Show notes
CAMILLO BOCCACCINO |
Testa di uomo anziano |
Uffizi, Sala 23 |
Versione integrale | La narrazione è di Maria Spanò, la voce di Arianna Scommegna |
Leggi la scheda completa dell'opera su uffizi.it
Camillo Boccaccino | Head of Old Man | Room 23
He brought me here. We met in the Gallery on a November afternoon, in the room where I was working. He was immersed in his thoughts, and I in mine. Just a few tourists around, and a calm atmosphere in the shadowy autumn light. I looked up and saw him. I had never met him, yet he was there, where he had always been. This is what happens when there is so much beauty all around you. Then, a second of harmony, which is like a small jolt for you... And there it was, that bent head of an old man. A prophet? A saint? A wise man? Like a gush of water, for me, he is my grandfather, Armando. An elementary schoolteacher with a passion for Greek and Latin, just a few things in his backpack and, on the day after 8th September 1943, the long walk home, from Rome to Sicily. As I said, it was he, with his love of beauty, who brought me here to Florence. So why was I so struck by a Lombard-school painting? After all, the artist, Camillo Boccaccino, is almost unknown, and his city, Cremona, is not 16th-century Florence. Very few of Boccaccino’s works remain: four altarpieces, one of them lost; frescoes in the church of San Sigismondo and the Cathedral, both in Cremona; and then, this portrait with all its mystery. It could be a preparatory study, but it looks more like a fragment. A palette played out in the colour tones that art historian Mina Gregori, also born in Cremona, describes as “a range of autumn fire; a bonfire of crisp, dry leaves”.
How did Boccaccino achieve these colours? With light! It comes from above, glowing on the receding hairline, and not by chance: the forehead is where knowledge resides. The man is frowning, as if his mind had just been enlightened by a sudden thought. His eyes are barely perceivable, because the light is shining straight on the thick white beard, almost eaten away by the darkness at the bottom. Wrinkles, like waves on the sea after a storm, seem to fade around the barriers of the eyebrows. The expression is friendly, the intention gentle, like an awkward St. Joseph.
He has the tenderness of the elderly on his face; the same tenderness that made me think of my grandfather. A memory that merges with light, like colour merges with shadow in Camillo Boccaccino. It’s summer. I am going into my grandparents’ house. The silence of an early afternoon in the sun. The sound of the cicadas. An antechamber bathed in sunlight, giving cool shade to the other rooms. I move forward into the dim dining room. He isn’t here, though. I find him writing at his desk, in a small room invaded by warmth and silence. The blinding light is kept back by a fine embroidered curtain, white and swollen like the sails on a boat. Darkness and light. The feathery pencil strokes and the neat handwriting of a teacher. Gentle expressions such as: “You look very well today, my granddaughter!”. The smell of books with yellowing pages and lovely illustrations. A world would open up to me in those moments.
Today, this is just a memory, and it seems strange that a nameless old man’s head could unleash so many remembrances and soften my gaze over so many dormant things. It was my grandfather who brought me here, before this face, so that this face would take me back to him.