“Dark is Light" – From Italy to England: Challenging Tradition through Colours

Renaissance English authors, and particularly Shakespeare, approached Italian culture with two contrasting attitudes. On the one hand, the immense Italian patrimony was felt as something stable and ʻfinishedʼ, a monument to which English authors had either a submissive response, resulting in imitation, or a contrarian one that resulted in intentional and explicit deviation from the ʻmodelʼ. On the other hand, Italy was not just something ʻpastʼ, perceived as complete and ready to be observed, either in awe or with impatience, but something ʻin motionʼ, whose influence could still reveal itself as extremely challenging. It is possible to analyze this dual influence through Shakespeare’s complex process of opposition/appropriation to Italian models, with a focus on the symbolic use of chromatic and luministic values in order to express different ontological and gnoseological paradigms. After illustrating the traditional European Christian/Neo-platonic paradigm born in Italy – based on a hierarchical opposition of white and black, light and darkness, symbolically representing the contrast of good and evil – I will show how this chromatic and luministic symbolism was called into question, and then reversed, by the revolutionary works of Giordano Bruno and Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s new way of painting (his tenebrismo) and Giordano Bruno’s philosophy (his concept of divinity as “la luce che è nell’opacità della materia, cioè quella in quanto splende nelle tenebre”, Eroici Furori) expressed, through a novel relationship between light and darkness, a new ontological and epistemological paradigm that broke with the hierarchical opposition of material and spiritual planes, promoting instead as its foundation a life-giving contrast of extremes endowed with the same dignity, in which light is to be sought in the heart of matter, not above it. A similar revolution is visible in some works by Shakespeare, who, while appearing to absorb the traditional, vertically orientated bi-chromatic universe – dominant in painting, poetry and dramatic production of the period – worked from inside to invalidate it, displaying therefore a strong affinity with the most advanced and controversial European thought. In many works – especially Love’s Labour’s Lost, Antony and Cleopatra and the Sonnets – the affirmation of a non-hierarchical concept of man and universe, in which there are no “vile parts”, is conveyed through an inversion involving both the main symbols (i.e. the dark ladies) and the whole chromatic and luministic system. In opposing the traditional Italian model, the poet reveals himself to be embedded in a new chromatic sensibility, springing from a novel ontological matrix, that owes a great deal to Italy.