Pinocchio, a pop icon?

Matteo Fochessati

Pinocchio, a pop icon? Not only because of the significant presence of Carlo Collodi’s hero in the works of various artists who have embraced this trend, but also due to the boundless and unceasing dissemination of his image across multiple expressive forms. Indeed, Pinocchio has continued to captivate us with his magical — and yet so terribly realistic — adventures. We find him in the illustrations of the hundreds of editions dedicated to his famous story, translated into every language; he has been immortalized in countless types of puppets and continues to be represented in the works of artists of all kinds and from every background. He has also appeared in the flesh (and in wood) in various cinematic and television adaptations, or in the animated drawings of Walt Disney’s famous 1940 feature film.

In 1952, he was consecrated by the environmental park of Collodi which — a forerunner of many similar parks later dedicated worldwide to comic book and children’s literature heroes — was realized with the artistic and design collaboration of sculptors Emilio Greco and Pietro Consagra, and architects Piero Porcinai, Marco Zanuso, and Giovanni Michelucci. In Jesolo, an entire sand sculpture exhibition was even dedicated to him — proof that fame does not necessarily require eternal monuments.

Pinocchio has, in any case, far exceeded the famous fifteen minutes of fame that, in Andy Warhol’s pop imagination, were supposed to be allotted to each of us. The universal fame of the “burattino senza fili” (the puppet without strings) — also the title of a celebrated album by Edoardo Bennato in the 1970s — automatically makes him a hero of the collective imagination, on par with Warhol’s Marilyns and Maos.

It is no coincidence that his famous image — that long nose which has become the distinctive and symbolic mark of the character — was revived precisely by pop artists such as the American Jim Dine and the Piedmontese Ugo Nespolo. For Dine, Pinocchio was not merely a subject within the varied universe of pop culture: this hybrid character — victim of astonishing genetic mutations (like the growth of donkey ears) — became for him a true obsession, embodying the alchemical value of making art itself.

Nespolo, on the other hand, interpreted the popular story of the wooden puppet as an iconographic model of our collective imagination, reworking it through an ironic and festive reinterpretation inspired by the vivid colors of Fortunato Depero’s works and his artistic world populated by marionettes and animated, mechanically shaped figures.

Indeed, a portrait of Pinocchio appears among the many puppets produced in the atelier of the Trentino futurist, that pyrotechnic creative workshop known to history as the Casa del Mago (“House of the Magician”).

Like all icons of our time, our character thus reveals a multifaceted adaptability to every circumstance and setting. Hence, the whimsical, fairy-tale wooden puppet of Lele Luzzati — echoing the theatrical enchantments of Gozzi — can, as happens in this exhibition, converse with the dark atmospheres of Flavio Costantini’s Pinocchio-Frankenstein, once again confirming that if everyone has their own Pinocchio, then Pinocchio truly belongs to everyone.

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