Riccardo

Riccardo is a gallery regular and painter whose successive changes in style culminate in the mystical exhibition Megale Apophasis. In the story, he is introduced through other people’s responses: Lorenza praises him, while Jacopo Belbo recognizes him as the man with whom he had once lacked the courage to fight. His paintings’ shifting forms and occult vocabulary make him a small but telling figure in the novel’s world of aesthetic fashion, personal rivalry, and proliferating correspondences.

Identity and Introduction

Riccardo is identified as a man with a scar who frequents Pilade’s Bar and exhibits his work in galleries. The narrator first sees him at a restaurant, where he is seated beside Belbo. Belbo does not challenge him; instead, he remains at the table while Riccardo looks him over as though Belbo were the intruder. The narrator understands the encounter as a provocation staged for Belbo, whose part seems already assigned: either to fight or to make a show of not fighting. Belbo chooses a drawing-room performance, joining the conversation amiably, but the narrator notes that the only person impressed by his self-control is Belbo himself.

Riccardo’s presence is later clarified through the narrator’s recollection of an earlier evening. When Riccardo’s exhibition is announced, Lorenza tells Belbo that he knows the artist. Belbo looks up at the ceiling and orders another martini. The narrator, who has since read the files, recognizes Riccardo as the scarred man from the restaurant and understands Belbo’s earlier reaction as the residue of that encounter. Riccardo’s importance in this scene is less a matter of direct action than of the pressure his presence exerts on Belbo.

Artistic Development

The narrator traces Riccardo’s work through several distinct phases. In the early 1960s, Riccardo painted small, geometrical canvases in black and gray, with titles such as Composition 15, Parallax 17, and Euclid X. The narrator found this work tedious and associated its optical effects with a kind of visual disorientation.

In 1968, Riccardo began exhibiting in squats and changed both palette and manner. He abandoned gray for stark black-and-white contrasts, made his brushstrokes bolder, and adopted politically charged titles including Ce n’est qu’un debut, Molotov, and A Hundred Flowers. By the time the narrator returned to Milan, another shift had taken place. Riccardo was working in white alone, using the texture and relief of paint on porous Fabriano paper to make figures appear differently under different lighting. The titles—In Praise of Ambiguity, A/Travers, fa, Berggasse, and Denegation 15—signaled a new interest in ambiguity and interpretation.

At the exhibition described in the main scene, titled Megale Apophasis, Riccardo has turned to figurative painting and a vivid palette. The narrator suspects that the compositions begin with projected images of famous paintings, although he presents this as his own inference rather than a confirmed account of Riccardo’s technique. Riccardo overlays these images with pointillist gradations, moving across the spectrum between a brilliant center and absolute black, in either direction according to the mystical or cosmological idea he means to express.

Megale Apophasis and Its Imagery

The paintings at Megale Apophasis combine recognizable artistic references with esoteric subjects. The narrator describes mountains sending out rays that break into pale spheres, and concentric skies containing hints of transparent-winged angels. The titles include Beatrix, Mystica Rosa, Dante Gabriels 33, Fedeli d’Amore, Atanor, and Homunculus 666. Their cluster of mystical and alchemical terms connects Riccardo’s exhibition to motifs that already circulate among the characters; the narrator specifically associates the show’s homunculus imagery with Lorenza’s passion for homunculi.

The largest painting, Sophia, depicts black angels fading as they descend and forming a white creature, which great livid hands caress. The creature echoes the figure held against the sky in Picasso’s Guernica. The narrator considers the juxtaposition dubious and the execution crude when viewed close up, yet finds the painting lyrical from two or three meters away. This change with viewing distance parallels the exhibition’s wider investment in shifting appearances and interpretive ambiguity: the work’s effect depends in part on where the viewer stands.

Relationships and Narrative Significance

Riccardo’s connection to Belbo is defined by the earlier restaurant encounter and Belbo’s failure to confront him. At the exhibition, Belbo whispers that he is a realist of the old school and understands only Mondrian, asking what a nongeometric picture can say. His response places Riccardo’s figurative, mystical work opposite the geometric art Belbo trusts, while also revealing Belbo’s discomfort with the scene around it. The contrast is both aesthetic and personal: Riccardo’s presence recalls a confrontation Belbo avoided, and his art occupies a visual language Belbo professes not to understand.

Lorenza, by contrast, arrives as Riccardo’s enthusiastic advocate. She praises him and insists that the others come to the opening, while the narrator observes that Belbo is pained by the prospect of losing the chance for a private conversation with her. Riccardo is thus a point around which other characters’ attractions and rivalries become visible, even though the evidence offers little account of his own motives or character beyond his exhibitions. Across the changing work—from geometric black and gray, through stark political contrasts, to white-on-white ambiguity and finally mystical figuration—his art also mirrors the novel’s movement between modern cultural styles and occult systems of meaning. The paintings do not establish that Riccardo belongs to any secret group; their significance lies in how readily their imagery enters the same network of associations that preoccupies the other characters.