On some biblical allusions and prototypes in Paolo Volponi’s The font: a contribution to the problem of distinguishing specific traits of his Christian philosophy

Paolo Volponi (1924-1994) was one of the leading Italian postmodernist writers, whose small works were neglected by scholars thus far. Volponi's texts from 60-es to the 80-es had been imbued with Biblical motives. In The Font (1984) we single out and analyze some basic motives of the kind, starting from the title which, in my view, is a reference to Ps. 35 (36), 10 or the parallels. The most important symbolic element in the commencement of the story is the vision by Pietro Lorenzetti of the heavenly realities, like a comet and a new Saint, appearing in the Siena sky, coming hand in hand with a reference in Pietro's speech to the Burning Bush. But the middle and the final parts of the story show up that Pietro's and Ambrogio Lorenzetti's hope for the vision to come true was in vain. Both the brothers die from pestilence, their death being followed by an avarice Ferrarian merchant's attempt to pillage their mansion, the Ferrarian himself being then killed by a goat which took predominance over the mansion and the garden. The goat story, which is full of allusions to our Lord's Passion and which ends up with its torturous death, has been the subject of about a half of the narrative. The image of the goat is ambivalent. It tramples down the snake (cf. Ps 73 (74), 13) when guarding the house and the garden, but at the same time it is traditionally for Medieval and postmodernist culture correlated with the evil spirits. The narration is brought to the end with a description of the fight between crows and sparrows, which seems to be a downplaying projection of the subject matter of Christ's eschatological talk to His disciples about the sheep and the goats (Mt 25, 31-46). In Volponi's short story one can observe a crash of the hero as such, his des-objectivation, having as a consequence a skillfully made allegorical description by the author of das Man's passions.