The library and the artist as Homo legens

Abstract

The artist, in addition to talent, artistry and professional mastery, is the result of continuous training. Reading is a tool of this becoming. The musician, the painter, the sculptor, the upholsterer, the actor, the director, the filmmaker, the choreographer, etc. cannot but turn to reading as a form of training, learning and cultivating his artistic self. The connection between art and reading is an indispensable one. The literatures of the world provide us with a huge imaginary corpus of the creative reader. Artists in books and their readings, their libraries – this is the purpose of this research. In this sense, we aim to carry out a comparative-contrastive study between arts, artistic professions, characters from different eras and spaces. The approach is a literary-cultural one, with some nuances of the sociology of art and the artist. The artist as human reader is both a character and a tool for x-raying the mentalities of an era reflected in literature.