I.
(1) Giorgio Vasari. Las vidas de los más excelentes arquitectos, pintores y escultores italianos desde Cimabue a nuestros tiempos. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. p. 105. (2) Op. cit., p. 116. (3) Dani Marco. “Entrevista a Paco Pomet”, in La palanca de cambio nº 18, December 2009, digital fanzine at: <http://www. palancadecambio.org/2009.htm>. Last viewed: 19-09-2011.
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Giotto’s glasses
One of the commonplaces of old artistic historiography was to place the artist under the sign of precocious talent from childhood. Speaking of Cimabue, Vasari tells us that “as he grew, not just his father, but everyone else recognized his acute genius,” so that “his father decided to direct him to the study of literature, (…) but Cimabue (…) spent all day painting men, horses, buildings and other fanciful figures in books or on loose sheets, driven by his own nature that seemed to cause him pain if not exercised.”1 Of Giotto, Cimabue’s disciple, he tells us that “in all his still childish acts he displayed an extraordinarily vivid, aware intelligence despite his youth” and that “he had an innate inclination for drawing, which often led him to depict for pleasure natural or imaginary figures on stones, earth or sand.”2 When asked about his beginnings in painting, Paco Pomet told his interviewer a story that is both a re-reading and a curious deviation from Vasari’s topos: Although it may sound like a commonplace for a painter or draughtsman, I began to draw like mad when I was very small. I was a shy, homeloving child, perhaps a little introverted, and I spent hours looking at everything. My parents like to say I’ve always been very observant and
since I was very tiny I looked at everything very attentively, but the truth is really that I couldn’t see very well and I had to get glasses when I was five years old, when they realised that I had great difficulty reading. So it wasn’t that I was very observant, but that I used to stare a lot and open my eyes wide just to distinguish things. When they finally got me glasses I suddenly discovered the world was made in high definition, that what I had been seeing before was “low”, and I discovered textures, clean edges, dust, little reflections, I became fascinated with the act of looking, of being able to distinguish infinite details that I hadn’t been able to see before, and I was trapped forever by the amazing variety of the visible. This rediscovery of things then lead me to enjoy recreating them on white sheets of paper, likewise fascinated by the details appearing from the point of a pencil or a ballpoint.3 Vasari did not merely coin a commonplace in artistic literature; he sought to re-establish the myth of Painting, that strange discipline that, after innumerable, clumsy last rites, also persists in the work of the painter concerning us here. The comic touch to Pomet’s story is an accurate foretaste of what is to be found in his canvases, but more particularly this little text contains a substantial metaphor about the