Perhaps. But the same person who is Italian is often also much more, e.g., a woman, a Jew, a rationalist, a Marxist, a feminist, a middle-age person, a mother, a vegan, educated in a Catholic environment, passionate about ski, long-term traveller to Bhutan, not to speak about her job and so on. In other words, even if their were anything like a “typical Italian”, a “typical woman”, a “typical Asian” and so on, still it would not cover but a small aspect of a person’s intellectual life. In this sense, Leonardo, e.g., is not (purely or predominantely) the result of the “Italian genius” (and in fact most Italians did not achieve anything vaguely comparable to what Leonardo achieved in a single year of his life), just like the “Indian spirit” is not enough to understand, e.g., the Mahābhārata. This is not meant to altogether deny the presence of anything like the Italian genius etc., but to stress the fact that complex phenomena cannot be fully understood through one single approach and that the fact of sharing the same birth place of Bruegel does not make you automatically more competent to discuss his art than an art historian.

Can we agree about that and stop “boxing”?