Tra arte e letteratura: Il museo dell’Innocenza di Orhan Pamuk

The essay aims at investigating the borders between visual arts and literature. The premise is found out in several recent novels, where the writers not only create characters working in the art world - artists, collectors, dealers - or describe real art works, but also create original art works, so that the writers themselves become the authors. In particular this essay considers The Museum of Innocence, a novel written by Orhan Pamuk, Turkish novelist and winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. The peculiarity, which is the reason why I choose this example, is the fact that the main character inside the novel builds a sort of museum collecting the objects which belonged to his beloved one; and that Pamuk himself built a real museum with that objects. The Museum of Innocence so becomes a book and an art work (an installation constituted by the whole museum), and is based on a mechanism where facts and fictions become interchangeable.