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Home » Magazine » Focus » Magazine » Magazine


BAROQUE SICILY. WHEN HISTORY AND ART JOIN FORCES — AND WIN

Dominique Fernandez (July 31, 2021)
 *  Syracuse. Stature of Santa Lucia carried in procession in the Cathedral
 * View of Ragusa
 * 
 * Palermo, alley of the old town
 *  Palermo, Cocchieri Church, Madonna dell'Itria
 *  Palermo. Oratory Santa Cita.   Stucco of Giacomo Serpotta 
 *    Palermo. Oratory Santa Cita.   Stucco of Giacomo Serpotta
 *  Noto. Oval nave of Santa Chiara Church
 *  Syracuse. Front of The Duomo (Cathedral)
 *  Modica. Lateral portal of San Giorgio Church
 *  Syracuse. Stature of Santa Lucia carried in procession in the Cathedral
 * View of Ragusa

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With so many possible ways to visit Sicily, we decided to take you for a tour of
Sicilian cities in search of baroque treasures.

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Four baroque corners in Palermo

Palermo, alley of the old town
 Palermo, Cocchieri Church, Madonna dell'Itria
 Palermo. Oratory Santa Cita.   Stucco of Giacomo Serpotta 
   Palermo. Oratory Santa Cita.   Stucco of Giacomo Serpotta
 Noto. Oval nave of Santa Chiara Church
 Syracuse. Front of The Duomo (Cathedral)
 Modica. Lateral portal of San Giorgio Church
 Syracuse. Stature of Santa Lucia carried in procession in the Cathedral

Known throughout the world for its rowdy vitality, Palermo is also renowned for
its marvelous baroque architecture. It’s the perfect place to start our trip,
focusing on four corners all of which will surely take your breath away. The
first sports marmi mischi (colored or inlaid marble): a sumptuous local
specialty that bears witness to the wealth and politics of a few eighteenth-
century polychrome churches that never cease to amaze.

One of the most beautiful is the Chiesa del Gesù, set in the heart of a working
class neighborhood and laden with marble inlays of every color, numerous putti,
scantily clad figures, angels, peacocks, winged dogs and griffins clinging to
pillars in an lively blend of realism and fantasy.

Behind the altar, in the recesses of the choir, the sculptor Vitagliano
recreated scenes from the Old Testament taken from the story of David. The
statues are set against a backdrop of yellow and blue inlay and depict three
workaday commoners – a miller, a vintner and a man delivering bread – who stand
in sharp contrast to the church’s theatrical pomp, naturalist motifs in a
lyrical setting. Palazzo Gangi, our second baroque corner, was made famous by
Visconti in his movie Il Gattopardo (The Leopard).  

A remnant of Palermo’s old aristocracy, Palazzo Gangi is the only family house
of its kind in such good condition, thanks to the ingenious work of the current
owner, a woman from Lyons who married Prince Gangi. The princess offers private
tours of the adjoining halls she has restored bit by bit, wall hanging by wall
hanging, trinket by trinket – repairing, gluing, scrubbing and polishing with
admirable earnestness and self-sacrifice.

Rare cabinets, chandeliers teeming with branches, armchairs with gnarled feet
and intricate lace adorn every room without a care for how much it once cost –
or will cost in the future. The ballroom and adjoining hall of mirrors are among
the most beautiful antique remnants of a class that has all but disappeared.
What impeccable taste! What unpretentious beauty!   

On the third corner we find the three oratories decorated by Giacomo Serpotta, a
stucco worker about whom little is known. In fact, his talents never made it off
the island. Besides his work on the Santo Spirito Monastery in Agrigento,
Serpotta exclusively operated in Palermo, where he was born in 1656 and died in
1732. His body, buried in the basement of the Chiesa di San Matteo, disappeared
when the cemetery was removed. Until recently, there had been no mention of his
work. For two and a half centuries, he was forgotten, confirming how little
Sicilians care to boast of their reputation.

Or should their silence be attributed to indifference? Contempt? Distaste for
attention? Sicilians, you might say, prefer to stay in the shadows, where their
talents may remain intact, intangible, sacred, like a diamond in the depths of a
mine. Indeed inside Serpotta’s three oratories you will discover the work of a
sculptor of striking imagination and skill, whose medium was not marble or
bronze but stucco.

The artist’s specialty was a snake or lizard (serpiotta) that he would sometimes
carve into the corner of his statues. Serpotta’s world is entirely white, and
you’re not immediately aware of it, given that the first oratory he worked on,
the Rosario in San Domenico, houses massive paintings by van Dyck, Pietro
Novelli and other famous artists, which are embedded in the walls and above the
altar.

