Talk about bad luck. You arrive in Cagnes-sur-mer hunting for light and landscapes that look like paintings, only to find a day veiled by clouds acting as a softbox (a tool, as we know, despised by the Impressionists) spreading the light in flat expanses that evoke more the metaphysical illumination of Piero della Francesca than the vibrant, restless brushwork of the “painter of joy.” But the schedules of today’s television productions can hardly bend to the whims of the weather. So, after having extolled on a couple of occasions — in absentia — the quality of light in the places where Renoir spent the last part of his life, the telegenic Jacopo Veneziani gets himself out of trouble by saying that “spring is running a little late this year,” while suggesting one can still imagine the incandescence of the light that had bewitched the man from Limousin. The young presenter certainly doesn’t lack for on-screen presence, built on a gestural style that openly acknowledges its debt to Alberto Angela, deployed by a direction that indulges in rapid cutting — in which Veneziani appears between the balusters of a railing, or pops up cheerfully from a doorframe, framed in a window or reflected in a mirror. A “pop” freshness that some will enjoy, and which has evidently been judged as the bottle of water from Barenton — capable of rejuvenating the weary and exhausted audience of the cultural leftovers produced by state television.
Obviously, being at that stage of life where one dispenses good advice to console oneself for no longer being able to set bad examples, I must admit that Veneziani’s charms leave my heart rather lukewarm. Which is perhaps just as well, since it allowed me to focus on the content of the episode. Which satisfied me only up to a point, I’ll admit. Setting aside the biographical accounts of Renoir’s life, the engagement with his actual work amounts to very little, very often nourished by the easy comfort of cliché.
Not to mention a rather tiresome rhetoric whereby the artist under discussion must necessarily possess something that sets him apart from everything that came before — a true birth from the mind of Jupiter, whereby the history of art, in this case, undergoes with his arrival a veritable right-angle turn. And the argument is made in a fairly underhanded way, I’m inclined to say. Comparing Renoir’s paintings with those of Jean-Léon Gérôme can give the impression of Renoir (or the Impressionists in general) as one of those cyclones that seem to arise from nowhere and sweep everything from the period’s repertoire into their vortex. Had we instead compared his canvases with those of the Barbizon school, of Gustave Courbet, and of Delacroix himself, the story would look quite different. And needless to say, any comparison with the Macchiaioli is entirely absent — though in this way we are reminded that the nineteenth century is the one in which the acknowledgement of Italy’s lost cultural primacy translates into a strain of cultural deference toward foreign things, from which we still suffer today.
And of course, there had to be the teleological-technological question of what the Great Masters of the past might have achieved had they been equipped with the tools of their great-grandchildren. What would Michelangelo have done with tubes of oil paint at his disposal? Questions of this sort apparently still fail to provoke the embarrassment they ought to.
One final note: a gaffe, likely the result of an editing error — at the end, Renoir as sculptor is discussed with reference to works that were never actually shown. A venial sin, but one that speaks volumes about the conditions under which these programmes are made.
In short, if the lion is known by its claw, this episode is not a strong representative of a project from which one was entitled to expect more. Online I have come across comparisons between this format and those of Daverio — a figure whose mantle someone is sorely needed to take up and carry into the third millennium, that is to say, with an awareness of how culture is consumed in the age of social media. Whether this is an achievable goal I cannot say; what I can say is that this is certainly not the programme that will break the tape: Daverio wrote texts that were at times labyrinthine to the point of obscurity, but he had the gift of connecting things that were far apart from one another — do you remember the episode on the Venetian genius loci? An epiphany — opening up pathways and provoking reflection. Here we are at the level of what one might hear on a guided tour of a museum. And I never take guided tours. As I once said to a guide: I’d rather not understand on my own than be told by you what I’m supposed to understand.
English translation based on Claude.ai translation services.