Vittorio Macchioro

Life and works

He was born into a Jewish family of Sephardic origin. He became an archaeologist and scholar of the ancient world. Macchioro’s life and intellectual career can be divided into three periods. After graduating in Bologna in ancient history in 1904 until the First World War, he devoted his intellectual activity to archaeology, working as an inspector at the superintendency of archaeological museums. At the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, he tackled the problem of classifying an enormous quantity of ceramics from the necropolises of Magna Graecia, reconstructing the provenance of the various pieces and identifying, through stylistic analysis, the different factories where they were produced. After enlisting as a volunteer in 1915, he was sent to the front in 1916. Missing, he narrowly escaped death by exposure. This experience produced a radical transformation in the way of living and conceiving studies on the ancient world; This is a true conversion that finds its fulfillment in the masterpiece: Zagreus. Studies on Orphism (1920). The work begins with the exegesis of the frescoes in the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii, interpreted as the representation of an Orphic liturgy. The war coincides with the end and the beginning of the second period of studies oriented towards the history of religions, and in particular towards Orphism and Pauline theology. We recall from this phase: the first edition of Zagreus (1920); Heraclitus. New Studies on Orphism (1922); Orphism and Paulinism (1922); The Orphic Origin of Pauline Christology (1923).

Having approached Protestantism in the early 1920s, he devoted himself to writing texts on religious subjects: The Gospel (1922); General Theory of Religion as Experience (1922); Luther (1924), in adherence to Protestantism. These were years of intense work, marked by existential and intellectual restlessness that brought Macchioro to the heart of the most disparate cultural and religious contexts possible, in an attempt to respond to those inner needs that tormented him and that never found peace throughout his life. Proof of this are his numerous conversions: from Judaism to Catholicism, to Protestantism and, finally, the return to Catholicism. Theoretical and practical elements converged within a research method and a lifestyle that were increasingly merging, and that would end up leaving a profound mark on all scientific production from the end of the Great War onwards. For these characteristics of method and sensitivity, as well as for the type of exegesis and contents expressed, intellectuals of the calibre of M. Eliade, A. Warburg, E. De Martino (who became his son-in-law) were fascinated by him and borrowed his inspiration. With the second edition of Zagreus (1930) the phase of Macchioro as a scholar of the ancient world ends.

The enormous amount of writings from this period and their hermeneutic originality earned him international recognition. In 1929 he held a series of conferences in Berlin, Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Prague, Vienna, Graz; in the same year he was called to Columbia University in New York to inaugurate a series of lectures on the history of religions. Back in Naples, in December 1933, he was sent by the Italian government to India as a visiting professor, an occasion that allowed Macchioro to hold a series of conferences focused on Orphism and Greek religion, in various cities: Benares, Delhi, Calcutta, and at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). In 1936 he was transferred to Trieste, to the superintendence of Venezia Giulia, where he directed the excavation of the Roman theater of Trieste and the area of ​​the forum of Zuglio. In 1938, with the entry into force of the racial laws, Macchioro was forced to retire. From this moment on, he abandoned all scientific activity to dedicate himself exclusively to literary, hagiographic and journalistic production. In this third and final phase, he signed with the pseudonym Benedetto Gioia, a counterpoint to Benedetto Croce, the novels of autobiographical inspiration: Il gioco di Satana (1938) and La grande luce (1939). He was interned in a concentration camp during the war, and later reinstated in service and assigned to the archaeological superintendency of Rome (1946).

 

