Fear (october)

  On the cover of October I wanted to talk about a subject that I had not touched in the previous covers.

  It's true that the spirit of the magazine (and of the research in general) is full of hope, but, if the brain begins to function in an irregular manner, anxiety and fear are also elements that come into play.

  I painted an actor in front of the mirror. He's wearing a colored bandana in the colors with which some animals in nature "warn" of the danger (or so I was told when I was at school).

  He's holding in his hands a mask of those that in the commercial cinema symbolize the terror and a frame with a landscape reflected in a lake. The landscape alludes to the word "Nirvana" (in the book "Oriental mythology. The masks of God", Joseph Campbell explains that the meaning of this word is "beyond the wind", that our perception of the reality would be like the distorted picture of a landscape on the surface of a lake shaken by the wind).

Only when the wind calms down we can have a more accurate reflection.

  In the background, some images of the sky map of a frescoed ceiling at Caprarola.

Taddeo e Federico Zuccaro, Villa Farnese, Caprarola (Viterbo)

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/issue/current