In the next chapel Serpotta decorated, Santa Zita, a flurry of white shapes
fills the space. You see nothing but white – life-size female Virtues and
playful putti frolicking about like acrobats, skipping, swaying, playing with
their mouths and genitals, among garlands of roses, bunches of fruit, and war
trophies. But this child-like space can’t muffle the noise of war: the Battle of
Lepanto is rendered in admirable detail in a large panel above the entrance and
between two older boys—one, holding his head high and staring insolently,
symbolizes the victor; the other, in a turban, the defeated Turks. The twelve
alcoves along the walls reveal the mysteries of the Rosary.

These miniature theaters were fashioned with exquisite precision and poetry.
Serpotta may have never set foot off the island, but his deep understanding of
perspective makes you wonder if his bas- reliefs were borrowed from Donatello.
Shapes gradually recede, creating a sense of depth. The last oratory is in San
Lorenzo, adjacent to the church of San Francesco d’Assisi, and introduces a new
kind of human next to the serious Virtues and whimsical babies, several naked
adolescents stretched out or prone in poses redolent of Michelangelo’s Ignudi or
those by Carracci in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome.

The total absence of adult men among dozens of figures is novel and mysterious;
it’s a world of white with only women and children. When Serpotta was fourteen
years old, his father was sent to the galleys and died a slave. Does the color
white, combined with the absence of virile characters, suggest a boy who has
erased his father from his mind? Or is it a post-mortem homage to the idealized
criminal according to the Sicilian code of omertà?

Our fourth and last corner lies at the opposite of this relatively sober style.
It is represented by the over-the-top baroque of Bagheria, a small town about
ten miles from Palermo. Here, the Prince of Palagonia topped the wall
surrounding his villa with extravagant “monsters” that would startle Goethe, one
of the first visitors to see them. Dwarfs riding lions, hunchbacks donning large
wigs, dragons with donkey ears, bird-women, fish-men, and oversized heads on
contorted bodies. If you attribute them to the wild imaginings of the mentally
insane, then you fail to grasp the Mediterranean mindset.

Like a Pirandello character, the “mad” prince was fully aware of what he was
doing. Humor and ridicule were to blame, not mental illness. Indeed, chances are
he commissioned these statues to tarnish the image of a Sicily forever bound by
the cult of restraint and reason. Bagheria’s brand of baroque is merely an
exaggeration of a quintessential island trait: a tendency to defy Greek clichés
and impatiently dispel a myth that had reduced the island to a subject of
academic investigation.

On the contrary, what has best represented Sicily since the end of antiquity are
not the columns you see on the temples, the tiered seats in the theaters or the
grandeur of the ruins, but rather art that express a lust for life, the direct
result of a tragic and turbulent history and the constant threat of violence
from the earth and below the earth – the island’s erratic earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions. “Sicilitude” is a permanent state of anxiety. Mount Etna
beckons.

Lava, basalt, blackened prisms, black lava flows, heaps of carbonized ash,
clouds of black smoke, random craters formed by ice melt: the world as it was, a
telluric jumble. It’s not uncommon to emerge from the slag heaps and see a shrub
suddenly burst into flames, reclaimed by the fire underneath the surface. How
can you maintain your composure or your bourgeois lifestyle when you can’t even
trust the earth your house stands on? It’s as if the notion of saving for the
future, planning ahead, meeting obligations and building a career did not exist
in Sicily. What’s the point when at any minute it could all go up in smoke?

Catania

The provinces of Catania, Ragusa and Syracuse were devastated by the 1693
earthquake. Catania was almost entirely rebuilt out of Etna’s lava and rock,
which explains the city’s strange black hue. A rational urban plan was drawn up.
Streets were designed to intersect at right angles (or almost) and, unlike the
labyrinth that is Palermo, hold very few surprises. The austere monuments are
baroque, which was the style of the day.

Around 1730, the city’s authorities called on the architect Giovanni Battista
Vaccarini, a native of Catania who trained in Rome. He brought the noble and
grand Roman style to Sicily and extinguished any local imagination. His greatest
works are the city hall and the facade of the cathedral in Catania’s Piazza del
Duomo. There is something about them that is regular and cold, a curious blend
of puritanism and the baroque, further underscored by the juxtaposition of white
stone and black lava.  

Catania is home to less officious but infinitely more delightful places and
monuments. Near the port, the facade of Palazzo Biscari is laden with herms,
putti and copious floral decorations. Inside the palace, the ballroom, which has
an uneven, arched ceiling decorated with stucco and painted with extravagant
volutes, is punctuated by an oval opening that draws the eye to a cupola with an
allegoric fresco.