Philosophical-religious thought

Macchioro is among the first Italian archaeologists to historically evaluate the Italiot vase production. His classification was intended to correct the then consolidated one by G. Patroni. Let us recall the main contributions: For the chronology of Canosa vases (1910); For the history of Italiot ceramography (1910); Symbolism in Roman sepulchral figurations. Studies in hermeneutics [1911]. In questions of method (1910) Macchioro poses a critical reflection towards the evolutionary approach of the history of art and towards an investigation of an exclusively aesthetic-formal nature. An approach that leaves the “minor” schools in the shade and excludes any type of consideration that goes beyond the purely formal nature of the object (ceramic or painting) in question. With this reflection, Macchioro anticipates, on the one hand, the lesson of the great Austrian scholar A. Riegl, and his fundamental work: La fabbrica nell’impero romano (1927), on the other, the research of K. Kerényi for whom textual philology and iconography designate a common research horizon. Already in this first phase of work, an experimental and innovative method emerges compared to the disciplines and methods in use at the time. Although, therefore, Macchioro’s training unfolds on a positivist line and the approach and method follow the Wilamowitzian direction, we cannot fail to notice elements of rupture with this tradition. Macchioro’s research will increasingly align itself with the most radical philosophical demands of the field of Phenomenology, as amply demonstrated by the second and expanded edition of: Zagreus: new studies around Orfism (1929). Macchioro’s philosophical-religious research proceeds on the hermeneutic path traced by E. Rohde’s Psyche (1898). This is manifested, above all, in the scholar’s attitude to face the questions of the ancient world not only in historical and historicist terms, but according to the particular possibility of developing a real philosophical-anthropological critique on the present meaning of existence. This critique finds its power and its actualization in the openness to the complexity of the current cultural situation, thanks to the integration and study of practices of knowledge external but complementary to antiquity; listening and using, for example, anthropology, psychoanalysis and ethno-musicology in dialogue with archaeology, numismatics and philology.

This method allows to produce, on the one hand, a synthesis of a phenomenological-existential type (this is the essential difference with the School of Pettazzoni and with the cultural orientation of Croce); on the other hand, the even more radical attempt to assume the inactuality of phenomena – such as Orphic-Dionysian practices – for a critique and transformation of the cultural institutions present in contemporary daily life. The distinctive sign of Macchioro’s hermeneutic practice is, therefore, marked by this montage technique, which not only connects different practices and knowledge, but which allows to evoke – phenomenologically – the event of the phenomenon investigated making its eidetic-essential intuition possible. For these main reasons, Macchioro can be considered an original interpreter of Orphism, as well as of Pauline theology. Macchioro does not fail to notice, in fact, the legacy of Orphic-Dionysian cultuality in Paul, as his essay Orphism and Paulinism clearly shows, in which he reveals and articulates the magical, concrete dimension of Christian liturgy, without a solution of continuity with the Eleusinian one. The identity between Dionysus and Christ – between the Orphic-Dionysian mystery and that of Pauline Christianity – is to be traced, therefore, in cultic action as a real possibility, and not only spiritual, of redemption and palingenesis. This type of reading allows Macchioro to express a content that has remained at the bottom of Christian culture. It allows us to recover the mystical basis present in Pauline Christianity, which Macchioro defines with the term “realistic”, to be contrasted with the dominant “spiritual” conception, typical of the evolution of post-Pauline theology; that is, of an increasingly intellectual and metaphysical vision of religion. This “spiritualization” would be the cause, according to Macchioro, of a process of sterilization and alienation. dell’esperienza e della presenza del divino nella vita, a favore di una concezione dell’esistenza sempre più rappresentativa: lontana dal potere miracoloso e magico della realtà, di cui l’esperienza cristiana sarebbe stata, in origine, la traduzione
perfetta della dimensione dionisiaca, tipica del mondo greco. Tale interpretazione dell’orfismo, così come del cristianesimo, non trovarono quasi mai unanimi consensi neppure tra gli storici delle religioni francesi, sebbene l’importanza della sua opera sia emersa nella ricerca scientifica più recente (v. M. Detienne, Les chemins de la déviance: orphisme, dionysisme et pythagorisme, in: Orfismo in Magna Grecia. Atti del XIV Convegno sulla Magna Grecia (1974).

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THE MACCHIORO FAMILY Trieste – August 15, 1924

Golden wedding of grandfather Davide and grandmother Noemi. Caia is the second of the “little ones”, on the left with braids …

STANDING: Giorgio Finzi, Luigia Macchioro in Schwarz, Mario Finzi, Bice Macchioro in Finzi, Ferruccio Macchioro, Guido Macchioro, Lidia Schwarz, Vittorio Macchioro.

IN THE SECOND ROW: Emmy Baeusch in Macchioro, Rosita Parra in Macchioro, Noemi Lenghi in Macchioro, Davide Macchioro (born 1844), Aurelia Stadler in Macchioro with Paolo, Silvia Schwarz.

IN THE FRONT ROW Anna Macchioro, Clara Finzi, Aurelio Macchioro, Rita Macchioro.