Sunday May 19th, at 14.30 pm, at the Turin Book Fair, Spazio Sant'Anselmo, the presentation of the book Giorgio de Chirico will take place. Catalog raisonné of sacred works.
The curators will participate Giovanni Gazzaneo and Elena Pontiggia, flanked by Paul Picozza, president of the Giorgio and Isa de Chirico Foundation, Andrea Dall'Asta, director of the San Fedele cultural center in Milan, Fiorella Minervino, art criticism, e Davide Rondoni, poet.
The book, with introductions by Lorenzo Ornaghi and of the cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, contains essays by the two editors, Paolo Picozza and Pierangelo Sequeri and the cataloguing, edited by Salvatore Vacanti, of over one hundred and fifty works, many of which are unpublished or rarely published and brings together works in the field of art for the first time sacred made by Painter Optimus (Volos, 1888 – Rome, 1978), thus investigating one of the lesser known aspects of his production.
The volume inaugurates the series Sacred Twentieth Century, conceived and promoted by the Crocevia Foundation, which aims to show how the great masters - despite the fact that the sacred subject seems to disappear in the manuals - have continued to investigate the relationship between God and man even in the contemporary world.
De Chirico, the father of Metaphysics, produced from the end of the XNUMXs and more frequently in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs works of religious subjects which bear witness to how the poetic and philosophical universe of the artist was profoundly renewed with a fascinating research, with complex and problematic outcomes.
The reflections offered intend to highlight how, in conjunction with the Second World War, an opening towards the divine mystery took over which modified the existential conception professed by the Master in the years of Metaphysics - when he believed that the whole world was the realm of "nonsense" - and which has been translated into both theoretical writings and works of art that know how to surprise, starting with the Apocalypse, whose tables were created in the second half of the 1940s.
writes the cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi: “The unfinished copy of the famous Tondo Doni by Michelangelo, kept in the Uffizi, is still placed on the easel in his studio today. Already in 1921 de Chirico, with great respect, had confronted himself with this Holy Family, "the most difficult painting to interpret and copy", as he confessed. Having reached the twilight of his existence, the Pictor Optimus had made this extreme attempt at veneration for a religious subject and for such an excellent artist, and ideally his hand had stopped after having filled only the face of the Virgin Mother with color. This was the symbolic seal to a long artistic itinerary that had certainly not ignored the sacred, advancing "beyond metaphysics", along the high-altitude paths of the spirit, among the panoramas of the great biblical narratives".
“No one – underlines Elena Pontiggia –, for at least half a millennium, had designed an Apocalypse so little apocalyptic as de Chirico. And no one, perhaps, had depicted the events with such calm serenity, tinged in some parts with an even childish candor. The most mysterious and terrible sacred book, traditionally interpreted as a prophecy of the end of the world (although in reality it is more a meditation on man's painful history than on his eschatological destiny and culminates with the dazzling light of the New Jerusalem and the triumph of Lamb); in de Chirico they become a fairy tale, both spontaneous and cultured, suffused in certain points with an evangelical spirit of childhood, in others with solemn classical accents”.
The catalogue, thanks to the essays and the anthology of writings by the Master on sacred art reported in the appendix – essential for understanding a theme so neglected by critics as it is relevant for the artist – brings a new and fundamental contribution to the studies on the work of the Pictor Optimus. For Giovanni Gazzaneo: "De Chirico was among the few artists of the twentieth century to have grasped the paradox of Christ who is both the "most beautiful of the sons of man" (Psalm 45,3) and theEcce Homo without "beauty or appearance" (Isaiah 53,2:XNUMX). These are the two faces always present in Christian art, as Benedict XVI has emphasized on several occasions: the face of pain (which the last century presented to us in the sign of the cross) and the face of glory (which the twentieth century was able to express very rarely), both beautiful because they are an expression of the greatest love, the one that gives life. There Ascent to Calvary and the Apocalypse are expressions of this paradox two thousand years old yet always new, to which de Chirico was able to offer form and color”.
