In the chapel of the Madonna Silvio Consadori depicts the Marian Mysteries.
The classical modules and its ingenious modernity pleased Paul VI.
by Don Lorenzo Cappelletti
Cas we anticipated in the last issue (see Lat Santa Crociata 1/2024, p. 18), with this number de The Holy Crusade let's begin to illustrate in detail the frescoes by Silvio Consadori present in the basilica of San Giuseppe al Trionfale, starting from the six panels (three on each side) located on the side walls of the chapel of the Mother of Divine Providence.
As a whole, Consadori's work in the basilica (also including the frescoes he dedicated to Jesus in the symmetrical chapel of the Sacred Heart, as well as the monochrome frescoes above the altars), according to the painter himself, was «the most complete result of my fresco painting" (as stated in the catalog of the exhibition which was held in Milan on the occasion of the centenary anniversary of the painter's birth: Silvio Consadori 1909-1994, editor. Fl. Gualdoni – AM Consadori, Busto Arsizio 2009, p. 142). Indeed, from the first glance, these frescoes are convincing already due to the combination of colours, which, although imposing themselves forcefully, fit in without any disharmony within the two chapels. But their classic division into rectangular paintings is also convincing, evoking, without disfiguring too much, as much as the volumes of the characters, some great fresco cycles by early Renaissance painters: Masaccio, Masolino, Piero. Consadori's style, in fact, is rooted in the great figurative tradition of Italian painting, but is at the same time imbued with modernity. It was not for nothing that she was much appreciated by Pope Saint Paul VI, linked to the painter by this feeling, as well as by their common Brescian origin. Consadori doesn't get lost in detail, he goes to the essentials; and so he touches the heart: with marked and luminous colours, with sparse and intense landscapes, with the isolation of figures and objects, which however maintain the warmth of a story and do not rise to cold didactic symbols, as in so much contemporary sacred art.
All this can be seen right from the first panel at the bottom left in the chapel of the Mother of Divine Providence (the panels are to be read, according to an inverted U pattern, from left to right and from bottom to top), which depicts the Annunciation. It does not lack any traditional iconographic element, starting with the dove of the Holy Spirit, however resting on the windowsill as a casual detail; from the work of spinning wool for the veil of the Temple, which Mary, according to the apocryphal Gospels, was engaged in, but rendered without pedantry, in a familiar and modern way, through a ball of yarn in the center of the scene (no spindle!); by the classic gesture of the angel, which with fine intuition is rendered not with sumptuous and all too earthly robes and feathers, but with a uniform sepia color (it is still a spiritual essence); ending with the immaculate whiteness of the lily and, further on, with that of the tunic and face of the Virgin (in which it is not difficult to see the portrait of the painter's wife), covered in a cobalt blue mantle which will also return in all other boxes: the "power of the Most High" (Lk 1, 35).
This element returns, in fact, also in the second panel, dedicated to Mary's visit to Elizabeth, in which the pose of the two women is once again traditional in the form of a tight embrace, which - although not going back to the text of Luke 1:39 -56, where we simply speak of «greeting» – it became popular in Western art starting from the middle Ages; with good reason, we would say, given the numerous occurrences in the Pauline texts of the greeting between Christians in the form of the holy kiss (see Rom 16:16).
On the left, on the threshold of a door, in this scene there is also a woman sitting and intent on her work - at lace-making, one might say - and a man standing, who is instead looking towards Mary. It could generically be those neighbors or relatives of Elizabeth named by Luke (see Luke 1:58), but in the man, perhaps more probably, given her different attitude, the painter wanted to depict Zechariah.
On the one hand, the predominant weight of the landscape is striking in this scene, as happens in many of Consadori's Italian contemporaries (Carrà, Sironi and Rosai, among all), which in the Brescian painter does not, however, go to the detriment of the thoughtful depiction of the mysteries of faith, indeed it exalts it. So do, in this case, the two curved walls that frame and lead Mary to the embrace with Elizabeth, whose bare compactness, apart from a little greenery beyond the left wall, is interrupted only by a thorny stem and from a vase with vivid red flowers placed on a windowsill. On the other hand, the heartfelt and suspended gaze of the Virgin Mary is striking, which can make us think (in the absence, in this series of panels, of the Presentation in the Temple, with the included prophecy of Simeon: «A sword will pierce your soul", Luke 2:35) that those red flowers and that thorny stem are not just a landscape detail, but in some way already symbolically point to the passion of Jesus.