{"id":15273,"date":"2025-05-21T11:49:43","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T09:49:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/?post_type=magazine&#038;p=15273"},"modified":"2025-05-21T11:49:43","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T09:49:43","slug":"shadows-book-lauretta-colonnelli","status":"publish","type":"magazine","link":"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/shadows-book-lauretta-colonnelli\/","title":{"rendered":"The secret life of shadows: the new book by Lauretta Colonnelli"},"content":{"rendered":"Shadows are sisters of light.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nThey travel on the surface of the Earth attached to the feet of men, animals, plants, houses, mountains. Even a grain of sand has a shadow, however imperceptible.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nShadows travel around motionless bodies, or crouch beneath them, following the path of the Sun, or that of the Moon across the sky.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nShadows cast by artificial light remain still. The shadow of a tree next to a street lamp will not move all night. But a man walking down the street will be followed by his shadow when he approaches the street lamp, and will see it stretch out in front of him when he moves away from it.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nUnder a sky covered by a blanket of clouds, or on moonless nights, or in the midst of the thickest fog, or in the heart of caves, or in a room without windows, individual shadows are no longer seen, swallowed up by the great shadow in which they are immersed. Everything is shadow where there is no light. Shadow becomes synonymous with obscuration, darkness, gloom, dimness, night, black, stain.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nThe depths of the sea are made of shadow.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nThe universe was born from an immeasurable darkness, and astronomers say that all the stars gathered together in the galaxies can illuminate only five percent of it. The rest is made up of dark matter, and pervaded by a hypothetical dark energy, theorized to justify the accelerated expansion of the universe itself. Both have been defined as dark for two reasons: firstly, because they are invisible at any wavelength, they do not emit light, they do not absorb it or reflect it, therefore they are not detectable with telescopes or satellites; secondly, because we don\u2019t know anything about their nature, which remains obscure, unknown.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nThen there are shadows juxtaposed with the real world. In many belief systems, a person\u2019s shadow is the only part that survives when life is extinguished. Since the time of Homer, poets have told of living beings who cross the threshold of the afterlife to embrace the shadows of their loved ones. These shadows have faded features, they speak, they predict the future, they recall the events of their earthly existence, but they are elusive.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nLiterature of every time period, as well as dreams and myths and fantasies, is populated by shadows in the guise of ghosts, larvae, spirits, souls, simulacra, appearances, illusions, deceptions.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nContrasted with light, shadow becomes the negative symbol of it. And both are narrated as the extreme poles of a single thought: good and evil, God and the devil, beauty and ugliness, form and formlessness, the sublime and the abyss, joy and sadness, health and infirmity, knowledge and ignorance.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nAnd yet, without shadows, man would not have arrived at true knowledge, as taught by scientists, philosophers, artists, who together with poets have tried to explore all aspects of shadow.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nThanks to shadow, astronomers began to measure time and infinite interstellar spaces, botanists to discover the age of ancient trees, geologists to trace primitive forms of life in the bowels of the Earth, explorers to plumb the depths of the sea in search of unknown creatures, psychologists to investigate the shadows nestled in the dark depths of our mind, artists to create the plasticity of figures.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nIn this book I wanted to explore why shadows are disturbing but also alluring, how they can change colour from black, how they entered theatres, how from magic lanterns they reached the movie screen, how Galileo was the first to see spots on the Sun and the Moon, how Joseph Conrad and Arthur Conan Doyle crossed the line into darkness.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nI wanted to recall lots of little stories: of Peter Pan who lost his shadow and of Peter Schlemihl who sold it for a bag full of gold coins; of Jung who saw in a dream the kingdom of light as a gigantic shadow; painters who have recreated haunted shadows and miraculous shadows; ancient Babylonians who discovered the secret of eclipses.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nAnd stories that reveal how the search for shadows can become an obsession. The \u201cmole men\u201d who have been digging tunnels underground since ancient times know a thing or two about that.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\n<strong>Lauretta Colonnelli<\/strong><br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nTranslation of the text taken from the book <em>La vita segreta delle ombre. <\/em><em>Storie di luce, arte, silenzio e altri misteri<\/em>, Marsilio Editori, Venice 2025","protected":false},"featured_media":15271,"template":"","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categorie_magazine":[343],"class_list":["post-15273","magazine","type-magazine","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","categorie_magazine-words-from-marte"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The secret life of shadows: the new book by Lauretta Colonnelli - Marsilio Arte<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"After having told the secret life of colors, Lauretta Colonnelli explores an equally fascinating territory, that of shadows\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/shadows-book-lauretta-colonnelli\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The secret life of shadows: the new book by Lauretta Colonnelli\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"After having told the secret life of colors, Lauretta Colonnelli explores an equally fascinating territory, that of shadows\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/shadows-book-lauretta-colonnelli\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Marsilio Arte\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/MarsilioArte\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Lauretta-Colonnelli.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2362\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1575\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@MarsilioArte\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/shadows-book-lauretta-colonnelli\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.marsilioarte.it\/en\/magazine\/shadows-book-lauretta-colonnelli\/\",\"name\":\"The secret life of shadows: the new book by Lauretta Colonnelli - 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