The Canvas: Anatomy of a Universal Metaphor

The Primordial Language of Weaving

When human hands began to weave the first threads, more than just a material support was born: one of the most powerful and persistent metaphors in the Western imagination was created. The canvas, even before becoming the privileged field of painting, established itself as a universal symbol of the creative act, the construction of meaning, and the very weaving of existence. The origin of the use of canvas as a pictorial support is lost in antiquity, but its symbolic value is rooted even more deeply in human culture. It's no coincidence that the Latin term textus—from which our word "text" derives—literally means "woven," as Roland Barthes noted in The Pleasure of the Text, revealing an ancestral connection between the art of weaving and that of writing.

The Three Ages of the Metaphor

In the classical tradition, the metaphor of weaving was inextricably linked to destiny. The Fates of Greco-Roman mythology wove the thread of human life, while Penelope, in the Odyssey, wove and unwove her web in a gesture that transcended waiting to become a metaphor for cyclical time and enduring hope. In the Divine Comedy, the origin of the metaphor is clearly explained by Landino: "He speaks by transference, calling life (which she began in religion, but did not finish) a web, from which she did not draw the shuttle... until the end; because the shuttle is that which leads the thread of the weft back and forth until the web is filled." In these verses, a conception of life as an ongoing work emerges, where every human gesture adds a thread to the universal warp. The seventeenth century radically transformed the use of the textile metaphor, inserting it into a poetics of wit and wonder. Metaphor is described as the most ingenious and extraordinary rhetorical figure, capable of connecting ideas and images of distant objects. Emanuele Tesauro, in his Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico, theorized that the more ingenious the metaphor, the greater its poetic value. The Baroque canvas was no longer merely a support for the narrative but a device of wonder, capable of "tying together remote and separate notions." In this view, the artist became a cosmic weaver, capable of creating unprecedented connections between seemingly irreconcilable elements, just as pleasure is born from wonder. The twentieth century definitively revolutionized the metaphor of the canvas through the critical thought of Roland Barthes. Barthes draws an analogy between text and fabric, declaring that a "text is a fabric of citations," drawn from "innumerable points of culture," rather than from an individual experience. This conception shatters the romantic idea of the author as the sole origin of meaning. The text is a multidimensional space, in which different writings oppose each other, none original: the text is a fabric of citations. The modern canvas is no longer the place where a single truth is painted, but the space where infinite voices, infinite interpretive possibilities intertwine.

The Phenomenology of Interweaving

The metaphor of the fabric finds a particular development in the work of Walter Benjamin, who makes it an instrument of historical and critical reflection. Benjamin speaks of "that defined group of threads, which represents the weft of a past in the warp of the present," overturning the traditional conception of history as a linear sequence. For Benjamin, the critic's work is similar to that of a weaver who can recognize "certain threads that have been lost for centuries and which the current course of history suddenly and almost inadvertently takes up again." History thus becomes an immense loom where past and present intertwine in ever-new, ever-to-be-deciphered configurations. The richness of the textile metaphor: the warp consists of longitudinal threads and is stretched longitudinally, while the weft consists of horizontal threads that are interwoven with the warp. This technical structure translates into a true ontology of meaning. The warp represents the stable structure, tradition, consolidated codes; the weft constitutes the dynamic element, innovation, the surprise that traverses and renews tradition. Every work of art, every text, every significant human gesture is born from this dialectical intertwining of conservation and transformation. In contemporary culture, the metaphor of the canvas has found new variations. During the twentieth century, painting became more material and was no longer, as in the past, a two-dimensional mimetic reproduction of reality. Artists like Alberto Burri literally incorporated textile elements into their works, creating works characterized by jute sacks attached to his canvases, where the texture refers not only to that of the spatulated color but also to that of the jute fabric's weave. This evolution reveals how the metaphor of the canvas has been able to adapt to the languages of contemporary art, maintaining its expressive force intact. The texture becomes an autonomous semantic element, capable of conveying meanings that go beyond traditional representation.

