Michele Cometa (Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Palermo, Italy)
Stimmungen: 'The Triumph of Death' of Palermo
The theme, the concept, the "meaning" of the end that the fresco (circa 1450) now located in Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo, expresses is at the center of the question of Begriffsgeschichte: it obliges us to think the finiteness of the human, an experience that individuals and communities universally confront. Finiteness, death, is at the center of the only strategy that allows us to give meaning to experience. Nothingness, in fact, is overcome through the construction of narratives, that is of actions and tales. It is therefore necessary for us to ask a question of the fresco of the Triumph of Death that all too often the history of art has avoided: what story does it narrate? What is its discourse, or better, what are the discourses that are interwoven on the background of the Ospedale Maggiore of Palazzo Sclafani, such an important institution for the society of Palermo of the fifteenth century?
