His participation is proof of the undisputed value of his work on the international artistic scene. The commitment and the ability to go beyond the canons of the common thinking, have helped to create new creative experiences and catalyze positive change in Europe and the world.
In the fall of 1608 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, a man fleeing from the Roman murder and from the Maltese prisons, arrived in Sicily. During his stay on the island, the painter revolutionized the pictorial style and manner of painting, anchored in late Mannerism; the latter characterized by a care towards the perfection of the design and the use of soft colors in pastel shades.
One might think that modern art in Sicily has its own beginning with its arrival. The style of the last Caravaggio, in fact, is even more dramatic, the Sicilian paintings are full of pathos, the brush stroke is violent, the divine disappears totally and the contrast between light and shadow is clear, as well as the labile border between life and death, which turns into black spaces, empty, dark above the characters.
In Sicily he stayed in several cities and it is still possible to admire masterpieces such as the burial of Saint Lucia in Syracuse, the Resurrection of Lazarus and the Adoration of the Shepherds in Messina. A small number if we think that the sources testify much to other paintings, paintings for public and private commissions. Unfortunately some of Messina's works have been lost, others destroyed by the earthquake of 1908; history even more dramatic that of the Nativity, preserved at the Oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, stolen by the Mafia in 1969.
Right here, in the city of Caltagirone, we do not have a work but a manuscript, dated before 1710 and kept in the Municipal Library, which tells a curious episode: Caravaggio, entered the church of Santa Maria di Gesù, admiring the statue of Madonna della Catena, sculpted by Antonello Gagini, would have exclaimed: "Whoever wants it the most beautiful goes to Heaven".
In Sicily, more than ever, Caravaggio imprints his soul in his paintings, his desire for salvation and this will affect not only the painters of the seventeenth century, such as the Syracusan Minniti and the Messinese Rodriguez, but also, in a conceptual way, the contemporaries as the Chinnici master.
His works are affected by this transport, this absolute abandonment to life imbued with pathos, pains and emotions. The divine becomes an expression of the human, the only glimmer where the spiritual is possible. The pain in Lorenzo's works shows the same humanized and humble religiosity of Lombardy, which in Sicily is expressed with the Franciscan representation of the Madonna of Humility, from humus, lying on the bare earth.
"Human too human" Chinnici, as well as Merisi, both dragged by an irrational force
where art becomes primordial creation, around which everything revolves. In his works among earthy and luminous colors like wheat, he expresses the drama of existence, sublimated, also this time, by the saving light.
The men he portrays are of intense humanity, of powerful naturalism, because as Caravaggio stages the real, the truth filtered by his eyes, soaked in his experience. The painter thus becomes the spokesman of the last, of the workers, of the common people, the one who struggles, who hopes, who lives in a land full of contradictions. Fishermen, farmers, mothers who move in the ancient waters of the Mediterranean and in the arid and lean but fertile landscapes of Sicily. Sicily of other times, land of myth and light, land dreamed and evoked, told as if it were a fairy tale. Land that always calls inexorably to itself, like a mother who never abandons her children.
From the beginning of time
Men have passed on this magnificent land
men of all races and cultures
Kings, soldiers, peasants, artisans, humble or rich people
Of all these only a few God has granted a Gift,
the Gift, to leave the indelible mark of their earthly passage.
What is the light that comes from the dark .................. .. it's just a moment
What is the wind .................. .. it's just a moment
What is the wave of the sea ............................ it's just a moment
What is man in the time of the earth ...... .. is only a moment
What is the thought of a man .................. .. is just a moment, written, transmit it over time
What is the stone ..................... .. is the matter that is made of earth and is Eternal
What is a painting .................. is figurative thought, created by man, it remains in time
What is a sculpture ......... .. is the thought of the man carved on the stone, it remains in time
Thought, painting, sculpture, a song or a creation
They are called Art .................................
Men that exist in the world
Only to these men ... GOD ... granted a gift
the gift of being ETERNAL, their passage remains in time
these men men, they are called ... ..
.... ARTISTS OR POETS ... ..
With esteem for a great artist
DEVOTIO- ONIS
Mia grazia infinita
Nessuna pietade
Nessuna clementia
Nessun amor- Oris
Accogli nel palesarsi
Torbidi annunzi
Che
Benevola Agape
Divozione et fides
Provvidenzia Divus
SOLIMARE
In becoming often
In the continuation of the day
In vague thought
I admire and breathe
Sour and disarming
Ardor vardo
Immerse immense universe
In opulent fate
Perfumes and colors
They lie in my heart
Melancholy my house.
