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Notes of the author The underlying theme of this cycle of etchings is the
multifaceted and sometimes complex relationship between symbols and saints and
takes inspiration from the iconographic tradition between the Renaissance and
Baroque, in which the saints and their stories are an integral part. The saints are mostly portrayed as candid and innocent young
girls and as bearded adults and it was and is not easy for everyone to
recognize their identity today. Often the only way to identify them are their
symbols, or what are called, more properly, the iconographic attributes that
always accompany them, that is, the objects they hold in their hands or that
are at their side, the animals placed nearby or the heads of clothing. The
attribute par excellence for all martyrs is the palm leaf, a symbol of
sacrifice but also of triumph over Evil and a sign of their Redemption. These attributes derive their origin from the hagiographies
of the saints and from the Acts and Passions of the martyrs in which their
sacrifice and all the brutal tortures and tortures that preceded it are
recounted, often romanticizing them with bloodthirsty tones. All this tradition
will be collected and reworked in 1265 by Jacopo da Varagine, Dominican friar
and bishop of Genoa, in the book called Legenda aurea
which was widespread
in the Middle Ages so much so that it was considered one of the first
bestsellers in history. These writings constitute the source and
inspiration of the entire European iconographic tradition which
elaborates, in the wake of widespread devotion, an identifying code for the representation of saints, which will have value from the Middle Ages to modernity. This code
has the aim of allowing the recognition of sacred characters even to
the least cultured observers, because as Gregory the Great wrote
"painting is for the illiterate as writing is for those who know how to
read". Thus, for example, the attractive and elusive Fillide
Melandroni, the prostitute known throughout Rome for her extraordinary beauty,
becomes Saint Catherine of Alexandria in Caravaggio, due to the symbol of her
martyrdom, that toothed wheel which was the instrument of her torture , by a
miracle, it will break saving her. Following this prodigious event, the saint
will be beheaded with the sword, another of her attributes, which in fact is
found in her hands while at her feet is the inevitable palm leaf. In these works of mine the focus of this relationship
shifts decisively from the saint to his symbol, letting the latter, in its
transformations and evolutions, evoke, recall or allude to the saint it
represents, even in his absence. Thus in the etching dedicated to Saint
Catherine, the wheel is not found at her side (as tradition dictates) but in
the foreground at the saint's feet, intimately connected to her symbol, which
constitutes the founding element of the figure itself. By replicating itself
upwards, the wheel changes into another structure, as if to symbiotically protect
the palm tree that grows near it. The image ends with a book, because the
martyrs are the witnesses, the true interpreters of the Word (see also Saint
Simon), while the multifaceted face enclosed in the large volume refers to the
triple nature of saint, martyr and woman. Even in the engraving dedicated to Saint Lorenz his main
attribute, the gridiron on which he was burned alive, is converted into a complex
reticular structure which acts as a base and support for a sort of ecumenical
embrace with the classical lines of an empty amphitheatre, often a place of
torture. In some etchings, the symbol seems to take on hypertrophic
forms such as to almost completely occupy the perspective space: this is the
case of Saint Margaret. The martyr, on the night before her execution, was
visited in the prison cell by the devil in the form of a dragon who swallowed
her. Margaret, armed only with the cross, tears open the monster's belly and
survives the lethal confrontation. From this ancient initiation rite, a passage
towards a higher level of consciousness (see Jason and Jonah but also
Pinocchio) Margaret will emerge as a martyr as a saint and will become part of
a small number of saints, the 14 holy helpers, that is, those who they are
invoked in the moment of greatest danger. She will be the saint destined to
protect women giving birth. In the engraving the martyr is not captured, as
tradition dictates (Raphael and Giulio Romano), in the moment of triumph over
Evil but in the midst of the fight with a monster which, however, has nothing
horrifying but seems to be a prop ( the little key), destined to play a role already
pre-assigned and functional to the dramatic representation. Even in the etching of Santa Barbara her symbol dominates
