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TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR....
WHISTLE WHISTLE LITTLE MAN....
| With the first music notes the world grew richer
in meanings and man. Its protagonist, got more involved in life because
he “continued” creation and gave order and image to what surrounded him.
This is the reason whi we can say that the breath that gives life to terracotta
includes the spirit of divinity as it is infused by a “creator”. Whistles
are the ancestors of musical instruments and accompanied man along his
way in Europe as well in Asia and in America in pre-Columbian cultures. |
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Anyone who doesn’t know their origin finds it hard to believe that they
come from a mythical age when the god Pan wandered among human beings that
is whistles are part of that ancestral iconographic “common core” of all
civilisations together with amulets,masks,necklaces and ex votos. Their
origin is rather magical than ludic because they were created not only
to change noise into sound (and then into harmony),
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but first of all to call for rain or a good
harvest. They were also used to treat illnesses: whistling about sick people
stimulated patients to live the heroic days of their ancestors over again
and get the strenght to recover.
Blowing into a shell or imitating the whistlig of the wind , man began
to make whistles but it was very hard work to get earth to sound before
it was cooked that is before it became terracotta. |
As regards their shape man drew inspiration from his surrounding world
and he started to produce rough representations of the animals which supported
him such as the ox or the cock. In particular the latter not only
comforted human beings at dead of night and at dawn when it announced that
the sun would reappear, but also it was a symbol of manliness.
| As time went by, man made representations of
himself, too and, imitating the typologies of great religions which
had always been remote in their magnificense, he invented his own idols.
The coming of established religions lay over that popular pagan rituality
and absorbed a lot of those representations but there was a mutual exchange
because potters themselves began to make saints and redeemers in their
own way. |
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After the damage caused by industrial civilisation, those traditions, which
still have countless stories to tell us, have been recovered: nowadays
a creative current of artists is trying to introduce innovations, even
if according to a tradition handed down from century to century, in the
shape of this object which has so many-sided meanings.
A. N. C.
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