Full of Light. The earthly Mary by Giuseppe Gianì

The narration of the sacred, in Christian-Catholic spirituality, has been entrusted to iconography over the centuries. Biblical scenes beautifully decorate the vaults and arches of our churches. Images and symbols, even before their artistic value, were designed with a view to a pedagogy of peoples, an education to the major events of sacred history. Their majesty still communicates today the absolute peaks of the divine and the human reaching towards them.

A vertigo. Narrations, the biblical ones, which have spanned the centuries and have adapted to men and women of all times, because the sacred language is in time, it is a splinter of the infinite which, like Christ, is incarnated in the temporality of the living and speaks the their language. The same happens in the iconographic representation. The works of the painter Giuseppe Gianì that are part of the “Full of Light” cycle are an extraordinary example of a sacred chipped over time.

Twelve panels depicting the life of Mary and made to decorate the Church of the Madonna delle Grazie in Ispica, commissioned by the Confraternity, with the approval of the Diocese of Noto and thanks to the generosity of some families. Twelve panels with the colors of the earth, in which the figure of the Madonna emerges from a unique, bright and warm background, as the protagonist of a story that is as divine as it is deeply human. The verses of Alda Merini echo the artist’s gaze: “I am only an adolescent land, / a land that becomes a flower / and a flower that becomes earth. / Why a virgin if I am the mother of all? / Why a mother if I am a virgin without borders? / Why the atrocious doubt of faith? / Why this great loving crucifixion? “.

Through the panels of Gianì we see the Mother of God grow and change, she expresses joy, absolute presence, care, disturbance, pain, since the moment of her loving initiation: “I opened myself like a book in front of you, / a book full of earthly measures, / a book full of the flowers of youth, Lord … / And suddenly You appeared, / for me, who enjoyed the tenderness of my adolescence, / for me, who felt young / and ready for all battles of life, / for me, who had the shield of the word ”.

She is a young woman overwhelmed by the mystery, Maria. She carries within her the youthful ardor that is a challenge to the canons of the time, because this is the task of every new generation. She is benevolence and trust towards Joseph, her husband, who caresses her belly with a moved and loving gesture that already makes him a father from the moment of her conception. In this way she breaks the rhetoric about a male who will mature after the birth of his son the paternal feeling; she subverts the prejudice against a male who is always inadequate in expressing his emotions and his ability to care.

Once again, Giuseppe Gianì’s narration offers the Word the opportunity to splinter itself in the time we live. His Mary rushes to Elizabeth, in full spirit of sisterhood: the two women look alike, the same cloak covers their shoulders, the colors are those of the earth that makes them mothers and allows them, starting from their condition, an immediate understanding. , an ancestral solidarity. How beautiful Maria is when she hugs her newborn son to her chest, gathered in a fetal position. On her own skin she lays her son, on her breast, in her heart.

Mary’s heart is the new womb in which the child will continue to be kept. Mary is a full woman, a total woman, a mother between heaven and earth. It is she who, like a priestess, presents her son to the temple. Rooted on a slab that has the shape of the inevitable destiny of a cross, she raises her son to heaven, so that he may be filled with divine light: she delivers herself together with her son, whatever his destiny, there will be her hands to support him. Mary will be there to educate him, to accompany his steps: she is firm, solid, in love with her son, persevering and loving.

Faced with the destiny of Christ, Mary remains proud in her contrition, she knows that the pain belongs to her child, she must be root and trunk, support, conscious and silent closeness, priestess of her pain. A mother knows, she recognizes the upset and pain in her child, and she stays. However, Maria bleeds, the red drapery of her dress, like that of her son, it is maternal that bleeds, it is a torn belly that restores her pain to the earth. She is desperate for the radical pain, the absolute pain of her son’s death. A pain that upsets the soul and distorts her face.

He calls God to his omnipotence, he invokes him, he reproaches him. “My son, / sleeps on my legs. / My son, / who is no longer alive. / Misery of me, / or universe … / Miserere of me / who died with him”. But then, in the empty tomb, while she tightens the sheet that no longer covers the body of Christ, Mary’s face becomes young again, the tears stop on the threshold of the mystery, her gaze hints at joy and looks at hope. “He is alive, / he is alive, / my mother flesh cries out.” Joy, hope and the ability to trust in the mystery restore youth to Mary.

The soul is this timeless thing that stirs within us and Mary’s soul let itself be felt by every human being and remained alive. With the momentum of the flight, Maria conquers her sky. She recomposed in her youth, she sits on the throne, at the gates of heaven. She is the complete woman. She is the eternal feminine. Demeter-Kore-Persephone-Maya. Mother, girl, queen, priestess. Her womb is pregnant, it is perennial motherhood, continuous creation, tireless generator of grace. “Greet in her / the door of the blessed smile / and the future omniscience: / she has foreseen everything / because although she has no roots / Mary is the only root of the world”. Thanks to Maestro Giuseppe Gianì for this restitution of a sacred that goes to the human heart.

Full of Light. The earthly Mary by Giuseppe Gianì