THE MADONNA OF THE ARTISTS

The artwork, located at the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Bonea, depicts St. Luke the Evangelist painting the Virgin Mary.

In the center of the painting, stripped of the most common iconographic references in painting and revisited by De Stefano with his personal use of luminism from ancient masters and 17th-century Neapolitan Caravaggio-inspired style, Mary/Miriam, with her face slightly tilted, has a gaze that seems questioning and directed towards elsewhere. On the other hand, Luke’s gaze is concentrated as he paints her portrait. A bit off-center, with his dark turban and Moorish features, another observer clad in a red cloak looks straight into our eyes as if to bring us as witnesses into the scene which envelops the viewer with the mystery of its intimate truth. Mary’s silence is an eloquent breath in honor of motherhood; that of her double portraitist is a respectful and dry homage without rhetoric.

Donatella Trotta

The painting was born out of an emotional encounter at the Parish Church of Bonea during a baptismal rite where children are presented to the community by their parish priest. At the end of his sermon, he invited me to offer my artistic skills for completing a series of ovals inside the apse. My offer was immediate and I decided to approach an unusual sacred theme: I then focused on representing “painting Mary”, a theme that was realized in the 1600s by Luca Giordano and later by Lanfranco in the dome of Gesù Nuovo in Naples. Another identical theme belonged to Norimberga’s National Museum – Masterpiece altar degli eremitani from one century earlier. I chose to create a painting on gesso-prepared canvas to obtain opaque mural-like texture.

Armando De Stefano. Naples, June 2010