In the picture the great partition wall of 1529, fairly considered the most famous Renaissance fresco of Swiss, a work not just given by Bernardino Luini, but to him commissioned and paid as his own payment receipts to the Sponsors can document.

 

 

 

It is about the rising again : a human experience, then an unavoidable thought, ascribable indeed to an added value and to a further profit. However it is easily rejected… The Sun rises without any work, (that is, it cannot resurrect).

I was thinking about the above, when I was in front of the complicated fresco made by the great master Bernardino Luini, excellent disciple of Leonardo Da’ Vinci and here in his professional maturity making him a demanded teacher throughout  Lombardy, Piemonte and up to the Swiss Canton Ticino.

We are in ‘Santa Maria degli Angioli’, charming and simple Romanesque church, standing just a little back on the Lugano lake-front : what visitor would you ever expect, coming to this largest partition wall, about one hundred ten square meters and richly painted, without any visual pause on which a lively city is described, with garnished horses and elegant knights, armed guards and mothers with children, passers-by and common men and women, merchants busying, notaries and shopkeepers while bustling about their daily and provincial jobs ?  

If it weren’t for those refined spears, pointed at the three men on the Cross, half-naked and grieving but up there where any glance can’t get. Who ever infact would like to be in their place?

The heresy therefore is winding and winking, indulgent however among the Observants, minor friars coming from Milan, who around 1473 were  well received at Lugano due to their work of pacification accomplished among the opposite city factions of Guelphs and Ghibellines, and to their own assistance to plague patients : the convent was founded in 1490 and the first stone of the church was placed in 1499.

Loyal to the ‘Bernardinian module’ which had single nave churches equipped with a partition wall high to the ceiling in order to separate the area reserved for religious, the believers of Lugano were coming here and got Eucharist, but they were assailed by dark sermons and nihilism. Resurrection was an uncomfortable item indeed, in these churches and we find it just allocated into a little corner, upwards on the right side of the fresco, like into a  cupboard under lock and key.

In brief, on that enormous and colourful blackboard, the ‘lectio’ clearly says to the assembly to deal with what everyone is entitled to on Earth, so dodging the divine punishment but, on the other hand, thanking the Sponsors, who renewed in 1496 that agreement in remembrance of the peace already drawn up in 1445 among  the factions of Lugano, to get an earthly Power in the name of God.

The title for the fresco is ‘Passion and Crucifixion’, where Jesus is  diminished to just one of the three men and the ‘imitatio Christi’ – spoken ironically indeed – can’t be a human ambition, but only a leaden servant premonition.

It is too early for that Council in Trento which in the second half of ‘500 had to recall the strength of  Carlo Borromeo Cardinal and Bishop of Milan, maybe the only one protagonist, in order to put out the greediness of heresies culminated in the Schism of the Protestant reform ?

Engaged without any energy saving on such a vast field, that saint and also so torn man could at least indicate, by his own humanity, that resurrecting is then possible.

Neverthless, without any delegation.

 

                                                         Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – August 5, 2019