On this point, however, Croce’s convictions are unfortunately adamant and seem to spring from an extremely limited familiarity with the arts, not only in the sense of his never having practiced one, but also in the sense that he never had much interest in what artists actually did. Croce condemns as superficial the observation that “the artist creates his expressions in the act of painting and sketching, writing and composing,” because artists “in fact, do not make strokes of the brush without first having seen [the work] by means of the imagination” (p. 114). But if the word “reality” has any meaning in Croce’s system, actual artists in fact never tire of recounting how the consistency of the material stimulated their imaginations, and it is only when reciting their rough drafts aloud that some poets find the clue that leads them to change the rhythm and come up with the right word. Croce, however, states, in La poesia, that poets abhor the empirical externalization of their inner intuitions to the point that are reluctant to recite their poems out loud. Which is statistically inaccurate as far as the poets I know are concerned.
In his Breviario d’estetica Croce demonstrates the inessential nature of the technical aspects of art, citing the cases of very great painters who have used colors that faded over time; but in so doing he confuses artistic technique with the science of materials. In the Aesthetic there is an interesting page describing the efforts of a poet who tries out different words and phrases in search of “an expression for an impression he feels, or of which he has a presentiment” (p. 132); but only a few pages earlier he had said that artists whose expression is still unformed apply an experimental brushstroke “not to externalize their expressions (which do not then exist), but as if to try out and to have a simple point of support” or as a “heuristic device” (p. 114). What Croce calls a “point of support” is like the hotchpotch of our everyday perception: it’s all we have. But what common sense recognizes as everything, for philosophy becomes nothing, with the minor inconvenience that everything that’s left becomes impalpable.
I believe it can be pacifically agreed that in these pages Croce affirms the exact contrary of the truth, if the truth is what common sense concedes in the light of a thousand recorded experiences. I am not sufficiently familiar with the entirety of his works to know whether Croce ever commented on the sonnet in which Michelangelo reminds us that: “Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto / c’un marmo solo in sé non conconscriva / col suo soverchio, e solo a quello arriva / la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto” [“The best of artists does not have any concept / that a single [block of] marble does not encompass / with its excess, and only to that [concept] arrives / the hand that obeys the intellect”]. If he read it, he forgot it, on purpose. Because what Michelangelo is telling us here is that the artist finds his intuition-expression in a dialogue with his materials, with their vein, their bias, the possibilities they offer. Indeed Michelangelo goes still further, for the sake of hyperbole: the statue is already present in the marble, and all the artist has to do is to remove the excess that conceals it.
And here we have Croce, as it were, contradicting Michelangelo, speaking of the “piece of marble that embodies the statue of Moses and of the piece of coloured wood embodying the Transfiguration” (p. 112, my emphasis). The citation leaves no room for doubt: what we consider works of art (over whose deterioration, restoration, counterfeiting ,or theft we agonize) are merely the containers of the only, unique, true (and at this point unattainable) works that existed in the completely inward intuitions of their authors. Elsewhere, speaking of how the judgment of taste retraces the genesis of the original intuition, Croce will refer to these physical embodiments as mere “signs,” instruments practically didactic in nature that facilitate the process of reconstruction. Not realizing that, for a philosopher reluctant to acknowledge the social existence of systems of signs, with their own laws and definable unities, who sees instead every expressive act as a unicum in which the language is, as it were, reborn as though for the first time, a sign ought not be something negligible, and the relationship between sign and intuition should be understood to be less accidental and external.
Croce tells us that that block of marble and that wooden panel are said to be beautiful only as a metaphor. Then it occurs to him that we really are using a metaphor when we say the score that contains Mozart’s Don Giovanni is beautiful, and he recognizes that the first metaphor is more immediate than the second. But, for an author who has refused to define metaphor, the solution leaves something to be desired. What does this difference in immediateness between metaphors conceal? And what is the status of the Don Giovanni contained in the score? Is it something that exists in the realm of sound (and therefore physically externalized and externalizable) or is it the original intuition that Mozart could even have refused to perform? And why does it continue to be performed today, rather than simply evoked by reading the score, as Croce believes dramatic works should be read, instead of seeing them externalized on the stage?
It seems clear that what Croce is articulating (encouraged by his lack of interest in everything that goes by the name of “nature,” and dominated by his humanistic education with its verbo-centric model, whereby beauty is inevitably defined with reference to verbal poetry) is a complex paralogism whose phases it will be useful to follow.
(i) First of all he is aware that there exist volatile expressions (in the sense in which verba volant [“words fly away”] and do not congeal in mid-air as Rabelais put it) and permanent expressions, such as statues or drawings. The difference is so evident that humankind has developed means by which to make the first permanent, from writing to magnetic tapes—authentic physical vehicles for the recording of previous expressions in the realm of sound.
(ii) From this correct empirical observation he draws the erroneous conclusion that volatile expressions are not material facts, as if writing and recordings did not record sounds. His verbal experience must have made him think of poets who mouth their poems to themselves, thinking of the sound they could give them. But they do so because they have already had experience of what sounds they could produce, so that an experimental psychologist (a category Croce didn’t have much time for) might argue that, when we think of Pavarotti hitting a high C, our organs of phonation, however imperceptibly, imitate the externalization we are thinking of. When we intuit, what we intuit are externalizations; when we think, we do not think outside the body but with the body. Croce is sufficiently well aware of this to have devoted a rather memorable passage to the phenomenon of synesthesia, in which he says that words on the page evoke not just thoughts but auditory, tactile, and thermal sensations. If Michelangelo had been born blind, he could never have “intuited” his Moses.
(iii) Beguiled by his (empirical) experience of discourses that take place in the mind (of which, however, we become fully aware only when they have been “minted in the currency of words”—and the physical metaphor of coining is worth noting), Croce makes this possibility into an absolute and extends it to the arts of permanence. Of course, we can all imagine a sculptor who, away from his workshop, imagines down to the tiniest details the statue he could produce with his chisel. But he can do so only because he has sweated over marble before, because he has hammered away in his shop; he can do so in the same way anyone can intuit that if they swallow a cube of ice they will feel a pain in the middle of their forehead, because they recall having already felt it under similar circumstances. Without the memory of our previous natural experiences we can intuit nothing, and someone who has never smelled a verbena can never intuit the scent of a verbena, just as someone born blind can never intuit what a dolce color d’orïental zaffiro (“sweet color of an oriental sapphire” [Dante, Purgatory, I, 13]) might be.