The building, now (1981) undergoing renovation, that once housed Turin’s great hospital, the Ospedale Maggiore di San Giovanni Battista, is not a cheerful place. Its ancient walls and soaring vaults seem to be steeped in generations of suffering; busts of its benefactors, which line the stairways, look down on the visitor with the unseeing gaze of mummies. But when you reach the crociera, or cross vault, where the two central halls meet, and the exhibition of butterflies assembled there by the Museo Regionale di Storia Naturale (Turin Museum of Natural History), your heart swells, and you feel that you have regressed to the fleeting but giddy condition of a student on a field trip. As from any well-designed exhibition, or, indeed, from the consumption of any spiritual nourishment, you emerge well fed and, at the same time, hungrier than before.
If we were to imagine a zoologist who knew all about birds and mammals but nothing about insects, and we were to tell him that there are hundreds of thousands of animal species, of great diversity, that have devised a method of building themselves a shell using a unique derivative of glucose and ammonia; that when these little animals have grown to the point that they “no longer fit in their skin,” or rather, in their unexpandable shell, they discard it and grow another, larger one; that, in the course of their brief lifetimes, they transform themselves, taking on shapes that differ as radically as does a hare from a pike; that they run, fly, leap, and swim, and have managed to adapt themselves to practically every environment on Earth; that with brains weighing no more than a fraction of a milligram they have succeeded in amassing the skills of the weaver, the potter, the miner, the murderer with his poisons, the trapper, and the wet nurse; that they are able to live on any organic substance, living or dead, including those synthesized by humans; and that some of them live in exceedingly complex societies, and engage in such practices as the preservation of foods, birth control, slavery, alliances, wars, agriculture, and breeding livestock—well, this unlikely zoologist would refuse to believe it. He would tell us that this insect-model of animal is something straight out of science fiction, but that if such a thing really existed it would be a terrible rival to man, and in the long run would certainly vanquish him.
In the insect world, butterflies enjoy a privileged status: anyone who goes to an exhibition of butterflies will understand that a comparable show devoted to such orders as the Diptera or the Hymenoptera, even one of equal scientific importance, would be less popular. Why? Because butterflies are beautiful, but that’s not the only reason.
Why are butterflies beautiful? Certainly not, as Darwin’s adversaries insisted, to give pleasure to humans: butterflies existed at least a hundred million years before the first human being. I believe that our very concept of beauty, which is necessarily relative and cultural, has been modeled over the centuries on butterflies, as well as on stars, mountains, and the sea. Proof of this can be had by examining a butterfly’s head under the microscope: for most observers, admiration gives way to horror and disgust. In the absence of cultural habit, we are disconcerted by this new object; the enormous eyes without pupils, the hornlike antennae, the monstrous buccal apparatus all appear to us as a diabolical mask, a twisted parody of the human face.
In our civilization (but not in all civilizations) bright colors and symmetry are considered “beautiful,” and so butterflies are pretty. Now, a butterfly is a veritable factory of colors: it transforms both the food it consumes and the wastes it excretes into dazzling pigments. What’s more, it is able to obtain its magnificent metallic and iridescent effects by purely physical means, exploiting nothing more than the interference effects we see in soap bubbles and in the oily films that float on the surface of water.
But the fascination of butterflies is not merely a product of color and symmetry: deeper factors contribute as well. We wouldn’t find them so beautiful if they weren’t able to fly, or if they flew as straight and alertly as bees, or if they could sting, or, especially, if they didn’t pass through the unsettling mystery of metamorphosis. This latter phenomenon takes on, to our eyes, the value of a poorly deciphered message, a symbol, and a sign. It’s no surprise that a poet like Guido Gozzano (“friend to the chrysalises”) should have studied and loved butterflies so passionately: if anything, it’s surprising that so few poets have loved them, since the transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis, and from chrysalis to butterfly, casts a long and admonitory shadow.
Just as butterflies are beautiful by definition, and serve as our standard of beauty, similarly caterpillars (“entòmata in difetto,” Dante called them, “like . . . unto insects undeveloped”) are ugly by definition: awkward, slow, stinging, voracious, hairy, dim-witted, they are in their turn symbolic, the symbol of the crude and the unfinished, of perfection unattained.
The two documentaries that accompany the show reveal to us, with the powerful eye of the motion picture camera, something that very few human eyes have ever had a chance to see: the caterpillar suspended in its lofty, temporary grave, the cocoon, transforming itself into an inert chrysalis, and then emerging into the light in the perfect form of the butterfly; the wings are still unusable, weak, like crumpled tissue paper, but in a few moments they strengthen and extend, and the newborn insect takes flight. It’s a second birth, but at the same time it is a death: the creature that flew away is a psyche, a soul, and the torn cocoon that remains on the ground is the mortal remains. In the deeper layers of our consciousness, the butterfly with its agitated flight is a simple soul, a fairy, sometimes even a witch.
The strange name that the butterfly has in English harks back to an ancient northern belief that a butterfly is a sprite that steals butter and milk, or turns them sour; and Acherontia atropos, the large Mediterranean moth with the death’s-head pattern on the thorax, which Gozzano encountered in the villa of Signorina Felicita,1 is a damned soul, “which brings sorrow.” The wings that popular iconography attributes to fairies are not feathered bird wings but the translucent, ribbed wings of a butterfly.
The furtive visit of a butterfly, which Hermann Hesse describes on the last page of his diary, is an ambivalent annunciation, with the flavor of a serene foreshadowing of death. The aged thinker and author, in his Ticinese retreat, sees “something dark, silent, and ghostly” take flight: it is a rare butterfly, a brown-and-violet-winged Nymphalis antiopa, and it lands on his hand. “Slowly, like someone breathing easy, the beauty opened and shut its velvet wings, clinging to the back of my hand with its six fine legs; after a brief instant it vanished, before I even noticed its departure, in the great hot light.”
1. A reference to the poem “La signorina Felicita ovvero la felicità,” by Guido Gozzano (1883–1916).