Semiotics and Symbolic Politics in the Reception of Seventeenth-Century Art: Reflections on Guercino's <i>Prometheus</i>

Abstract

As happens in almost all eras, contemporary thinkers have been able to prepare new tools for understanding the historical phases that preceded them. Tools that have led to new disciplinary directions and new interpretative methods: think of semiotics which in relation to the artistic field has highlighted alternative exhibition languages for reading paintings; or to the philosophical question of symbolic politics. With these tools it has been possible to read the timeless myth of Prometheus with a decidedly original key and in the modern age we see a clear revival in the use of this myth, both in political essays, in philosophy, in literature and in art. Also because Prometheus brings with him many messages also based on how one wants to think of him, whether free to grant the flame to humanity or chained due to the punishment of Zeus. With this essay, we try to read the interpretation of Prometheus by one of the most important painters of the European seventeenth century, Giovan Francesco Barbieri known as Guercino who at the age of 25 decided to open the Academy of the Nude in his hometown, Cento between Bologna and Ferrara, for very young aspiring painters, and it is precisely in the rooms of that art school that he frescoed his first and only Prometheus in the act of granting flame to the inanimate clay statue. A gesture that marks the meaning of art considered one of the highest human virtues.