The Via dei Crociferi is “short but infinitely beautiful,” according to writer
Vitaliano Brancati. Covered in gates and chains, San Giuliano, San
Francesco Borgia, San Benedetto and the other churches lining this street evoke
a past where devotion, intrigue and gluttony (the pastries and ice cream in
Catania are divine!) come together powerfully and harmoniously.

There are also sumptuous railings on the balcony overhanging the splendid
doorway on the facade of Palazzo Valle. The railings were enlarged to
accommodate women’s panniered dresses (fashion in Sicily was still dictated by
Spanish pomp and circumstance). Too opulent and exuberant for Rome, the curves
and counter- curves of the palace’s gallery make it one of the most
beautiful balconies in all of Sicily. Lastly, the gigantic proportions and
abundance of diamond shaped bossages, caryatids, putti and floral patterns
swallowing up the windows and balconies of the monastery and church of San
Nicolò are as ostentatious as any monastery in Mexico.  

Southeast Sicily

The southeastern towns of Noto, Modica, Ragusa, and Scicli were also destroyed
in 1693. Noto, razed to the ground, was reconstructed at a new site several
miles away, marking the beginning of the area’s reconstruction. Since baroque
was the fashion of the day – though no one knew it as such – the area was
rebuilt in the baroque style. As a result, the group of towns that were rebuilt
exemplifies what we now refer to as Sicilian baroque, which is quite different
from Roman or even Palermitan baroque.

A less sumptuous, more country, more earthy baroque. No marble or gold but a
soft, golden-colored stone ingeniously dispensed. The architect Rosario
Gagliardi (like Serpotta, an unknown) used the slope of the land to form the
facades of the Chiesa di San Giorgio in Modica, the Chiesa di San Giorgio in
Ragusa, and open- air theaters that used the sun as a spotlight. Noto, or Netum,
was built from the ground up. It is the most successfully reconstructed city and
the most spectacular surprise in all of Sicily. Built into the side of a hill,
the city boasts a main street flanked by honey-hued limestone religious
buildings all facing the same direction.

The first is the conventional Chiesa di San Francesco, which sits atop an
immense staircase with three landings. Then there is the cathedral, whose
staircase is equally monumental. A bit farther along, Rosario Gagliardi’s Chiesa
di San Domenico has a convex facade with two orders and columns. The portal has
a broken pediment and a semi- circular crown between two broken half-pediments.
The street runs east to west and, in the late afternoon, the sun illuminates the
gold limestone and accentuates the churches’ angles, creating a lyrical, solar
parade unlike anything else you’ll see in Europe.

It is, however, pointless to go inside these churches. Contrary to what you’d
find in Palermo, their interiors are bare, cold, unexciting. They are all about
the profane pleasure of the spectacle, not somber devotion. The decor created by
the curves and counter curves, ceremonious staircases, added archways, pilasters
and capitals of these facades would seem extravagant if it were not for the soft
and sensual color of the stone. As for Noto’s Villadorata princes, their only
claim to fame is the over ornate anthropomorphic and zoomorphic corbels found
under the six balconies of their palace.

Syracuse

Finally we arrive in Syracuse. Surrounded by water, Ortygia – the former heart
of the city, a white oasis in the sea, a kind of lagoon – is the most beautiful
city in Sicily. The island’s history can be read in the cathedral. In the
beginning, it was a Greek temple dedicated to the goddess Athena. When it was
transformed into a Christian basilica, the powerful Doric columns were
integrated into the new structure and are still visible from both inside and
out. In 1728, a superb baroque facade was added by Palermo architect Andrea
Palma.

A facade with two orders is joined by opulent volutes and adorned with columns
and statues ingeniously detached from the wall, which create a sense of depth.
The miracle is how these three styles are reunited so vibrantly and
harmoniously. In front of this impressive aggregate building is a white piazza
paved in white flagstones and flanked by white palaces and coffee shops where
you can order white almond milk, the nectar of the gods. (The best almond milk
is served at Minerva, a bar to the left of the cathedral.) At the back of the
piazza, in the small ultra baroque church of Santa Lucia, with its pot-bellied
iron balconies, hangs the Burial of Saint Lucy, Caravaggio’s famous work painted
in Syracuse. The two giant gravediggers in the foreground create a perfectly
baroque disproportion in this powerful, tragic scene.




Tags 
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visconti
sicily
santo spirito monastery in agrigento
palermo
palazzo gangi
il gattopardo
history
chiesa del gesu'
baroque
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