2023-08-11 20:46:49
by GIAN ANTONIO STELLA
The sculpture made on the basis of the Shroud is exhibited in the church of San Domenico under the Crucifix «of the fishermen»: the hyper-realistic reproduction and a story of devotion
«It is said that it is the work of St. Luke the Evangelist, having worked four similar ones, and that it was in Constantinople, and in the time that Maometo 2°, emperor of the Turks, took the said City, which would be the year 1453 (… ) all the good and valuable of that great Metropolis had been thrown into the sea, and on that occasion also said Veneranda et insigne Immagine, and which then by divine will, floating above the water, came to land in this City…».
The same Antonio Boscolo, notary, who wrote in the eighteenth century of the miraculous discovery in the Memorie diversi della Città di Chiozza did not claim to have absolute certainty of how and where the statue had been built and how it had ended up four centuries earlier right there, in Chioggia, in the monastery of San Domenico built by the Dominicans in 1290. What is certain is that, beyond the legends, the extraordinary wooden Crucifix rescued from the waters has since then been venerated with moving devotion by the fishermen of the lagoon and the Gulf of Venice who they rely on him going out with boats. Aware of how the Adriatic may be a basin compared to the oceans but is capable of tremendous anger that has always prompted sailors to pray: «Lord, bless you, the sea and the sea / everything is at your discretion / we’ll come to ask you grace / I threw the beef into zenucion. // Degneve We beg you to hear / from no other povareti this prayer / that you see a woman with anemia and a heart / a fisherman can make it comfortable…».
And it is right there, at the foot of the altar and the grandiose wooden crucifix that dominates the Dominican church, that the silicone body of «Mystery Man» has been lying for a few days, to remain there until the beginning of January. That is, the man of the Holy Shroud as it was reconstructed in the laboratory thanks to the information provided to scientists by the famous shroud which suddenly appeared in 1353 in the hands of a knight named Geoffroy de Charny in the small French village of Lirey, ended up a century later among the Savoy properties in Chambéry and from there, after a few decades, to Turin where it is kept in the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista.
What the museum initiative is, curated by Álvaro Blanco, commissioned by ArtiSplendore, hosted in Chioggia thanks also to the editorial director of the Vatican dicastery for Communication Andrea Tornielli and the mayor Mauro Armelao, visited in the Spanish cathedral of Salamanca by over one hundred and twenty thousand people, a request after the Venetian months from other cities including New York and St. Petersburg, readers know. An exhibition which, to use the words of the promoters, offers «a real journey through art, history and science, aimed at retracing the last moments of the life of Christ and the particular events linked to the Shroud» with «a immersive room, in which five hundred representations of Jesus show the evolution of the iconography of Christ through the centuries, from the early Christian era to the present».
A fascinating overview. To flow precisely, after a path that recalls the centuries of studies on the Shroud up to the images of Secondo Pia, the lawyer and expert photographer who in 1898 obtained from the Savoy royal permission to take the first photographs of the Shroud for two days, discovering how « the negative plate revealed the perfect image of a man just like Jesus Christ», in the hyper-realistic reconstruction of the body that was wrapped in the sheet.
A body covered in blood, the hair and beard stuck together, the head wounded by the mocking crown of thorns made with the sharp branches of the jujube, the legs bent by rigor mortis, the skin scourged by one hundred and fifty blows inflicted with the flagrum, a three-pronged whip which ended with metal spheres called taxili «which tore at the skin and flesh of the prisoner» with such ferocity as to be forbidden against Roman citizens. And reserved only for the worst evildoers.
An image to take your breath away. Even more impactful, not only for believers, for that formidable comparison, a few meters higher, with the Crucifix of San Domenico that hangs over the nave. A work which, as explained in the book Christ and the church of San Domenico edited by Vincenzo Tosello (published by Nuova Scintilla, 2006), who is not only a passionate scholar of the church but also the parish priest, «measures overall in height 4.87 meters and 3.50 meters wide, weighs about 180 kilograms, the cross has the shape of a gnarled trunk with thin curved arms». A Christ nailed to a cross which is «an evident reference to the tree, both for its accentuated knots, and for the shape of the arms, slightly inclined upwards, like branches deriving from the trunk». Below the image of a dove, the scroll reads: «Mors Christi dura monstratur in ista figura». «The death of Christ is revealed in all its harshness in this effigy».
«The vehement unbridled passion expressed in the face has a Rhenish imprint, but almost all the other morphological signs refer to the Strasbourg current», wrote the Gorizia scholar Geza de Francovich in 1938, «but it is certain that no one can say with certainty whether it comes from from the East or from South Tyrol, since the historical documents are completely missing». The Crucifix is a mystery, the Shroud is a mystery. Joined together, in the church of San Domenico full of many ex voto «for graces received» left over the centuries by those who saved themselves from countless shipwrecks, a church close to the canal cluttered with fishing boats, between huge piles of nets and smells of the sea the nostrils, from those constant references in the Gospels to fishing, to fish, to the Sea of Galilee, to the apostles gathered among the fishermen.
And it is impossible to review without emotion the black and white photos of that Crucifix carried in procession on fishing boats and bragozzi that have imprinted that image of their devotion on the prow and on the sails themselves. A statue so large that in order to take it out of the church before a special winch was invented to put «el Cristo de sbiego» through the entrance portal, it was necessary in 1814, after the defeat of Napoleon and the liberation of Pope Pius VII prisoner in Paris, tearing down a piece of the facade.
Then, of course, virtuously restored.
August 10, 2023 (change August 11, 2023 | 20:28)
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