14 posts tagged “popular sacred art”

Can you make Popular Sacred Art and scary Halloween meet? Sure!
Let's get back to Val Codera once again. On the walls of a chapel, here's the grim reaper: a skeleton with a scythe. It's an image linked with the Great Plague that drowned Europe in the XVII century. That's when death became a familiar, almost everyday presence.

Grim Reaper

But the image of the skeleton with a scythe goes way back to the image of Saturn, father of Zeus: that was an old man with a scythe, who became, during the centuries, an image of Time: all consuming Time, with a scythe in one hand and a hourglass in the other. In many other examples, skeletons also hold the hourglass.

It's what has become to be known as the Vanitas (latin for Vanity): life is fleeting, death is closer. This concept is not limited to painting: it has generated mottos, like this one, that accompanies the image above:

Memento

"What you are now,
We were once.
He who forgets us
Forgets himself".

I've been going back and forth for years through the very small town of Brenna (look for it near Cantù if you can find it), and never noticed this beautiful crucifiction, on the facade of an old house, until some weeks ago!! Sometimes you have to thank a traffic light...

Crucifiction