Hesitant modulations of the vision

some pictorial variations from Valéry

Abstract

By focusing some moments of Paul Valery’s Cahiers half-century writing, it will be possible to observe how an aesthetic concept derived from music, the modulation, is transformed by the french poet and is already used in the manuscrits of Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci to reflect upon the vision, the figure and the drawing. Once it is displaced from the musical universe to the plastic arts, the ideia of modulation ceases to be thought of as a successive transition between two different moments of a piece and starts to be conceived as an hesitant at once successive and simultaneous passage among the multiple layers of the aesthetic experience. The act of modulating will therefore open a field of resonances between the different arts within which the concept of form, instead of being defined by the analitical purification of an art media, support or area of competence, refines itself in contact with hesitations and intervals between different artistic practices and materials. Thus, the dialogue of Valery’s modulation concept with the plastic arts might also define more precisely important aspects of the poetic formalism attributed to him.