L'opera del lunedì - Girolamo Romanino "La Passione di Cristo"

Dear friends, in this installment of Monday's work, we're focusing on a "minor artist": Girolamo da Romano, known as Romanino (Brescia, c. 1484 – c. 1566). His training took place between Brescia and Venice, influenced by Giorgione and Dürer, as evidenced by his Madonna and Child, now in the Louvre and executed in the mid-1560s. In later years, the artist turned to the Milanese illusionistic perspective techniques of Bramantino and Bernardo Zenale. The church's artistic focus is on the fresco cycle depicting the Passion of Christ, considered one of the pinnacles of Romanino's poetics. The frescoed scenes present themselves to the viewer as a complex of imposing theatricality, with the vaults populated by "Michelangelesque" figures of sibyls and prophets, and the scenes on the walls unfolding to form a sort of popular representation of the Passion, which takes place during Holy Week and involves an entire town. Giovanni Testori evocatively dubbed the frescoed church in Pisogne the "Sistine Chapel of the Poor," and during a public conversation, he explained the meaning of this title in these terms. "Look at the sibyls up here; they don't look like women returning from the woods with their panniers. [...] Pisogne, through poetic force, clings to the Sistine Chapel; it is like its otherness, the other way of experiencing Christianity, [...] Here there is a humbler way of experiencing it, more of popular and mountain heroism, more dialectal. [...] Romanino here provides the counterpoint to the word that becomes flesh; in fact, he takes the flesh of a people, of a valley, and turns it into a figurative verb." Enjoy! Remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel and activate notifications by clicking the bell to the right of the "Subscribed" button to stay up to date on the publication of our new art and culture videos!