Enzo Santini

The drappellone

For a Sienese to make a drappellone (the Palio banner) is a doubly demanding task: for the artist, who has to paint on a silk cloth of unusual dimensions and for the true contradaiolo, who has to overcome his emotional involvement. The challenge mainly concerned the need to infuse harmony into the entire banner by keeping the upper part tied to the lower part. The traditional elements are not scattered in a disharmonious way but rather combined in a balanced context where the overall homogeneity of the work, from the colours to the shapes, is evident.

Palio
A work of art is the result of a global and harmonious vision of the represented subject.
However the space available to the artist is always inadequate to his imagination, to his creative dynamism. You dream to go beyond the oppressive surface that stands before you and let your thoughts run free, but the four sides of the frame, like insurmountable walls, send all your ambitions into smoke. The Palio banner is not an exception to these spatial rules. It rather accentuates all its limits as the unusual size -250x80cm- led me to reflect a lot about how to work on silk.
Of one thing I was sure, I had to overcome the old, consolidated pattern that showed the various components of the banner living their own independent lives, detached from one another, deprived of the bond that should unite the upper part with the lower part of the painting, an essential link to obtain a homogeneous and thus harmonious whole. With this certainty I painted the “drappellone”.
On a sheet of paper I traced a sort of upside-down S that from the bottom occupied the entire surface. This simple sinuous sign was the common thread that influenced the entire painting. In fact, the horse’s neck takes a curvilinear shape that covers about half of the banner, directing, almost with force, the viewer’s gaze upwards where the second curve of the S opens with a flower that hides a female figure, like to protect her from the earthly things that are shown below by the horse. His torn neck expresses passion, strength, tragedy, which are the feelings of our people. The head, stretched upwards, shows an immense effort to relieve that unbearable tension. Between the muscles of the neck there is a red chromatic element which, at the animal's head, dissolves in the serene blue of the flower to lead us upwards where a female figure with a reclining head, like a 14th-century Madonna, observes, with serene detachment, the earthly events beneath her, protected by the flower that encloses her. This was my Virgin Mary.
The section to the right of the horse and the one surrounding the Virgin Mary were painted an intense navy blue that was intended to project forward the two key elements of the banner, the Madonna and the horse, which highlight the secular and religious characters of the Palio. In the distance, to the left of the flower, you can see a surreal Siena, also surrounded by that blue common to the whole banner.
The symbols, which must appear in the banner according to municipal regulations, are in the lower part of the work, secured to a battlemented wall. They live a life of their own, far from any negative contamination from the ascending S while respecting the overall balance of the work.