Vedere volti: Il gigante nella montagna

Michelangelo conceived the plan to turn a whole marble mountain in the Apuan Alps into the sculpture of a giant, guiding the sailors toward the ports of Tuscany. His never accomplished project was inspired by that of Dinocrates, the Macedonian sculptor, architect, and urbanist that proposed Alexander the Great to turn the entire Mount Athos into the Emperor’s e*gy, holding a whole city in his right hand. This project too did not come about, but inspired a rich iconography, in which the topos of the mountain turned into a gigantic sculpture was used to extol popes (Pietro da Cortona with Alexander VII), the State (Abraham Bosse with Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan), or the Republic (Pierre–Henri de Valenciennes). Another trend also developed, projecting these gigantic accomplishments into the exotic landscapes of ancient Middle East (the Garden of Queen Semiramis) and modern Far East (the mountains of Sichuan). This entire tradition, then, surprisingly resurfaced in the +,th century, with Gutzon Borglum’s project to sculpt the Memorial Monument of Mount Rushmore. The present essay interprets all these texts through the lenses of cultural semiotics, detecting a millenarian dialectics between two opposite ideologies of the political use of nature and space: on the one hand, a rhetoric of grandeur and domination; on the other hand, one of proportion and fairness.