Esoteric Rome

By Francesco Roesler Franz

Forte di questa sua simbologia insita, l'arte si rivela ancora una volta il luogo deputato del pensiero mitico sia quanto luogo di esibizione del simbolo, come nelle arti figurative, sia come luogo nel quale il pensiero poetante disegna la duplicità del reale nel dipanarsi della narrazione.

Tre serie di quaranta acquerelli, per un totale di centoventi quadri. È questa Roma Sparita, un'opera complessa e mozzafiato che tocca le corde più alte dell'arte. A firmarla è stato Ettore Roesler Franz, ma quali erano davvero le sue intenzioni? Questi quadri non sono solo la testimonianza di un grande talento artistico ma un vero e proprio mistero perché dietro di essi c'è un mondo intero da scoprire. Celebrazione della Roma massonica, testimonianza dei cambiamenti urbanistici della città, esaltazione della spiritualità, elogi ai grandi artisti: tanti sono i significati esoterici che si intrecciano tra questi quadri e che vengono esaminati e approfonditi in questo incredibile saggio, scritto dal pronipote del grande artista.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9791220395557

Book preview

Preface

So the reason why my great-uncle Ettore has included all these paintings in the Roma Sparita series is not because of a romantic or nostalgic attachment to the river Tiber, but as an indictment of the temporal power of the Papal State for the carelessness with which it ran Rome.

Bringing order to the tangled skein of the world is an ambitious, incredible, perhaps almost naive project. If most people get lost in this attempt, the great artists succeed in a surprising way, leaving behind a mark destined to last forever.

Ettore Roesler Franz certainly succeeded, because in addition to being an artist, he was a complex, extraordinary and deeply human man, as his works show.

His work describes a journey that we should all take and which, picture after picture, forms our collective unconscious. It wakes us up from the torpor of life, shakes us out of that sleep of tedium that sometimes envelops our daily lives and invigorates us, awakens our attention and brightens our days as only a dear friend can.

And if we add to all this the desire of a great-grandson who wishes to pay homage to the talent of an extraordinary great-uncle, everything changes, because a special and indestructible bond is built within us with these two men.

On one side the artist, on the other the writer. In a dualism that seems almost dangerous, that makes us fear we might stumble at some point, because we have absolutely no idea where it will lead us. And yet, if we trust it, after reading Francesco Roesler Franz’s essay, we cannot help but rediscover ourselves as different people. We learn to live art, not just look at it. We learn the importance of that special human bond that goes beyond the ties of blood and reminds us all of our humanity.

The grandeur of Ettore Roesler Franz shines from every page of Esoteric Rome and it is through clear and sincere eyes that we understand all the fascination of initiatory esotericism and we embark with passion and curiosity on an esoteric journey into the purest art.

‘Basically, my great-uncle Ettore was unique among nineteenth-century Roman painters, because he not only knew the secrets of the initiates but also had a network of friendships with the greatest European artistic and cultural exponents, and this is confirmed both by his long stays abroad and by the astonishing number of exhibitions he held throughout Europe,’ writes Francesco Roesler Franz. And in his words there is no exaggeration, there is no sweetening that this family bond might impose. With Ettore Roesler Franz we discover the importance of symbolism and we are about to be reborn to new life, thanks to the messages hidden in his works.

And if the artist is so great, the writer, his biological successor, is no less so and gives us, with his words, an equally important and profound testimony.

As well as being a striking example of an exhaustive critical analysis of a man and a subject that are by no means easy, Esoteric Rome is also a propaedeutic project, leading us to an intimate personal confession and to the understanding that without art our world would be much less special.

Seeing Ettore Roesler Franz’s works together, and reading his analysis of them, is an unexpected exercise for both heart and mind, an adventure that we can experience at home and that changes us completely.

Once we have finished reading , we will no longer be able to look at a painting with the same eyes: all our senses will be alert and our attention will be stimulated as never before. We will understand that each work opens the door to complex narratives and that the eyes of an artist are endowed with a poetry that we should never underestimate.

Esoteric preface

by Luca Rocconi

Writing a preface is an arduous task, tantamount to a declaration of the intentions of the text that follows it, presenting readers with the origins of literary creation, the methods and goals set by the author, all in a few clear, light and unambiguous lines. This preface (from the Latin praefatio ‘to preface, to say before’) is not written by the author but is written by a third person, who has been asked for an esoteric preface, given the nature and content of the pages that follow. Out of my love for esotericism, therefore, I will briefly explain the meaning of this term: it derives from the Greek language, from ἐσώτερος (esóteros, inner), and represents the ability to go beyond outward appearances, to access the core of inner truth. The main task of the esotericist is to ask the why of things and not to stop at the who, how, when and where. The spiritual disciplines, Kabbalah, alchemy, hermeticism, magic and astrolog y, are esoteric, and these disciplines are examined in the book by my good friend Francesco Roesler Franz. Writing an esoteric preface is indeed a difficult task, but to be able to present the characteristics of this work to the readers through this brief ‘inner premise’ is also a great honour.

In reading this book, one learns that the series of 120 images of Roma Sparita painted by Ettore Roesler Franz, owned by the City of Rome, conceals a profound esoteric meaning , where the many threads hidden in these splendid paintings intertwine, forming the fabric of this essay, the plots of which I do not pretend to summarise in this foreword, and even less do I wish to deprive the reader of the pleasure of reading , a pleasure that will be expressed to the fullest when one comes to the conclusions.

