Water and land, where the world ends. Ghirri, Celati, Ariosto, the Columns and the Embankment

The article aims at offering a new interpretation of some photographs of Luigi Ghirri’s Il profilo delle nuvole. Once separated from the linear sequence in which they are arranged in the book and recomposed in a panel inspired by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, these images reveal a hidden genealogy that, taking into account both Luigi Ghirri’s suggestions and readings of his work by Marco Belpoliti and Gianni Celati, traces the figure of the columns back to 15th- and 16th-century motifs, in particular to the columns of Hercules in the Age of Discovery. It is then possible to create a connection between Il profilo delle nuvole and a text which is apparently distant from it, namely Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a poem that just like Ghirri’s photo-text feature two crucial elements of landscape in the Po Valley such as the columns and the embankment. By establishing what Carlo Ginzburg would call an intentionally anachronistic and asymmetric dialogue between these texts, a new hypothesis is made about Luigi Ghirri’s understanding of the relationship between the columns and the embankments, a relationship that is entrusted with the task of showing that it is possible to take care of reality by taking care of its representation.