Alessandro Falassi

ENZO SANTINI: A PROPHET IN HIS OWN LAND

No one is a prophet in his own land. Not even he, Enzo Santini. Born in 1930, he was an artist since the early days of a difficult, terrible childhood marked by the first bloom of his artistic vocation—helped along by his professor Leo Rossi—and further shadowed by the pain of witnessing the suffering of his anti-fascist father, who was not only persecuted but also horrifically tortured in the “Casermetta” (Barracks) at number 9, Via Malavolti in Siena.

Yes. I think it is here, in this experience, that the horrible ghosts and the mad anatomies appearing so often in his work have their origin. These fantasies, seeming at times like painful hallucinations, probe the dark side of existence in order to give shape to the sacred and profane nightmares of Siena. The City of the Virgin is also the City of Venus, and it is a place of the soul, home to roaming demons and, for those astute enough to see them, to the horrible spectres that once tormented St. Catherine of Siena.

Certainly, experts in the field knew about the work and the career of Santini from the very start. One need only recall the three times (1986, 1988, 1991) he took part in the Salon des Indépendents in Paris at the Grand Palais, the legendary place and legendary exposition that has enlightened European culture since the time of the Impressionists.

The population of Siena as a whole, however, discovered him only in July of 1992 when he was called upon to create the Palio (won by the Eagle contrada)—a wise commission on the part of the City of Siena, which regularly comes under attack by the gossip of the lower ranks regarding every choice and every painter, be they favoured or excluded. Enzo Santini produced an essential banner in a faux traditional style, the iconological field of which is reduced to three elements: beneath the sky of Siena, it shows the city, the Virgin, and the horse.

What a shame that there is no trace of the words Omar Calabrese and I, en route to Paris, exchanged one memorable night on that occasion! The main gist was this: we noted the strength, undiluted by uncertainty, of the system of signs Santini had developed for the single purpose of conveying the quintessence of serenity from within, up close and powerful.

Each of its elements was distorted—amiably, incredibly, decidedly. We played with the Latin. “Omne Trinum Tertium no datur,” but in the case of Siena, the saying should be “Tertium datur.” Here it was, right here, the Sienese trinity beneath its sky, which was not only black and blue but also azure and cobalt and lapis lazuli, copied from the crystalline and bright sky depicted since antiquity through the old, old technique of encaustic painting, learned and practiced by Santini, which gives a meta-historical, metaphysical patina and glow to his works. From its skies, not Assisi’s Giotto, comes the sky of the Palio.

The Madonna—open, ye Skies, and split, thou Earth—looks astonishingly Asian, sweet and metaphysical universalistic icon, ecumenical sign of ideal beauty, of steadfast composure. She, as painted by Santini, is a Madonna for the entire world, an unprecedented and mysterious variation upon the dear and never-ending iconography, not imported into the iconography of the Palio but produced from the Sienese marrow of tradition.

In this banner, the Madonna is connected by a swirling pictorial swathe to the horse, itself dramatically and horribly distorted, in a definitive drama of triumph and defeat, paradise and inferno, exaltation and damnation. It is a horse that shudders and neighs, paws the ground and falls, falls and rears up—in the race it will be an irrevocable and terrible sign of destiny, of an all-or-nothing struggle.

At the foot of the vortex winding around and twisting Mary and the horse is a monochromatic architecture that seems to have emerged from a salt mine or from a travertine quarry, an architecture that shows the coats of arms of the Contrada and of the institutions in their eternal solidity; to bring them to life, the painter has highlighted them with a touch of blood-red. And in the end, there is the image of the city, bare and without inhabitants, in all its architectural essentiality, as the Paris of Dubuffet was metaphysical.

It is a sidereal Siena, recognizably Gothic in its iconicity and in the vividness of its features: the gate, the tower, the dome, the cross, the arch, the roof terrace. It recalls the great pictorial

wellsprings, such as the Siena of Duccio and the Siena of Sano di Pietro, yet the Siena of Santini is the most unsettling, the most naked in rawness and in memory.

This icon of Siena reappears many times in Santini’s work. There is one such large-scale image holding court within the Enoteca I Terzi, a restaurant destined perhaps to a Via Bagutta kind of future, Sienese style. This Siena, anything but reassuring, stands in contrast to the Mediterranean iconography Santini employed in painting an analogously stylized and utterly recognizable Avignon characterized by a few signs, especially the pointed pinnacles of the Palais des Papes.

The Mediterranean is the physical and metaphysical setting of the great cycle of paintings dedicated to St. Catherine, the most impressive work of our painter. Upon its completion, the Catherinian cycle by Enzo Santini went on a lengthy and uninterrupted tour of the world from 1994 to 2012, tracing pathways unfathomable to me, taking it away from Siena along a remarkable route: Warsaw, Grenoble, San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, New York, Avignon, Florence, Toronto, Chiusdino, Bruxelles, Plaisance, Wetzlar, Treviso, Venice, Pienza. This is due, certainly, to the value, to the tenacity, to the diplomacy, to the public relations personnel, and to the artistic CV of Santini. Also, perhaps, without invoking mysterious machinations or predestination, it could be said that Santini struck a special chord in depicting matters superhuman, terrestrial and celestial, abstract and concrete in connection with St. Catherine’s story. Her journey and her universal message are communicated through the eleven luminous encaustic paintings by Enzo Santini.

