MEDIEVAL INSPIRATION FOR A PICTORIAL JOURNEY

The Middle Ages were penalized for a long time compared to other periods of history.
Fortresses and cities built to defend themselves from the "warlike neighbor" are still today the result of a great engineering knowledge that leaves us amazed.The fortified citadels with the square and the church identified the people who lived there. If the Renaissance is inspired by ancient Greek and Roman history Medieval men are the true inventors of their own knowledge and art.The corrupt, brutalized, worldly and politicized Church of the sixteenth century was far from the evangelical poverty preached by German Protestantism and this determined the desire to recreate a reformed Roman church in the historical and artistic Renaissance grandeur that condemned the culture of Northern Europe, the cradle of Protestantism and of Gothic art, as an enemy of Roman Catholicism.
A different conception will take place between 1600 and 1700.
Of course, the Middle Ages were not a splendid time in which everyone, being able to go back, would have liked to live, the barbarism of social relations and religious superstition blinded every glimmer of reason. But the middle age was a period of great artistic and cultural development. A historical era rich in experiences that academic research has studied, deepened, cataloged and ultimately handed over to contemporary history.
In the 1800s there are deep ties to the chivalrous values of the medieval community, which are totally lacking in the overly individualistic modern society in which romantics feel deeply uncomfortable and out of place.
Rediscovering an historical era involves a deeper and more intimate perspective. It means going beyond the personal vision of beauty in the promotion and enhancement of the heritage of the past.
The composition of this volume with images related to my imagination is an operation of simple invention and a reuse of the perception of the Middle Ages which, until the beginning of the twentieth century, was largely the heritage of professional historians only and not of artists.
It is precisely my simplified images, abstracted from the context, typified and made "ahistorical", that constitute the imaginary of the Middle Ages still present today: age of violence and at the same time of courage, superstition and strong religiosity, ignorance and darkness, but also of strong feelings, an age of barbarism and incivility, of fear and, at the same time, of audacity.