Per una patografia del Novecento. Hans Sedlmayr: l’arte come sintomo di un’epoca

The paper examines the relationship between art and pathology in a historical-philosophical and historical-cultural declination, placing it in relation to the crisis of the twentieth century and its possible interpretations. The protagonist is Hans Sedlmayr, the art historian compromised by Nazism, who, from the perspective of the theorists of entartete Kunst, considers contemporary art to be a symptom of the madness of civilization. What he describes in his major works (Verlust der Mitte, 1948; Die Revolution der modernen Kunst, 1955; Der Tod des Lichtes, 1964) can be read as a pathography of the twentieth century. Not only writers no strangers to the conservative revolution, such as the Jünger brothers, but also seemingly distant thinkers such as Karl Jaspers (extensively quoted by Sedlmayr) and Ernesto De Martino (who read Verlust der Mitte with sympathy in the 1960s) make diagnoses of the times that are in many ways surprisingly similar. What does it mean to see art as the symptom and pathology of an era?