in italiano una visione mistica a Viterbo
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Today my
fluxes of thought change location and go outside of Rome, into the beautiful Tuscia, because during my Christmas holidays
I took the opportunity to enjoy a little of medieval-fantasy atmosphere: walking through the Via Francigena, along the alleys of magical neighborhood San Pellegrino in Viterbo, I came across a "vision".
Kept inside
the Chiesa del Gonfalone indeed “La Natività Mistica”
has still now exposed to view; a masterpiece of Ignazio Stern, an artist yet
to be discovered, who worked in the late Seventeenth century and the first half of the Eighteenth century.
The most beautiful
thing is that the canvas has generously offered
to the eyes of anyone who wants to
enter into this baroque church: no barrier,
no glass prevent from
enjoying the view of the brushstrokes
that magically, for people like me who
is unable to
paint, have formed these figures.
And
that's how they show themselves, towards
the eyes of the diligent traveler who knows how to seize the
right opportunities to elevate his spirit from the daily monotony, those "characters"
that had made the history of the Western world, both for those who believe and for
those who have no faith.
The skin looks suffused
and the pores become the invisible passages from which intimate essences exhale.
The drawing, soft and warm, accentuates the
sinuous figures,
but it is mainly the chiaroscuro enraptures myself and catches my glance into a vortex where everything seems disjointed, wrapped in light.
In Rome together with
Ignaz Stern a lineage of artists accompanied the transition
from the Late Baroque to the
Neo-Classicism and
to the Romanticism; the latter, an era which will feature
vivid colors,
gauzy atmospheres
and delicate sentimentalism.
Contemplating
“The Nativity” you can feel the vibration, the music, and the sensibility of the pictorial genius of Stern,
sweet and intense at the same time.
Painted
in 1724 “The Nativity”
was depicted as a night where, by candlelight, the
visions seen by St. Bridget of Sweden
in the cave of Bethlehem became material.
The
time portrayed is the one when Mary is holding the Child into her arms while she is thanking God, praying but not bowed but turning her eyes to
the sky, still in the grip of the ecstasy’s effect
she had had before childbirth.
Then the
little cherub is very delightful
portrayed while he is kissing the little feet of
the Child Jesus and I consider marvelous the Nordic atmospheres that
envelop the scene into misty and impalpable shades: “ which are covering shapes and colors of dewy powder,
leaving the flashes of light running at the same time winning darkness and reverberating on
meat” as Vittorio Sgarbi poetically describes the
masterpiece, the canvas’s owner who made possible the temporary loan in Viterbo.
UA-47835525-1
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