For years Zigaina has been doggedly defending himself behind the sort of " schizoid" mechanism of which Kafka speaks, consisting of retreat and self -belittlement, which gives his ob jectivity a mirage quality. Excess of love, ideal-love, is suspect: it is one of the stratagems of the pseudoego system, conducted by the id—that eternal castaway waiting to be rescued. Zigaina feels threatened in Friuli, on the lagoon, etc., and it would therefore be natural (and perhaps is) for him to hate the theatre in which his tragedy is taking place. But hatred, impossible to accept, takes on the aspect of excessive love: the same fidelity, loyalty, indispensability, as found in good children. Reacting positively to a demand that he attributes to " other people", Zigaina is able to live internally as and how he likes. But we also know that the stratagems of the pseudoego end in an imporverishment of the id which, tyrannically, conducts them in the cause of its own salvation. And it is this impoverishment of which Zigaina is intuitively well aware that he has transformed into the dynamics of his artistic investigation, almost into his object. As always happens with the friends of one's youth ('46 and '47), I have never done any deep investigating into Zigaina's " psyche": he is ontological to me as I, I imagine, am ontological to him. And it is now, in 1970, as I write about him from the middle of the lagoon of Grado, that I see him as being "deontologicizable" for the first time. I content myself with this and look no deeper, since it is clear that I had already understood everything without expressing it as inevitably happens to true friends. But Zigaina's initial enigma, that of his infancy, in the fas and nefas of Villa Vincentina with his gentle and apprehensive mother and his carpenter father, appears to me in all its tragedy. This I deduce from his ideal-happiness which I have always regarded with suspicion.

It must, assuredly, have been relegated to the artist's id. which is so similar to the schizoid's. Instead of responding to other people with real perceptions it will respond with perceptions that, if not unreal (as are those of schizoids), are certainly not completely real, and will react, instead of with meaningful actions, if not exactly with f utile ones (as schizoids do), certainly rather deliriously. ¹ This can be seen in all his most recent work. But the delirium of his graphic and chromatic inspiration is meaningful not so much in itself as in relation to practical life. Nobody knows the true condition of the id (with its hatreds and its death-wish; or with its mad satisfactions), stage-managed by the pseudo-ego (with its praismorthy loves, its optimism and normal satisfactions): but Zigaina to some extent (for those who know him personally) reveals the double life of his id and of his ego of convenience. Because nobody who paints as he does lives as he does, and no one who lives as he does paints as he does. Zigaina has exorcised reality by always admitting its rightness, yielding, giving assent and smiling: but since it would be impossible to do this with the whole of reality, he began by cutting it down quantitatively, as the " physical theatre " of his behaviour—and this is where the Basso Friuli and the Lagoon come in. But while he leads an almost idyllic and almost hedonistic life, in that place and with those people, he paints all the horror of Redipuglia in lavish colour that is insufficient to blot out his almost psychotic desperation (if nothing else that of the psychosis we live through nightly in our dreams).² There is no consistency between his life and his painting: but, since consistency of this kind is a part of objectivity, Zigaina makes it ontological and takes it for granted. At his very fine home in the green fields of Cervignano, the wine is excellent and the hospitality sincere and deeply affectionate: but his studio is like a small concentration camp, containing all the atrocities experienced by an ego that writhes in torment, under the affectionate surface of his oil paintings, which, superficially, express the same smiling sensitivity and friendship that pervades Zigaina's whole life, but their depths...