[Vincent Van Gogh and Giovanni Pascoli, foiled by the foxglove.] / Il giallo digitale di Van Gogh e Pascoli.

ABSTRACT

Vincent Van Gogh and Giovanni Pascoli were artists who shared many aesthetic and biographical affinities. Both were somehow intoxicated by digitalis, the painter literally in a pharmacological sense, the poet symbolically or in a literary sense. In the paper we propose an original theory on how digital affected the last works of the Dutch painter and in particular the portrait of doctor Gachet, which differs from the previous theories, that attribute the chromatic style of Van Gogh to the xanthopsia caused by digitalis overdose. The Italian poet dedicated a short poem to the Foxglove, inspired by the popular wisdom that centuries ago already recognized the poisonous power of Foxglove.