The things that impress us in adolescence are rarely forgotten. The decadent writer Gabriele d’Annunzio narrated up to three times, in different words, his youthful encounter with an unusual masterpiece of the Quattrocento. During a visit with his father to Santa Maria della Vita, the young man sneaks into a crypt where, covered in accumulated dust, an astonishing set of terracotta figures awaits him.
At first, the recumbent Christ catches your attention. “Was he from land? “Was he of incorrupt flesh?” he wonders. Later, his eyes rest, fascinated, on a group of women “enraged by pain, maddened by pain.” They are the Virgin Mary, Mary Salomé, Mary of Cleopas and Mary Magdalene. The latter is the one that leaves the deepest mark on the poet’s mind, who compares it to “a kind of monstrous Nike”, thinking, undoubtedly, of another sculpture: the Hellenistic Victory of Samothrace.
The Portuguese José Saramago also expressed his impressions about “these women who lavish themselves on an extended body, shouting their completely human pain over a corpse that is not God: there no one expects the flesh to resurrect.”
It is impossible to contemplate Niccolò dell’Arca’s Compianto sul Cristo morto (“Crying over the Dead Christ”) with indifference, but the ensemble has not always received positive reviews. Its overwhelming expressiveness was poorly understood in Renaissance Italy, which loved elegance and restraint.
Who was the author of this terracotta set and why did he choose to represent grief in its starkest version? There is little biographical data about him. He is believed to have been born into a Dalmatian family, between 1435 and 1440, in the Apulia region of southern Italy. His formative years are a mystery, as is his journey to northern Bologna, where he receives the commission to model the Compianto around 1463.
Few other works are attributed to him, most of them also in clay, although in the Treasure Room of El Escorial there is a marble Saint John the Baptist sculpted by him. He also participated in the sarcophagus (ark in Italian) of Saint Dominic of Bologna, a collective work that earned him the nickname and which allowed him to share a chisel with a very young Michelangelo.
Among its influences, possible contacts with Flemish Gothic works have been considered, such as the forty mourners that Claus Sluter sculpted for the tomb of Philip the Bold. He may also have been inspired by Donatello’s Sorrowful Madeleines or Roberti’s Ercole.
There are similarities, but none of these works anticipates the Baroque so much, none exploits gesticulation and movement in a comparable way. The Virgin wrings her hands; María Salomé squeezes her thighs with an air of disbelief; Mary of Cleopas rejects with open palms the crude truth of the death of Christ: she is the living image of the denial phase that psychologists describe when faced with the loss of a loved one. As for the Magdalene, she seems about to throw herself on her corpse, in a flurry of cloaks and veils.
Only the men maintain their composure, specifically a repentant Saint John the Evangelist and a phlegmatic bearded character that some identify with Nicodemus and others with Joseph of Arimathea. The tongs and hammer that the plump figure wears at his belt seem to confirm this last identification, tools that he may have used to take Jesus down from the Cross. For Dell’Arca’s contemporaries, the group was also a spectacle of color, since all the figures were polychrome.
The burial of Christ is a recurring theme in the temples associated with pilgrimage sites such as Bologna, which was part of the route to Jerusalem, where the Holy Sepulcher was, precisely, the star tourist-religious attraction. Santa Maria della Vita was one of those enclaves. Knowing his history helps to understand how Niccolò dell’Arca’s unleashed pathos, despite not conforming to the most cultured taste of the Renaissance, was not only not out of place there, but was perfectly appropriate.
To begin with, the man who founded the sanctuary was not exactly restrained. His name was Raniero Barcobini Fasani and he was a Franciscan hermit who arrived in Bologna from Perugia at the end of the 13th century, inspired, as he said, by a vision of the Virgin. In each city along the way, followers were added who flagellated themselves shouting “Peace, peace!” By the time he arrived in Bologna, there were already twenty thousand. With part of them, before continuing his penitent march towards Modena, he founded a brotherhood that was to take charge of a hospital for pilgrims, which would come into operation in 1275 and would be operational until the 18th century.
It is likely that Dell’Arca found very realistic models of loss and suffering among the patients and families of this institution, which at its time had already existed for two centuries. As for visitors who came to the church to pray, they may have found comfort in a pain that mirrored their own and in the hope of the resurrection. In the words of photographer Andrea Samaritani, Compianto is not about death, but about life.
This text is part of an article published in number 611 of the magazine Historia y Vida. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
