We The Italians | Italian art: The church collector

Italian art: The church collector

Italian art: The church collector

  • WTI Magazine #135 Jan 16, 2021
  • 1013

Sailko is the pseudonym of Francesco Bini, photographer but not only. He is a voracious and incessant photographer, who portrays all the beauty that appears in front of him on his path and then transforms it. Each photo becomes part of large thematic constellations, real museums of images linked by common themes, subjects, time frames.

The driving force behind the whole principle is free knowledge, which is then catalogued, for an almost encyclopedic need, with a system that also looks at the pairing of the same subjects, perhaps portrayed at a distance of time. In creating these groups he often finds new themes in a ramification that never ends. The "Bini Museum", as he ironically defines it, now boasts cataloging for works of art ranging from period to medium to “school”.

But it is in the last few years that a very heartfelt love for Sardinia's Romanesque churches has been born. As he himself explains: "In Sardinia you can find a culture that is alive and ancient like nowhere else in Italy. For Romanesque churches, it's incredible how they were built out of nothing, as if they had fallen from the sky. In Tuscany, especially in the Pisan area, there are Romanesque churches similar in style, but they are in the towns, where you would expect them. In Sardinia they are isolated, immersed in a natural context, barren and empty".

And in fact, the churches portrayed by Sailko seem to come out of the ground, powerful in their Romanesque forms and as hard as the materials used to build them, such as trachyte, sandstone and basalt. Stones that are also used for the geometric decorations of the facades, alternating their natural colors, to create motifs typical of the Pisan Romanesque that influenced the taste of architecture on the island in the period of domination from the mid-thirteenth century.

The Basilica of the Holy Trinity of Saccargia, the Cathedral of St. Peter of Sorres and the Church of Our Lady of Tergiu are the most striking examples; the alternation of color bands, the use of two colors in the facades, the structure almost always with a single nave of great solidity and austerity. Sailko's skill was not only that of grouping them together, creating a remarkable parade of beauty and history, but also and above all that of capturing their ancestral power. They are apparitions that emerged from the ground, mystical boxes immortalized by a photographer who manages to transport this power into images.