TRANSFIGURATION
By Flavio Morani
Today’s Gospel offers us the transfiguration of Christ. That is, the figure of Christ becoming very white and luminous that is accompanied by the appearance of the prophets Moses and Elijah. Immediately afterwards the sky ripples and we hear coming out of a cloud the voice of the Lord inviting the disciples to listen to Christ because He is His son.
In this Painting VOLTURNO MORANI tells us about this moment, transfiguring it on his own life and that of us all.
The Face of Christ, taken from the Orthodox icon of the #pantocreator, red in color to signify, as in all paintings of #neocostructivism #spatial, the sacred and spirituality is accompanied, as in the Gospel narrative, by the faces of the prophets Moses and Elijah tinted in gradations of blue, as they are visible to man.
At this juncture, the author proposes his transfiguration by assigning the faces of Moses and Elijah to Don Sturzo and himself, respectively.
Why this choice?
As made public recently, during Gianmarco Landi’s lecture as part of the exhibition Exhibition on Volturno Morani – Love beyond time and space, the jump, Volturno Morani, tried to follow in the political footsteps of Don Sturzo, re-proposing in the late 1970s, the rebirth of the Italian People’s Party.
Don Sturzo, the original founder of the party, was the bearer in politics and thus in society of the Christian message, moreover at a dark time in Italian politics, which saw at that stage the rise of fascism. In this work the priest of Caltagirone, is likened to Moses and thus seen as the liberator of a people exhausted and reduced to starvation by an economic war first (World War I) and by subservience to the fascist dictatorship later.
For himself, the author instead imagined himself transfigured on the prophet Elijah, a disciple of Moses defender of the people who then freed themselves from fascist dictatorship but who found themselves having to fight from the mid-1960s onward against a new and more terrible evil, consumerism and relativism. And as Elijah challenged the terrible Baal and his 450 prophets, Morani attempted to challenge the decay of Italian politics from the relativist black hole into which it was disappearing and whose nefarious results we see today in society, in which the basest materialism has taken over everything.
We thus experience with this work an extraordinary and highly original parallelism between twentieth-century Italian society and the liberation battles of the Old Testament.
Superficially one might object, “but unlike Elijah, Morani lost his battle.” Wrong!
By consigning himself to eternity with his works and the love and faith he put into giving them life, Volturno Morani is still fighting and with the work #transfiguration invites us to #listen to the Christian message and thus arm ourselves with #DivineMisericordia and #love to fight our common enemy, #mammon who is stripping us of everything.
Thus, as Christ’s transfiguration completes the message and the battles started by Moses and Elijah, Don Sturzo and Morani, remind us to make this fundamental message our own in the individual lives of each of us. Listening to Christ.
#iolistening #iosonoelia #iosonomorani
Trasfigurazione – 80×120 – 1997 – enamel and paint on canvas