the scene. The saint seems to be in the middle of a bloody fight with the tower
in which she was segregated by her father. Armed with the same sword with which
she will be executed as a Christian, opens a gap between the two sides who are
about to give in to her powerful push. But her head is itself a tower to remind
us that, even if Barbara succeeds in her aim, she will have to deal with an
internal enemy, just as solid and resistant as her prison. Even the symbol of Saint Andrew, martyred on the cross that
bears his name (an X-shaped cross), is placed in the center and in front of the
same figure, contrary to the tradition in which he is always behind the saint
or at his side ( Rubens and the statue of Duquesnoy in St. Peter's). In the
engraving the saint is forced to perforate his symbol with tunnels to proclaim
his existence. The symbol, placed at his feet but also in the sky, would like
to make us understand how its meaning has changed over time: from the religious
and martylological sphere of the Christian tradition it has been transmuted into
an emblem of the unknown and the enigmatic nature of existence (De Chirico, Metaphysical composition). Even the railway carriages are a citation of the
modern in art (Magritte, Time transfixed) but also an observation that that
symbol also belongs prosaically to the nomenclature of the railway world. Even in Saint Erasmus, bishop of Antioch and holy helper,
his symbol, the winch, occupies the entire central space. Mounted on this
machine, a kind of spit (another of its attributes) collects, by rolling them,
the intestines of the martyr condemned to evisceration (the removal of the
internal organs), a torture often represented in tradition with inevitable
truculent and brutal tones (Sebastiano Ricci , Giacinto Brandi or Nicolas
Poussin). The sentence seems to allude to the persecutors' desire to tear from
the body that faith whose revolutionary message they did not understand. The
long poles are an explicit reference to the Stories of the
True Cross of Pier della Francesca, when the Jew Judas is pulled from the well into which he had been
thrown, to convince him to reveal the place where the cross of Christ was
buried. The martyr's intestines, however, pierce his body and seem to come from
a much deeper cavity, beneath the marble sarcophagus on which he was abandoned,
while his soul, with large spirals, already circles far away in the sky towards
that much-desired Paradise. Saint Helena is the main character of the aforementioned
Stories of the True Cross and is always represented with the cross. Elderly
mother of the Emperor Constantine, in 327-328, she undertook a long and
dangerous journey to the Holy Land to the places of the Passion of Jesus,
inaugurating what would become one of the most famous pilgrimages in history.
Like an archaeologist ante litteram, she wants to find the cross on which
Christ died after three centuries. He will find it again and bring a fragment
of it to Rome, where the basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme will be built to
house it. Another case of hypertrophy of the symbol observed in Santa
Margherita is found in the engraving dedicated to San Florian. The soldier of
the Roman army was thrown into the river with a millstone around his neck in
Upper Austria, for having defended the Christians. The millstone has become a
mammoth pair of oil mill wheels in the grip of an unstoppable inertial motion,
which will bring the saint to his tragic end. The scene described for the
setting (the wooden log bridge and the river) is an explicit debt to Albrecht
Altdorfer's Saint Florian, even if in this there is no trace of the saint's
resigned acceptance in his youthful nudity. There is a fundamental ambiguity in
the scene. A legionnaire is dragged by the invincible motion of the powerful
millstones to which he is bound but, at the same time, it is not known whether he
desperately tries to govern the motion in some way or instead supports it,
aware of his destiny, towards the tragic fatality that waits for him. The
ambiguity perhaps derives from the fact that in the sacrifice of the saints,
for us moderns, it is difficult to distinguish between an imitatio Christi
taken to the extreme consequences and the tragic impulse towards immolation and
self-annihilation. This theme also recurs in Saint Sebastian. Officer of the
Roman army and protector of Christians, naked like Christ, he is martyred by
arrows, which he will survive by miracle. For this reason he is invoked as a
holy thaumaturge in case of illnesses or epidemics, often together with
Saint Rocco, another holy healer. Tradition (for all Mantegna, but also Reni) represents
him with his young ivory body and perfect shapes, serene and triumphant over a
martyrdom that should be deadly. In the etching that bears his name, hanging
