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A Face in the Crowd
A FACE IN THE CROWD
Gloria FossiAn obsessive leitmotiv running through the five movements of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, culminating in a frenzy of musical madness, represents the love of a man for a woman. This is known as the idée fixe, the fixed idea (lampooned in Asterix as the name of a small and ill-tempered white dog, Idéfix; in English, Dogmatix). Ah, the mystery of influence: Pico Iyer, in an essay by that title, explores various transcultural incarnations of Raymond Chandler’s gumshoe, Philip Marlowe. When tracking artistic emulation, the scholar is also a sleuth, working her way up the Amazon of inspirations for clues. Gloria Fossi gets out her magnifying glass and deerstalker hat and sets off on the trail of Ingres and Matisse, watching Mme. Moitessier shapeshift through modern art. Along the way, the author finds the fingerprints of Pablo Picasso and a Roman muralist, dead now two millennia.
