Langone’s novel about an eternal feeling, like beauty painted on canvas

A love novel set in Mantua, like in the happy times when love still existed and hadn’t turned into a continuous, exhausting struggle for the supremacy of one’s identity over others. A novel that doesn’t need to give itself a tone by putting Rome or Milan, or Rome and Milan in it, always and only Rome-Milan as if it were a Frecciarossa, but which is enough at most for a sprinkling of Bologna and many journeys in Maserati. A smooth and flat novel that contains death and suffering but does not flaunt them as a license of credibility (in fact it is not in the five of the Witch), indeed it suffocates them as long as it can with joy, beauty and life.
For this “The Immortal Girl” by Camillo Langone (La Nave di Teseo) opens on the most beautiful words of love, perhaps the only ones possible: “I don’t want her to die”. They constitute the precipitate of the strongest sentiment, the universal core that remains once it has been separated from the vicissitudes and worries that we have all known; they are also the motive that pushes the anonymous protagonist and narrator to take her beloved girl to the best Italian painters, from Robusti to Mannelli, to have her immortalized in portraits that do not die or age.

Vittorio Sgarbi is mentioned in the novel, where he says that photography represents death but painting represents life. It’s true: the countless photos of us that we self-publish, smiling and filtered, are indistinguishable from those which the newspapers draw on when it comes to illustrating crime news; on gravestones in cemeteries, countless snapshots remind us that the instant has irrevocably passed. Instead, try to find the dead, I don’t know, Charles V throws a rest in Titian’s portrait, Degas’ dancers, Courbet’s anonymous fur. Does the Gioconda seem dead to you?

Deep down, love is a desire for infinity: we want the life of the other to last forever, and that their invulnerability finds no limit. Not being able to magically breathe immortality into the girl, the protagonist resorts to painting, which has the advantage of guaranteeing life that is not only interminable but also plural; in fact, he quotes Karl Kraus, where he says that in every portrait the important thing is that you recognize the artist well. The girl painted by Robusti will be different from the girl painted by Mannelli, from the one painted by Gasparro and so on, so that in the end the girl’s immortality is divided into a number of different images, all young, all beautiful, all destined to last when beauty and youth are gone from the body. It will be the tangible sign that the client’s love does not wane. Perhaps for this reason – I learn from the book – in the seventeenth century Cardinal Flavio Chigi had commissioned, to admire them, the portraits of the thirty-six most beautiful women in Rome. Only a scrawny moralist can see this as an act of lewd selfishness.

“But then do even very young and beautiful girls get sick?”: the dismay behind this sentence, which escapes the protagonist due to an ultimately secondary accident that occurs to the girl, is the corollary of the desire for infinity that characterizes love. It bears witness to the shift in the center of gravity imposed by sentiment, that uninterrupted monologue in which – as in the novel – there is one who speaks and another person who is carefully observed. Eventually the perspective is reversed, with the girl speaking on the penultimate page, and it turns out (spoiler) that it is the man who dies, her anonymous lover who feared her death more than anything else. But love performs a miracle. If, like him, she loves herself, then she wants to leave a perpetual trace of love; if this trace remains, after all death does not count, because the client will continue to live as long as there is someone who will look at the paintings, and his love will last as long as the beauty and youth of the immortal girl on canvas. Reading Langone everything seems so simple. And instead.