Franco Fortunato’s Mythic and Mystical Moby-Dick

Fortunato's images of Moby-Dick, while evoking events and characters from Melville's novel, are far removed from the dramatic images of Huston's fi lm and most Moby-Dick illustrations by other artists. Fortunato ignores piv- otal action scenes in the narrative, such as the quarter-deck scene, the meetings between Ahab and various crew members of his crew during the voyage of the Pequod, the crew's interactions, the Pequod's gams, and signifi cantly the conclud- ing confrontation with the great white whale. Whereas Moby-Dick illustrators conventionally create a portrait gallery of the Pequod's mates and harpooners based on the two "Knights and Squires" chapters, Fortunato omits all portrai- ture from his Moby-Dick series, with the exception of several images of Ahab, two of Ishmael and Queequeg together, and one sketch of Daggoo. Although his Moby-Dick images allude to the realistic, narrative tradition of Moby-Dick illumination, they deviate from it signifi cantly, creating a luminously new way of seeing the novel and allowing viewers to experience Melville's novel as veer- ing toward the mystical and the mythic. Fortunato shares an interest in a mythic sensibility with the mid-twenti- eth-century American abstract painters of Moby-Dick—Jackson Pollock, Wil- liam Baziotes, and Sam Francis—all of whom were interested in psychological readings of the novel (Schultz 133-42). Like these painters, Fortunato defi es