We propose a nice excerpt from the essay of the volume "Giorgio de Chirico. Reasoned catalog of the sacred work" (edited by Silvana) "Analyzing the religious, and specifically Christian, themes in de Chirico's art means first of all posing a problem of method: which works of his, beyond what the title suggests, really want to represent a biblical or evangelical subject?
The question is not as simple as it seems. The Pictor Optimus, in fact, began to paint subjects fully inspired by the Christian tradition at the end of the XNUMXs and dedicated himself to it with some continuity in the XNUMXs and XNUMXs, more episodically in the following years. Even some of his previous paintings contain references to Holy Scripture or to the title in the title feet religious, but these are works that contain other meanings or arise from other motivations than the explicitly declared subject.
Let's take an example, or rather let's take the most obvious example. In 1919 de Chirico painted the prodigal son, a theme to which he had already dedicated a drawing in 1917 and which he would later return to many times. However, he does not have in mind to depict the parable narrated by Luke. Or, better, through a vague allusion to the Gospel passage he wants above all to theorize the return to the craft of the ancients, to the laws of art, to the example of the past. The father who welcomes his son back into his embrace is not an image of God as in the parable, but of the great masters of all times and, more generally, of what de Chirico calls "the divine art of drawing", whose rules it is essential to return after the experimentations and iconoclasm of the avant-garde. It is no coincidence that in the versions of the painting from the early XNUMXs the father has a classic physiognomy, albeit petrified, while the son takes on the appearance of a mannequin.
In addition to the programmatic meanings that make it almost a declaration of poetics, in the painting one can perceive different references, but always extraneous to the evangelical message: autobiographical references (the themes of travel, departure and nostalgia for the return run through the whole painting de Chirico, becoming almost a story of his life, as well as a metaphor for life without adjectives); philosophical (in the continuous relationship between body, mannequin and statue, between existence and inanimate matter, between the passage of time and eternity); psychological (in the allusion to the relationship with the father).
Of course, infinite meanings resonate in a work of art and, strictly speaking, an interpretation of the Prodigal Son more consistent with the wording of the title. However, in the light of de Chirico's expressive path and writings, it seems inappropriate to place the painting, as has sometimes been done, in his sacred art production. Here, in any case, it was preferred to consider only those paintings and sculptures where the biblical-evangelical reference translates into a pertinent, not freely metaphorical representation.
By collecting the material in this book, among other things, various works have been expunged which, over time, had been erroneously considered to be of a religious subject. The so-called Maddalena from 1952, for example, is actually one Eastern head, as it is entitled in the artist's monograph by Isabella Far (1953), while the Studies of Hands with Hammer do not refer to crucifixion scenes (de Chirico never painted nailing to the cross), but are preparatory drawings for Vulcan's workshop of 1949. Certain improper titles have also been corrected, as in the case of the sketch Tobias and the angel, which instead represents Jacob's struggle with the celestial creature (de Chirico himself entitles Jacob and the angel a similar drawing, table 0
A research like this on the religious subjects of the Pictor Optimus (or on his sacred art, as we will say for convenience, but less exactly, because for de Chirico "art is always sacred, even when it deals with a profane subject. Art is sacred in itself”, Anthology, n.3) has, of course, no desire for completeness, also considering the vastness of de Chirico's work, and if anything, it is proposed as a reflection on an in-depth theme of his painting. […]
Sacred themes: According to de Chirico, in the Bible the works inspired by the birth of Christ come after those dedicated to his death. Reason is not theological, but historical. The first works of sacred art by the Pictor Optimus are placed [...] in the war years, in times that inevitably suggested images of pain and mourning. Only after the end of the conflict de Chirico (with the exception of an episodic Madonna with child which, with aImmaculate it's a Sanctus Antonius, runs around 1940 ) turns to other subjects and, among the evangelical pages, chooses those of the Annunciation, the Nativity and some moments in the life of Christ, without abandoning the theme of the Crucifixion.
