Bernoccoli e altre protuberanze spirituali

What is the meaning of the Italian expression “avere il bernoccolo della matematica”, “to have a ‘bump’ for maths” (that is to say, “to have a bent for maths”)? Why are the Greek-Roman and the Medieval medical-philo- sophical culture characterized by the spread of the idea that some spiritual surplus (that, metaphorically, “give birth” to the genius) push outward from the inside of the brain? The ancient physiological doctrines confirm the existence of a kind of mental-physiological solidarity, according to which the spiritual takes root in the cranial material, and the thinking activity of the body manifests itself in the “growth of a bump” on the head. A relationship between the physical protuberances and the spiritual ones is attested by some famous and emblematic cases like Gian Battista Vico and Tommaso Campanella’s autobiographies: the latter invented the nom de plume of Settimontano Squilla (Sevenmountain Rings), with which he signed his philosophical poems, playing on his surname and his seven bumps – that, allegorizing, he described as the seven mounts or the seven pillars of the Wisdom rising prophetically on his head-universe. Like the philosophers, the artists too sometimes represent the aerial dynamism of their spirit through the image of a spiritual protuberance. In the 20th cen- tury, the great sculptor Constantin Brâncus¸i, an old man by that time, care- fully prepared a photo, studying and building it in details as if it was a piece of art. The photo shows him in his atelier in Paris with two marble wings standing out from his shoulders and a copy of his wooden Never-ending Column that seemed to bloom from his head, heading for the sky as if it had been bred by his mind. Brâncus¸i once said “All my life I have sought the essence of flight”: the column-bump and the marble wings aesthetically give body to a great metaphor for the Spirit.