english text 166 One of the fundamental elements that sustained the European mythification of life in the Mediterranean for years was the journeys that artists, intellectuals and the wealthy elite undertook in search of the “lost paradise”. Journeys to discover a different, unknown world, strange and mysterious, far from what had previously been their day-to-day experiences. Adventures that took the form of a flight that presented, on the one hand, the elimination of aims and a search for principles that they did not find in their own surroundings; and, on the other, the magic of the faraway and the exceptional transfigured into a region of desire, a desire that presented itself as incomplete and unrealisable, because it constantly referred to an unsatisfied otherness. In the eighteenth century there was the beginning of the cultural tradition known as the Grand Tour, according to which the education of a young aristocrat was not considered complete without a visit to the places of antiquity to contemplate, in situ, the beauty of the Greek and Roman heritage. It was believed that the Mediterranean was a source of goodness of two kinds: physical, because it healed the body, and mental, because its works of art brought about positive moral effects and improved people’s minds. In the nineteenth century, therefore, when society in the north of Europe was undergoing profound social and economic changes, many artists and intellectuals looked towards the south in search of the lost Arcadia, for which the influence of Goethe’s book Italienische Reise (Italian Journey, 1816) was fundamental. They sought a bucolic landscape, an idyllic place of eternal spring with a sun-soaked countryside dotted with classical ruins among which still dwelt simple people who continued to live in accordance with the laws decreed by nature. The journey was an initiatory one of regeneration in which each visitor had a different reason for travelling to the south, such as the contemplation of classical ruins, the beneficial effects of the sun or a search for forbidden love. The economic development and industrialisation of the Western world were accompanied by a substantial rural exodus and a very considerable increase in populations in the big cities, which created serious public health problems and caused a great spread of diseases such as tuberculosis and alcoholism. Great importance was attached to physical health in that period, and there was a spread of a view of health understood as a search for balance in terms of form (beauty) and organs (internal functionality), the aim of which was to try to regenerate, physically and mentally, a society that was suffering from the evils of the process of industrialisation. The concern for hygiene and physical development was much influenced (in the late nineteenth century) by Utopian Idealism movements, based on the promotion of hygiene and the prevention of illness. As a reaction to the most disastrous effects of the Industrial Revolution, those movements foresaw a return to nature and to what was “natural” (i.e., life in the open air, physical culture, nudity, vegetarian diet, etc.), which would lead to a restoration of the original harmony of mankind with the world of nature, as can be seen in Franz Roth’s photograph Untitled, 1928. Since the middle of the nineteenth century the south of Europe had become an enormous sanatorium for travellers who came to be cured of lung diseases. One of the most famous people who made that journey was the Prussian photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856–1931), who in 1878, suffering from tuberculosis, came to Taormina, a Sicilian town of an almost feudal nature in a fierce natural setting, close to the volcano Etna and inhabited by rustic country folk. There Gloeden found a paradise to his taste, and there he tried to revive classical antiquity through his pictures. Thus rough and grubby young fishermen, muleteers or apprentices were transmuted by his camera into handsome shepherds, bucolic fauns or Homeric heroes with laurel leaves on their head; adolescents careless of their youth posed, idly triumphant, in an indolence set in patios surrounded by columns and jars or lying on leopard skins playing the flute, with the aim of expressing an erotic/aesthetic ideal (based on Winckelmann’s theories) that referred to a remote heroic past, to a Greece that had never existed. Wilhelm von Gloeden triumphed in his aim of propagating a view of a Golden Age prior to our civilisation. His works are veritable tableaux vivants, reproductions of folk customs and stories in which he composed representations of an idealised archaic society without social disparities. In those youngsters Gloeden saw the descendants of the Greeks, a noble race rooted in nature. We might say that his pictures were a mixture of the Greek worship of vegetation, Roman statuary and the “ancient nude” practised in the Schools of Fine Arts, and ethnological studies or poetic evocations of antiquity. Pictoricist photography that demonstrated the pure beauty of an adolescent with an androgynous body in a perfect world (Boy’s Head, 1890–1905). It was the German art critic and historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), with his book Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Art in Antiquity, 1764), who constructed a solid discourse in which he defended the view that to achieve aesthetic perfection it was necessary to imitate the Greeks. Winckelmann understood that Greek painting and sculpture were the perfect representation of ideal beauty, and that they had attained such a level of mastery that it was insuperable, and therefore he considered that modern artists should not only appreciate their perfection and study it but also copy and imitate it. For him the classical sculptures were not only objects to be contemplated with delight but also a subjectivity with which the viewer could identify, an ideal ego, a mythical image of perfectly integrated behaviour that could project the viewer outside his problematicised, inadequate self. The ideal male nude thus became a record full of power and desire; in fact, in his analyses the image of the male in ancient Greece was the true representation of the sovereignty of the subject, of his
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