Marino Niola on the Ancient Heart of the Future

Anthropologist Marino Niola (born Naples, 1943) discusses his passion for art, citing Aby Warburg's "The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity" and "The Ritual of the Serpent" as key theoretical references, alongside Heinrich Wölfflin's "Renaissance and Baroque," Eugenio D'Ors's "Baroque," and Lévi-Strauss's "Look, Listen, Read." His favorite artworks are El Greco's "The Burial of the Count of Orgaz" and Velázquez's "Las Meninas," which he describes as an anthropology of painting and a theology of painting respectively. Niola emphasizes the importance of genius loci as the object of anthropological research, understood not as surface identity but as a dark entanglement of roots. He asserts that "the future has an ancient heart or no heart at all," drawing on Tiresias from Eliot's "The Waste Land." For young people, he advises cultivating curiosity and a sense of disorientation, ignoring practical advice from parents and teachers. He believes the sacred remains important if not identified with religion but as a sky of ethical, aesthetic, and poetic values. He identifies three guiding ideas for the future: mass digital literacy, valorization of cultural heritage, and gender equality, arguing that a society with too many women on the sidelines renounces vital creativity. The interview is part of the "Futuro Antico" series by Ludovico Pratesi on Artribune.