Buddenbrooks
© Ivan Cangelosi, 2015
205X130 cm
Ink on paper
Technique – Handwriting of the whole book of Thomas Mann– Original language
Permanent Exhibition at the Museum of the writing and the sign in Turin
About the Novel – This novel tells about the life of the Buddenbrooks, a wealthy and notable family of Lübeck which, through four generations, radically changes its character and its social and economic situation, going through times of prosperity and then financial difficulties, until the final ruin arrives.
Description of the painting– This is the artwork in which more immediate appears the relationship between literary text and image. In this work is depicted a carpet. The structure and the state in which the carpet appears (intact and compact in its upper part, threadbare in the middle and gradually holed and fringed at its end) represents a figurative synthesis of the plot of the novel, namely the rise, the consecration, the progressive social and economic fall and then the final breakup of the family Buddenbrooks.
Here the literary text, the story told in it and its plot, are synthesized into one image that is not simply evocative of the content of the novel, but aims to represent its very essence.