Dated 1945-46 on an archive photo, but to be postponed towards 1950 due to similarities with the backdrop of the Legend of Joseph of 1950-51, the Nativity of the Vatican Museums, pl. 0, is actually aAdoration of the Shepherds. It is no coincidence that in the arrangement of the figures it is linked to the homonymous painting by Rubens in Fermo, even if in the motif of the angels and the glimpse of light on the right it looks rather to Tintoretto. Moreover, de Chirico takes up the main intuition of Rubens and of the Baroque sensibility: the idea of a continuous communion between heaven and earth, between the natural and the supernatural world. The golden choir of cherubs joins the opaque people of shepherds, Paradise descends into the stable, divine and human overlap and interpenetrate.
There were not many, but not very rare religious subjects that de Chirico painted in these years. We find a trace of it in his exhibitions and in his monographs, where occasionally someone appears: in the personal exhibition of 1945 at the Galleria del Secolo in Rome, he exhibited Chaste Susanna, identifiable with the copy by Rubens; in the great one-man show that he held in London in 1949 he presented La Maddalena; in the 1953 monograph signed by Isabella Far publishes The Magdalene at the foot of the Crucifix, and Christ the worker.
Sometimes the subject is second-hand, like the two little ones Blessing Child Jesus,, which the artist gives to his wife at Christmas 1950 and which are inspired by Rubens and the classical statues of infant Hercules. Sometimes, however, the theme is suggested to him by the client, such as the worker Christ, proposed in 1950 by don Giovanni Rossi, founder of the Pro Civitate Christiana of Assisi. Here de Chirico refers, especially in the bare-chested figures, to the Forge of Vulcan by Velàzquez, which had already inspired him in the almost homonymous Volcano Workshop from 1949. In the painting by the Spanish master, however, the true protagonists are the smiths, while here everything revolves around Christ, who emerges monumental at the center of the composition. The robe of Divine Worker she is poor, her attitude resigned, her activity humble, yet de Chirico, unnaturally increasing the proportions of the figure, manages to infuse her with solemnity and grandeur. While Vulcan is as tall as his blacksmiths and appears very little sacred, despite the laurel wreath that crowns him and the light he radiates, Christ manifests all of his divinity and, together, bears witness to all the nobility of the work.
Other subjects, then, arise from the suggestion of masterpieces of the past, such as Christ and the Storm, also erroneously known as The miraculous catch, and the drawing Christ walks on water. These are the only two works by the artist inspired by a miraculous intervention of Jesus. De Chirico never paints miracles: in his painting there are no healings, resurrections of the dead, multiplications of loaves and fishes, just as there is no Transfiguration , Transubstantiation and there is not even the Resurrection of Christ. Why then so much interest in divine dominion over natural elements? More than from a thematic reason, the artist moves here from the reminiscence of Miracle of St. Walpurgis by Rubens and del Christ on the Sea of Galilee by Tintoretto, of which his painting and drawing respectively take up the compositional syntax.
Similarly the convulsive Conversion of Saint Paul (1946) of the Vatican Museums, resolved with an oblique tangle of gestures, in an outburst of neighing and shouting, while the apostle is caught a little awkwardly at the very instant of his fall, derives from the interest in the powerful emphasis and the compositional complexity of works such as the homonymous Conversion of Saint Paul e The martyrdom of St Livino by Rubens.
Finally, a subject to which de Chirico pays constant attention is the angel. the ghost ofJewish angel that had obsessed him in metaphysical painting; the figure of the psychopompous angel that hovers in the pages of Hebdomeros ("Having received the soul of the deceased, the angel resumed its movement of the spring at an acute angle thrown into the void and with the soul of the deceased it went up to heaven") returns in his works of sacred art, both where the subjects necessarily foresee it (Annunciation, Nativity, Annunciation of the Shepherds), and where they might not expect it, like La Legend of Joseph.
GIORGIO DE CHIRICO -Reasoned catalog of sacred works (Silvana Editoriale)
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