Exhibition: Pietas

On Saturday, April 6, 2024, at 5:30 p.m. at the San Giovanni Diocesan Museum, the anthological exhibition “PIETAS” will be inaugurated, with which the sculptures and drawings of Paolo Spinoglio, a Turin-born but Asti-adopted Astian, will be made known and appreciated.

In particular, the exhibition project will focus on the important corpus of religiously inspired sculptures having for subjects the Crucifixion, the Deposition of Christ from the Cross and the Pieta, that is, Mary holding up the lifeless body of her Son Jesus: themes deeply felt by the artist and addressed several times throughout his activity with different formal solutions.

Pietas in its deepest sense

If today the term “mercy” has considerably reduced its semantic depth and is mostly used to express a generic sense of pity and sorrow, if not outright disgust (think of the locution “taking pity”), in the ancient world the term pietas expressed a series of dutiful acts of justice both to other men and to the gods, and the strict exercise of such acts in the conduct of individuals indicated their moral depth.

Christianity takes up and updates the values of Latin pietas: pietas toward God is manifested in the observance of religious practices, while pietas toward other people is realized in the corporal and spiritual works of mercy as enunciated by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel.

These include precisely “burying the dead,” a practice that was also very important in the pagan world: those who, in fact, do not give burial to a corpse are considered ungodly (“im-pius“), with all the consequences that this omission entails.

Spinoglio’s sculptural works pick up on this original aspect of“pietas“: the artist leaves as little space as necessary for his characters’ emotions to focus on their actions, their arms open to receive Jesus’ lifeless body, to support him, to carry him, to give each other comfort.

In this light, the Pieta of Spinoglio looks at the vertical model of the Rondanini Pieta by Michelangelo rather than the “soft” Vatican Pieta: Mary does not merely present, seated and silent, the lifeless Jesus to the devotion of the faithful, but is standing and Must support in his embrace the body of the Son. lifeless and bear the violence of that weight that would seem to slip away at any moment.

In Spinoglio’s poetics, then, mercy cannot be mere compassion or passive contemplation but must become action, arms and hearts opening to always go out to meet our neighbor and support him in his difficulties.

The sculptural works will be counterpointed by a large number of drawings and preparatory studies made by Spinoglio on the same subjects.

As a corollary to the exhibition, valuable engravings having as their subject the Crucifixion and the Deposition of Christ, contained in some ancient volumes of the Library of the Bishop’s Seminary of Asti, will be exhibited.

The exhibition itinerary, curated by thePaolo Spinoglio Association with critical text by Clizia Orlando:

In the arrangement presented, the intent to create the suggestion of a harmonious harmony between the subjects celebrating the story of the Passion of Christ and the connected space is revealed in the soft modeling tensions. The sculptor has shaped the material, succeeding in infusing into its folds the dramatic potential of a message emptied of rhetorical burdens, essential in its volumes, punctual in its willingness to imprint the communicative valence of his art in its profiles

Under the patronage of the Province of Asti, the Municipality of Asti and the Cities and Cathedrals Project, it will be open to the public from April 5 to May 26, 2024.