The Canvas As Philosophy

The persistence of the textile metaphor through the centuries testifies to its ability to express something fundamental in human experience. As Roland Barthes observed: "Lost in this fabric—this weaving—the subject undoes itself like a spider dissolving itself in the constructive secretions of its web." This evocative image condenses centuries of reflection: the artist who loses himself in his own work, the reader who gets lost in the text, the human being who discovers himself woven into a fabric of relationships that precede and transcend him. The canvas thus becomes a metaphor of belonging and alienation, of creation and dissolution. Beyond its specific applications in art and literature, the metaphor of the canvas configures itself as a true philosophy of existence. It suggests that reality is not given once and for all, but constantly woven and rewoven through the intertwining of gestures, words, glances, interpretations. The canvas thus becomes a metaphor for universal contemporaneity, where past and present intertwine in ever-new configurations.

Three-Dimensional Time: Science Rediscovering the Ancient Metaphor

After centuries of artistic and philosophical elaborations, the metaphor of the canvas has found an unexpected echo in contemporary theoretical physics. A new theory proposed by physicist Gunnar Kletetschka suggests that time, contrary to our daily perception, might not be one-dimensional like a line flowing from past to future, but possess three dimensions, just like the space around us. According to this revolutionary perspective, our physical universe—everything we see, touch, and experience—would actually be a "surface" that emerges from the intertwining of these. It's as if physical reality were the design that appears on a canvas when different temporal threads intertwine according to complex and still mysterious patterns. Kletetschka's theory overturns the traditional conception of physics: if Einstein showed us that space and time are intertwined in a single fabric called space-time, this new vision suggests that time is the true protagonist, a three-dimensional canvas from whose weaving emerges, as a secondary effect, the space we inhabit. What makes this theory fascinating is its ability to be experimentally verified, distinguishing it from previous purely mathematical speculations. Like a weaver who can concretely show the result of his work, Kletetschka has transformed an abstract idea into a testable scientific proposal. Thus, the metaphor that for millennia has nourished the imagination of poets, artists, and philosophers finds an unexpected resonance in the most advanced description of the physical nature of reality. The canvas of art and that of the cosmos perhaps reveal themselves to be different expressions of the same profound intuition: that existence is always the fruit of an intertwining, of a weaving that goes beyond our immediate perception, creating from the multiplicity of threads the unity of experience.

Bibliography

Primary Sources Barthes, Roland The Pleasure of the Text, Einaudi, Turin 1975 The Death of the Author, in The Rustle of Language: Critical Essays IV, Einaudi, Turin 1988 Variations on Writing followed by The Pleasure of the Text, Einaudi, Milan 2020 Benjamin, Walter Eduard Fuchs, Der Sammler und der Historiker, in Complete Works The Storyteller. Reflections on the Work of Leskov, Einaudi, Turin Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Angelus Novus, Einaudi, Turin Tesauro, Emanuele Il cannocchiale aristotelico, Turin 1670

Classical Sources Dante Alighieri Divine Comedy, with commentary by Cristoforo Landino Entry "Tela", Enciclopedia Dantesca, Treccani, Rome

Critical and Theoretical Studies Danto, Arthur After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press, 1997 Giglioli, Daniele "Barthes and Literature", Il Verri, 2016

Contemporary Art Dorfles, Gillo Preferenze critiche, uno sguardo sull’arte visiva contemporanea, Edizioni Dedalo, Bari 1993

Theoretical Physics Kletetschka, Gunnar "Three dimensions of time: An approach for reconciling the…", Journals Sage, 2024 "Three-Dimensional Time: A Mathematical Framework for…", World Scientific, 2025

Verified Online References "New theory proposes time has three dimensions, with space as a secondary effect", Phys.org, 2025 "A Revolutionary New Physics Hypothesis: Three Time Dimensions", SciTechDaily, 2025 "Texture", Consulenza Linguistica, Accademia della Crusca "Pittura su tela", Wikipedia (consulted February 2025)

Essays and Specialized Articles Prete, Antonio "The Tales of Walter Benjamin", Doppiozero, 2019 Various Authors "La metafora e i neuroni: stato dell’arte", ResearchGate, 2012 "Filo, trama, tessuto. Linguaggi dell’arte contemporanea", Thesis IUAV Venezia, 2015