Living in a Cage Is a Restricted Privilege - Beauty in Chemistry - page 126

6 Small Cages for the Smallest Anion ........................................................ 158
7 Is it the Shape or the Function that Defines a Cage? . ..................................... 163
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163
1 Cages in Life and in Art
Cages are not artistic items. At least in the sense that they are not loved by artists.
In fact, they do not appear in famous paintings and sculptures of any age and
culture. The only relevant painting featuring a cage is quite recent, on the time scale
of art history, being due to Ren´ Magritte (1898-1967) during his first surrealistic
period - Elective Affinities , 1933 (see Fig. 1 ). The painting shows a caged egg and it
probably intends to provoke a shock in the viewer through the delayed affinity of
two objects to each other, the cage and the egg, from which the typical guest of the
cage, a bird, originates. The rare appearance of cages in art is not due to the
intrinsically poor relevance of the object itself. Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571)
completed in 1543 for King Francis I of France an object for everyday life, a salt
cellar, as a splendid ivory, gold and vitreous enamel table sculpture, but neither
a Pope nor an Emperor nor a rich merchant commissioned a golden cage from him.
The poor attention of artists and gifted craftsmen to cages is probably to be ascribed
to the blameworthy concept of a cage, which is related to deprivation of freedom,
constriction in a reduced space, and forced exhibition of one's private life. In
addition, the most frequent and usual guest of a cage is one of the most undefended
and tender of living beings: a small bird (a canary, a parrot). Thus, humans use
cages mostly for leisure, but are not proud of this practise and do not want to
emphasise it.
Chemistry is different: synthesising a molecular cage and putting into it
a chemical entity (metal ion, anion or molecule) is considered a deserving and
admirable action. The design and synthesis of cages at a molecular level
has become so common and distinguished an activity to be mentioned in the
Fig. 1 Ren´ Magritte,
Elective Affinities (1933) - oil
on canvas. Private collection