The work of fine white biscuit is like a secular Pietà, a wounded young worker is carried lying, bloodless, in a wheelbarrow. We cannot remain indifferent to the face of the mother who is bent over in her effort to carry her son to safety, she seems to have no time to suffer, to ache, she must use every muscle to help him. The other stretcher-bearer, could be the father or an older colleague, also carries the boy but his gaze is sceptical and he fears, in his heart, that the young man will not survive and that all is in vain.
Only his muscles have not yet given up, they are tense in the effort to rescue him. As for the wounded man, he looks as lifeless as Jesus on the Virgin's lap in Michelangelo's Pietà. The sublime craftsmanship of the work deliberately clashes with the social denunciation that the Apulian artist Filippo Cifariello depicted. Filippo was born in 1864 into a poor, large family forced to emigrate to Naples, and was a scugnizzo (street urchin) noted for his artistic talent. His very fine eye for detail and taste for precise realism led him to obtain public commissions to create statues and monuments that still adorn the squares of some southern cities.
Acclaimed by the public but vilified by critics and his peers, he is accused of making plaster casts from life, he has to silence the malicious tongues by exhibiting small formats to prove that he is the great artist that many believe him to be. A few years went by and the sculptor was back in the news when, in a fit of jealousy, he killed his wife, a sciantosa of French origin who was 'unsuitable as the wife of a sculptor who receives public orders', as the chronicles of the time hastened to remark. Italy, as we know, is a male chauvinist country and Cifariello is acquitted for total mental defect, after a trial that will remain in the annals of early 20th century Naples.
A trial during which the defence will go so far as to proclaim that it is love that has guided the sculptor's hand, a terrible and fatal passion that gives life and death but also a divine force that kills and creates. So the artist, whom everyone thought was finished, continued his career, as well as his relationships, until a severe depression devoured his soul, leading to his suicide late in life.
- The work: Filippo Cifariello, Les malheureux (1899), Burgundy Museum. Vercelli
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