A cura di @NedCuttle21(Ulm).

Secondo un articolo pubblicato sul Guardian, nella stesura del celebre romanzo gotico Frankenstein, di cui quest’anno ricorre il bicentenario della pubblicazione, la scrittrice britannica Mary Shelley si sarebbe ispirata all’arte del tempo; in particolare a quella del letterato e pittore svizzero Johann Heinrich Füssli, con cui sua madre, la filosofa femminista Mary Wollstonecraft, ebbe una relazione sentimentale. L’autore del pezzo, Jonathan Jones, sostiene inoltre che il celebre romanzo della Shelley abbia a sua volta influenzato il mondo dell’arte.

One stormy night in 1816, while staying at Lord Byron’s villa near Lake Geneva, an 18-year-old woman tossed and turned in the thunder-filled darkness. Her name was Mary Shelley, and she was having a nightmare about a monster made from scraps of humans. Frankenstein, the novel Shelley would fabricate from her vision, is regarded as a fable of science gone wrong. Yet it is also a rumination about art. Victor Frankenstein, the monster’s creator, is as much sculptor as scientist. Like Pygmalion, the sculptor from Greek myth, he makes a body and it comes to life. And what is this monster but a collage? A full century before the likes of Kurt Schwitters and Georges Braque, Shelley seems to have presaged every modern artistic discipline that sticks together fragments of the world, from collage to photomontage to assemblage art.

Immagine: Andy Mabbett