The Years Midnight

 

The title is inspired by the verse of a work by John Donne, an English metaphysical poet of the seventeenth century: Notturno sopra il giorno di Santa Lucia, the shortest day of the year. I recently found it again in an intense essay by Cristina Campo (La Tigre Assenza) and it struck me. Saint Lucia’s day is called “the years midnight” because it is the shortest. Apparently it is not true, the shortest day would be December 21st, but we must also have some certainty in this post and now we ignore the clarification! Lucia’s day for only seven hours lifts her mask.

The composition was probably written in December 1611. The poet, who had painfully left his pregnant wife for a trip to Paris, had a terrible dream in a dream: of her, with a dead child in her arms. Frightened, he sent a courier to London to make sure of his condition.

And it was in the tremendous expectation that the five rooms of the Nocturnal were born, where the desolation of the bare earth is festive when compared to the mood of the poet, who says “I am nothing, I am nothing, I am annihilated” and also “Everything is up to me superior (…) even the shadow, to be such, must boast something that produces it, a body and light”. At the end you will find the complete nocturne.

I was disturbed by the poem (it’s incredible how autobiographical everything seems to us at times) and while quoting the poet in the title, I wanted to cover my Lucia’s head with flowers, fruits, leaves, palpitating insects, color as a reaction. A luxuriant version that exalted the stubbornness that emerged from the Passio and left the martyr’s fleeting gaze imprinted on passers-by. A face that could also inspire awe, while the sweet muzzle of the donkey peeped out, losing the meekness of the sketch to assume a more restless attitude. The detail of the eyes as an iconographic attribute is present but in a softer vision which is that of a plant whose leaves “observe us” and which culminates in a lily, a symbol of innocence. The suggestion was born by observing the saint Lucia by Francesco del Cossa preserved in Washington, which holds its eyes on a sort of map. It’s a wonderful work.

In the end, although my intent was to paint the donkey and transfer the strength of the work there, I realized that I had put power in Lucia, an intensity that makes her internally immovable but lets her fears leak out. The result is an inner nocturnal (mine, the martyr’s, the poet’s) that emanates light, a sort of chromatic paradox, a color that arises from the shadows like spring exploding in winter.

However, a disquiet remains, the indelible shadow of a violent death which reminded me of the many other previous or contemporary ones and above all a slightly later one which I madly loved, Ipazia from Alexandria, illustrious victim of the fanaticism of those same Christians who until a hundred years earlier they were victims.

If this suffering were relegated to the past, perhaps we could sweeten it. Instead it made me think of the many victims of every day, the lives taken in the name of a selfishness that someone atrociously calls love but which is only possession, another form of fanaticism.