WTI Magazine #10    2013 Dec, 20
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

Speaking of Italian Baroque is always very generalizing and sometimes an understatement. There are examples of Baroque in every region of Italy and almost always they have different properties with very connotative details and a final yield always recognizable as belonging to that place.

Rome, Lecce, Naples and Venice are the most famous bits of an architectural style that is always assimilated with Italy. But it maybe is in Sicily that the baroque flourishes in a truly entrenched way, creating generations of style and variety of outcomes in buildings and churches, also because of the wide diversity of materials that the island has always been able to offer. We will argue in the next few months about the Val di Noto, while today we want to tell about the more purely decorative aspect with the greatest plasterer in the history of Italian art: Giacomo Serpotta.

The "Stucco" is an artistic technique that is based on the speed of drying of a layer of lime and plaster that agglomerates on a wood and metal structure. Shaping faces, movements, fabrics, telling stories and making it all artistically valid is very difficult, but here we are talking about excellence.

The first major innovation that Serpotta brings is a final polish to his works, as to say a passage of marble powder and slaked lime which makes the sculptures gloss and very similar to marble. Stylistically, however, starting from a base of Bernini - especially Bernini's Ecstasy of St. Teresa of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni - Serpotta invents a new style, where the forms are detached from the walls, crawling around cornices and friezes, protrude from the edges and fling themselves in the air ... they create dynamism, with drapery and tension, twisting from wall to wall or, as in the Cornaro Chapel by Bernini, they remain active spectators of the scenes depicted in boxes as if they were windows or historical paintings in three dimensions.

In Giacomo Serpotta's oratories everything moves, tells, lives in a gleam of white on white that takes the viewer to perfectly focus on the subjects perfectly depicted, to pay attention to the monochrome to enjoy the different shades caused by the rapid changes of the daytime. It is a riot of movement, pathos, representation, aesthetics and craftsmanship.

In the "Oratorio del Rosario" in Santa Cita all this becomes even more magnificent, thus becoming emblematic of Serpotta's work. In 1685 the sculptor was asked to decorate the chapel of the "Compagnia del Rosario": here he combines the representation of the fifteen mysteries of the rosary, to the theme of virtue and the historic celebration of the battle of Lepanto, symbol of the victory of Christianity over the Ottoman Empire. Everything is conveyed by dozens of cherubs that move the surface of the counter-frames and by the cornices that frame the bas-reliefs of the battle or of the mysteries, cluttering the space of the Virtues which paradoxically almost become statues, losing completely the perception of the grout of which they are made. All in a shining light that in the late morning explodes like a white fire.

With his decorations in ten oratories and ten churches in Palermo, Serpotta almost unconsciously becomes the forerunner of the rococo, but especially becomes the precursor of the kind of decoration called "patisserie" that will be very successful in Central Europe in the further centuries.