like Christ from the column, there is what remains of a cataphracted black
body, tragically prostrate by agony and now almost lifeless. Above the column
to which it is tied, there are tentacled spirals, a symbolic motif that intends
to represent the power of the Church, whose strength is based on the sacrifice
of the saints, whose testimony (martyrs in Greek means "witnesses")
is fundamental for the transmission of his religious message to the entire
world, which takes place through a sinuous and disturbing antenna. In the other version the saint, riddled with arrows on a
battlefield, is literally petrified by pain. Maybe a fatal collapse awaits him
or maybe he will be able to at least raise his head towards that tiny symbol of
redemption on the mountain in the distance. However, there is no trace of Saint Clement, bishop of Rome
and fourth Pope in the history of the Church. Only its symbol, the anchor,
stands out in the desolation of a desert. His presence is only evoked by the
vestments with the insignia of the head of the Church and by the ponderous
missal, from which the end of a crozier protrudes. The large iron anchor
commemorates his sacrifice, when it was tied around his neck before being
thrown into the sea from a ship. Legend has it that in the place of martyrdom,
the sea retreated for a few miles every year, so much so as to reveal the shrine
with his remains, an incessant destination for devout pilgrims. There is also no evidence of Saint Apollonia,
but it is her
symbol, the tooth, that tells us about her. The saint was the victim of
an
anti-Christian riot in Alexandria in Egypt in the 3rd century. Her
Passio
recounts her torment preceded by torture during which all her teeth
were pulled
out with pincers. The molar, femininely refined, seems besieged by a
decomposed mob of tongs and torture claws. The candor of the symbol and
its
isolation are the manifest signs of its superiority and at the same
time of its
holy intangibility. Sometimes the symbol happens to multiply. This is the case
of Saint Agatha, patroness saint of Catania. The story of her sacrifice says that
among the many tortures her breasts were torn or cut off. This is why in the
iconographic tradition, from Piero della Francesca to Zurbaran, the saint is
represented with the palm of martyrdom in one hand while in the other she holds
a plate on which her severed breasts are found, like a small still life. In
this engraving the symbols have quadrupled as well as the arms, making a
comparison with the Indian goddess Kali and the Greek Demeter of Ephesus almost
inevitable, in a syncretic representation of a Christian virgin martyr who is,
at the same time, a mysterious pagan divinity and potentially dangerous, like
the volcano in the background. The multiplication of the symbol is so
irrepressible that visible signs of it can also be observed in the domes of the
towers of the city walls and in the high clouds in the sky. Even in Saint Simon we witness the same phenomenon of the
multiplication of the symbol. Simon, apostle and saint, is a fisherman from
Galilee, hence the symbol of the boat. Having become an evangelical
"fisherman of souls", (the book is also one of his symbols) he
suffers martyrdom in distant Armenia. His body is cut to pieces with a saw,
probably like that of the lumberjacks of the past. The triplication of the
symbol aims to underline the fury of the martyrdom of a venerable saint
transformed into a tree, whose roots sink precisely into that boat on the shore
of that distant lake, which he left forever following the word of Jesus. The image of Saint Peter instead arises from the
juxtaposition of the keys, his main symbol, and the dome of the most important
church in Christianity. The keys inserted in the keyholes seem to allude to the
fact that they do not open the kingdom of heaven but some mysterious secret
kept in the sacred institution, while that of the saint seems to be able to
unlock the unfathomable depths of theological thought represented by the books. Saint Denis
appears to have no symbol but in reality it
is his own head, which he holds in his hands, that is his
characteristic
emblem. The saint was bishop of Paris (Saint Denis) and martyred in
Montmartre
(Mount of Martyrs). He is a cephalophoric saint, that is, a saint whose
hagiographies say that, after his decapitation, he collected his own
severed
head, holding it with his hands. The posture of the image of the saint,
gothically dressecd under a black cloak, with one foot propped up on a
low stone
parapet, is a direct reference to San Floriano by Francesco del Cossa,
which
was placed in the upper left compartment of the Griffoni Polyptych. The saint
holds his head with bishop's miter and gas mask on his right knee. Faced with
devastating Roman repression, the first Christians were non-violent fighters of