The most unforgettable among them remain, in my opinion, La Meditazione (Meditation), La Preghiera del ritorno (Prayer of the Return), and La Contemplazione della croce (Contemplation of the Cross).

In Meditation, the Saint is shown looking beautiful and sensual, serene though she is at the column, like Christ. A metaphysical breeze blows, transporting us to a night in which time has stopped, while the Saint contemplates the “arcana dei” (secrets of God) which she has been allowed to see, the world beyond.

In Prayer of the Return, painted in vivid hues, the Saint bodily seizes upon, almost attacks, Gregory XI, a hesitant and cowardly pope, urging him to return the Papacy to Rome, the inevitable great step which, in Catherine’s view, was unquestionable and sacrosanct.

Contemplation of the Cross evokes and captures the Mediterranean, as Picasso did in Antibes, in its clear form and its dazzling light.

It is important to comment on the portraits of great personages whom Santini confronts as if in a duel, powerful and direct face-offs with contemporaneity—at times with unexpected aggressiveness. We need only mention those of Mel Gibson, of Barak Obama, of Mario Luzi. They are heads that talk; they are immediately examined, interpreted and almost surgically emptied of their vital spirit, like death masks of old. With unexpected determination, their psyche is stripped bare by a painter known for his placid, civilized, Sienese manners. But it is widely known, as an old saying attests, that the Sienese reach the bone before the meat.

THE CYCLE OF THE LOOK

Devotees to St. Catherine have always been accustomed to regard life, death and miracles not as separate images but in pictorial cycles: Giovanni di Paolo's in the 1400s, the one by Sodoma, to those painted a century ago by Alessandro Franchi in the Saint's house and including those others painted over the centuries in the Oratorio of the Oca, in the great kitchen of the Benincasa family, in the Chiesa del Crocifisso and in the Cappella delle Volte of San Domenico.

Each of those cycles demonstrates a substantial lack of homogeneity, even to those painted by the same artist. "Because it is impossible to reduce the duality of St. Catherine Benincasa' s experience to a single icon, theme or tonality" according to Raymond Fawtier, her major biographer.

In fact, Catherine was a forceful and impassioned participator ("my nature is fire") in the political, social, religious and even military events of her time wherein she moved with her own particular brand of logie and visionary determination which leaves us amazed.

Her focus, though, lay elsewhere, beyond worldly things, fixed on divinity and eternity. When, against her will, she had to consider worldly matters, she viewed them with "the eye of intellect" inquiring into the metaphysical core rather then exterior aspects: the truth that lies beyond appearances.

The cycle by Enzo Santini, a Sienese painter who already explored abstraction and the search for the essential in both his "gothic sidereal" and in "Mediterranean metaphysics" dear to Picasso and De Chirico, has the merit of offering us in particular Catherine's intense and concentrated gaze, which is the real guiding principle in this new cycle.

In the portrait which opens the cycle, Catherine is absorbed in the quiet contemplation of life after death ("she had seen the mystery of the gods") and her portrait with its lowered gaze seems like a variation on the theme by Andrea Vanni from the end of the 14th century.

In the "Meditazione", however, Catherine, claimed like Christ to the pillar, fixes her gaze beyond earthly considerations to a higher plane in accordance with the ideas of her time which viewed the metaphysical as "above". Contemplation transports one beyond the harmony of worldly matters (the 'world' in that period also meant one's town) to that of the heavenly, from the micro to the macrocosm.

Santini, however, paints into Catherine's gaze both a Picasso-like agitation "the Temptation of the flesh" ("One should arm oneself with one's own sensuality" wrote Catherine) as well as a tormented vision of damned souls, with Siena as a celestial city, plunged in the nocturnal light of gothic intellect and of the stars: a theme which Santini has turned to on other occasions. Again, an ecstatic and Mediterranean form of contemplation, with the vision of the Cross as a source of light - the light of the Mediterranean which Catherine had sailed in her travels (as with Picasso in Antibes). Finally, closed inside the precise framework of a large miniature which has reminded many of Liberale of Verona, is the dramatic, blazing gaze which so struck and affected the Pope, leading him to return to Rome ("Be a real man" a comment reflecting his weak spiritual leadership). In the "Ecstasies", Catherine's gaze is not fixed but is absorbed in contemplating divinity. Turning back to worldly affairs, Catherine's gaze is lost in the powerful drama of "The Exorcism", then her gaze is extinguished in "Death".

But the reflected light of her gaze still roams the world today, as in these lucid paintings by Santini, destined to create far those who look at them yet other images, some, perhaps, visionary.