor of “visual conversation.” The one concerning the slaughtered ox—in which the photograph by Angelo Raffaele Turetta is situated—has now lasted for more than four centuries 2, and probably reaches its apex in the extraordinarily powerful De Geslachte Os by Rembrandt van Rijn.
More than the countless and richly layered literal and symbolic meanings of the subject, what interests me here is reflecting on how a new image that takes it up ends up measuring much of its value precisely in the contribution it makes to the dialogue woven by authors ranging from Annibale Carracci to Francis Bacon, from Joachim Beuckelaer to Damien Hirst, from Bartolomeo Passarotti to Jannis Kounellis. And Turetta’s arguments are extremely convincing, skillfully positioned as they are between quotation and original contribution. Photographing the carcass in the incandescent perspectival light of neon constructs a context that is at once bleakly post-industrial and classically Albertian, and that finds precisely in the devices that establish the perspectival box its projection into the present. Likewise, the engraved light, which takes the place of the “night light” of seventeenth-century references, retains from the Baroque rhetorical device its inability to wrest the corners of the scene from darkness. Framing, distribution of light, tonal contrasts: in each of the dimensions that characterize photographic writing, there seems to emerge a kind of translation into contemporary terms of modes that have a long history and are not forgotten here.
Just as eternal and endlessly repeated is the carcass itself—desperate and fertile, eternal and ephemeral, witness to violence and reservoir of life—in which the dense, deep blacks that, as often happens in Turetta’s work, take on the appearance of strokes made with greasy charcoal, once again tell us of the painful relationship between the environment and the cumbersome, relentless guest that colonizes and subjugates it.
The photographs and images on this page, in compliance with copyright law, are reproduced for purposes of criticism and discussion pursuant to Articles 65, paragraph 2; 70, paragraph 1-bis; and 101, paragraph 1 of Law 633/1941.
English translation based on Claude.ai translation services.
- a slightly more rigorous definition would describe it as an object—natural or artificial, physical or mental—that, by presenting itself to our vision—internal or external—calls to mind one or more different objects, not coinciding with the one before our eyes and often absent from our perception. Despite its convoluted structure, the definition is far from complete. For instance, nothing is said about the nature, conditions, and effects of this “calling to mind.” For an introduction to the topic, it may be useful to consult A. Pinotti, Il Primo Libro di Teoria dell’immagine, Einaudi, 2024[↩]
- a gallery, albeit partial and containing an error that penalizes the most representative example of this iconography—The Slaughtered Ox by Rembrandt van Rijn—can be found in M. Santoro, “Carne da macello: rivisitazione di un topos figurativo,” La Rivista di Engramma, no. 118, July/August 2014, pp. 7–21[↩]