Luca Rocconi di Roma Esoterica

Introduction

The link between art and the dimension that we arbitrarily define as esoteric has a very ancient origin, to the point that, for many scholars, it can already be found in the numerous cave paintings of prehistoric times. This link has never lost its consistency, giving rise to many theses, finding their greatest affirmation during the Renaissance. In Giorgione’s or Bosch’s paintings, as in many other works by artists of all times, scholars have grasped a whole series of singular esoteric references.

The iconographical investigation carried out by Erwin Panofsky (who took up the theses of Cesare Ripa, author of An Iconolog y (1593), which indicated the way to consider art as ‘reasoning through images’), has focused on the esoteric, magical value of art. Indeed, as a method of historical interpretation, capable of going beyond the purely descriptive and classificatory aspects of analysis, iconography is the most suitable tool for looking beyond appearance, beyond the representation itself.

This type of reading is affirmed on two grounds: firstly, the atavistic connection between the artist and the universe of mystery and the supernatural, and secondly, the use of esoteric culture in the approach to the pictorial tradition.

The role of the esoteric artist depends above all on the environment in which he lives and which, in fact, in many respects, recognises his extraordinary qualities in his behaviour and his place in society.

On the strength of its inherent symbolism, art once again proves to be the able proxy of mythical thought, both as a locus for the exhibition of the symbol, as in the figurative arts, and as a place where poetical thought draws out the duplicity of reality in the unfolding of the narrative.

For psychoanalysis, artistic activity is a sign of inner unease (just like recourse to magic and magical thinking , according to rationalist criticism). This is how Sigmund Freud defined, in his essay The Poet and the Imagination, the motivations for the creative quest: dissatisfaction directed towards seeking in an ‘other’ space a possible place, in which appearances and inalienable certainties can be questioned and, if necessary, reconstructed.

‘We can assume that happy people never fantasise, only the dissatisfied do. The driving forces of fantasies are unsatisfied desires, and every single fantasy is a wish-fulfilment, a correction of unsatisfactory reality.’

Probably, as Proust argued, ‘without a nervous illness one is not a great artist.’ And it is perhaps because of this status that ‘by art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe, which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon’ (from Il tempo ritrovato).

The question was further focused on by C. G. Jung in his essay Psycholog y and Poetry, in 1930, in which he made it clear that ‘Within the work of art, vision represents an experience deeper and stronger than human passion... In feeling we experience what is known, but intuition leads us towards the unknown and the hidden, towards things which are occult by nature; which, even if they have been known, have been intentionally disguised and made mysterious, and therefore from the earliest times have been considered enigmatic, disturbing and deceptive’.

Jung later came to an important conclusion, which is still relevant today, even from the point of view of assessing the complex relationship between art and magic.

‘The mystery of creativity, like that of free will, is a transcendental problem that psycholog y cannot solve, but only describe. The creative personality is also an enigma whose solution will be sought in many ways, but always in vain.’ Just like magic.

In fact, from Freud’s psychoanalytical perspective, ‘art, which certainly did not begin as art for art’s sake, is originally at the service of tendencies that have largely disappeared today. It is fair to say that many of these are magical intentions.’ And like magic, Georges Braque stated, ‘art is made to disturb, science to reassure.’

The esoteric nature of art is expressed through the language of symbols, making use of signs organised according to a pattern that is never chaotic, but is perceivable on levels that can be penetrated depending on the tools possessed by the observer.

Important artists, most of whom can be traced back to those who adhered to the Rosicrucians, have produced paintings rich in esoteric meanings, which can be read not only for what they show clearly and obviously to the layman, but also for the hidden messages they contain. In essence, it is a matter of trying to make encrypted messages obvious.

Paintings that do not belong

to the ‘Roma Sparita’

We begin by examining in esoteric terms some paintings by Ettore Roesler Franz that are not part of the Roma Sparita series, owned by the City of Rome, but belong to private collections.

The sacred wood of the nymph Egeria

Empress Maria Feodorovna, widow of Tsar Alexander III and mother of Tsar

Nicholas II, bought, at an exhibition by my great-uncle Ettore in St Petersburg in 1898, a watercolour entitled ‘The Sacred Wood of the Nymph Egeria on the Via Appia Antica on a Sunny Summer’s Day’. Professor Antimo Palumbo guessed (during a presentation of the fictional biography on the life of Ettore Roesler Franz written by me, held in Rome in October 2018 at the headquarters of the Carabinieri’s Environmental Protection Section) that it was painted using the Golden Section and the numbers of the Pisan mathematician Leonardo Pisano, known as Fibonacci (1170 - 1240). In antiquity, both Eg yptian and Greek architects used the Golden Section to build the pyramids and the Parthenon.

Sacred Wood of the Nymph Egeria on the Via Appia Antica on a Sunny Summer’s Day

With the fall of the Roman Empire this knowledge was no longer used and then, thanks to Fibonacci, there was a rediscovery, as he also realised that the golden section is connected with the series of its numbers. Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar and a great mathematician, wrote a treatise, De divina proportione; three copies were made by amanuensis in 1497 and then a version was printed in Venice in 1509, illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci, during the period when they both resided in Venice at the court of the doge Vendramin.

There is another version of the sacred wood entitled ‘The Sacred Wood of the Nymph Egeria on the Appian