CONTRIBUTI / 5 / Antonio Maccioni /
Ecstasy as “Dionysian dissolution of the constraints of the visible”. Artistic Creation in Pavel A. Florensky
In Russia, the early years of the 20th century are marked by rather complex cultural ferments. The Philosophical-religious Renaissance involves, in the Bogoiskatel’stvo, different kinds of God-seekers and different kinds of thinkers and intellectuals, such as the poet Andrej Belyj and the philosopher Pavel A. Florenskij. The cultural imagery of many of them is linked to the thought of Nietzsche, whose reception in Russia went through different moments and phases. Florenskij, more often known in reference to the pure religious thought in which he himself takes place, is actually among the attentive readers of some of the most important works of Nietzsche. In Florenskij’s philosophy of art, the categories of Apollonian and Dionysian take up space where the Dionysian dissolution of the bonds of the visible is equivalent to authentic asceticism. Through some references to the lectures held by Florenskij at the Moscow Theological Academy in 1921, we will find in his thought an original and unusual juxtaposition of the artist to the saint, and of the philosopher to the child, as mystical figures par excellence. The artist and the philosopher are able to reach the ascetic act, through the inverted perspective in the icon and the philosophical transfiguration of reality.
