Post by Pino Blasone

In our schools, would we teach or study art history before a political or economic one, perhaps could realize better how true artists had not only a sensibility for beauty, but also a moral sensitiveness ahead of their times. Moreover, off those narrow national or religious boundaries so long troubling our modern ages, despite some conceited or nostalgic Eurocentrism. Not seldom, geniuses were able to investigate what's true, where we occur to perceive a bare but banal reality. For instance, at https://lnkd.in/d9pArmw we may have seen how not a few painters dealt with the well-known evangelical episode of Jesus and the adulteress; and how in a scarce-known painting by the French Émile Signol at last she plays a co-protagonist role, within such a sacred representation (Detroit Institute of Art; 1842). Indeed, there are illustrious precedents, where the conventional figure of a female more or less presumed sinner is already rehabilitated or even celebrated inside the “chiaroscuro” of conscience. Below, on the left: Caravaggio, Italian master, “Penitent Magdalene” (Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome; 1594-5); on the right: Rembrandt, Dutch prominent Caravaggist, “Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery” (detail: National Gallery, London; 1644).