immense courage and had to face the deadly and poisonous persecutions of an
enemy who could not understand the profound reasons for their faith. The mask
of Saint Denis is in turn the symbol of this patient and firm Christian
resistance, which will allow the new religion to triumph over the persecutors. The traditional representation of Saint Lucy is no different
from that of Saint Agatha (often portrayed together). In her martyrdom her eyes
were torn out which she shows as her symbol on a plate or cup. For the
engraving that bears his name, the iconographic point of reference is still
Francesco del Cossa, who portrayed Saint Lucy in the right compartment of the
aforementioned polyptych. In this painting the saint, with a highly original
invention, holds in her left hand a flower stem from which not two buds but her
own eyes emerge. That stem with the saint's eyes can also be found in the
engraving, in a small transparent vase near the figure. In the scene
represented, the posture of the saint and the ladder leaning against the
cornice are quotes from Durer's Melancholia. The martyr, deprived of sight and
with her face hidden by the bandages that cover the mutilation, seems to want
to look through another eye placed on her knees (with the eye of Horus in the
center) to see that invisible that only the soul can see. Saint Cecily, martyr and patroness of music, is almost
always represented with a small portable organ in her hands or at her side
(Raphael, Orazio Gentileschi), even if the reason for this association still
remains uncertain. The engraving is an explicit homage to Arcimboldo's art,
founded on the combination of objects from a single semantic area,
metaphorically connected to the subject represented. In this way the image of
the saint is assembled solely with an accumulation of musical instruments,
while her symbol, the organ pipes, are transformed into a sort of sonorous
vegetal backdrop to the scene. Like other saints (see Santa Agnese and Sant'Antonio) Saint
Rocco also has an animal as its symbol, a dog. French pilgrim (hence the
attributes of the cloak, the staff, the hat and the flask) is headed to Rome,
where he treats and heals the sick of the plague epidemic that raged in Italy
in the second half of the fourteenth century. During the return journey he
falls ill with the terrible disease and isolates himself in a cave so as not to
infect other people. What saved him from illness and starvation was a dog who
provided him with bread every day. The most invoked thaumaturge saint,
often represented with Saint Sebastian, is portrayed in tradition, offering the
viewer his bare thigh to show the bubo that has appeared near his groin. In the
engraving, the traveler-saint is blocked from moving by the contracted disease
and his wounds are exposed like the cavities of an old diseased trunk. The
saving dog, with the insignia of Saint James, comes from the sky and has just
landed to help him, bringing the bread that will heal him definitively. Saint Agnes also has an animal as her symbol, the lamb,
because, like the small animal which in turn symbolizes Christ's sacrifice, she
is slaughtered with a sword blow to the throat. Roman saint of noble origins,
before the final execution she was condemned to the stake but the flames, by a
miracle, split under her body and her hair grew to cover her nakedness. The
lamb in his arms has its front legs tied, a reference to Zurbaran's Agnus Dei,
but it also has the shape of a space probe that from the depths of the universe
has landed on the "wrong" planet and in the arms of a woman with whom
to share an identical destiny. San Blaise, Armenian bishop, was martyred in 316 three years
after the Edict of Milan, which granted freedom of worship to Christians. His
torturers tore his body using iron combs, which were used to card wool. A
further condemnation seems to be that of carrying these enormous and heavy
instruments of torture on his old shoulders, in the last journey he travels
leaning on a stick that ends with two intertwined candles (another attribute of
his), the light of which seems to support his uncertain and tired step. Saint Christopher is like Saint Blaise a helper saint and
patron saint of travellers. He was a giant ferryman who one day helped a child
cross to the other side of the river. The giant lifted him onto his shoulders
and began the journey; but the further he went into the river, the more the
boy's weight increased, so much so that with much difficulty he managed to
reach the bank. There the child revealed his identity: he was Jesus and his
burden that the giant (Christopher in Greek means "Christ-bearer")
had supported was that of the entire world saved by the blood of Christ. This
extraordinary meeting will transform Christopher into an evangelizer and then
into a martyr.
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