The painting exhibition “Rimembranze” tells us about the artist Michelino Iorizzo’s new journey through the centuries. With his fervent imagination, he brings back from the ashes of a distant past (in some ways still obscure to us) the Italian beauty of the Etruscan woman.
That socially “avant-garde” woman was not relegated only to the care of the domestic hearth, where her emancipation was the object of criticism by many chroniclers of the time: “With the Tyrrhenian women are kept in common, they take great care of their body and often appear naked among men, sometimes even among themselves, as it is not unseemly to show oneself naked. They sit at the table not next to their husbands, but next to the first comer of those present and toast the health of whoever they want. They are strong drinkers and very beautiful to look at,” as described by the Greek Theopompus of Chios (?-320 BC).
This was a notable step forward compared to the Greek and Roman women, who lived in a condition of subordination, without the possibility of being identified in society with a proper name, unlike the Etruscan woman, who enjoyed her legal autonomy, with the right to choose her husband.
The sarcophagus of the spouses (6th century BC), preserved in the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, clearly represents this independence. Here, we can immediately observe how the woman occupies an equal position to her husband.
The Etruscan woman of Iorizzo is mysterious, austere, and elegant, tinged with a subtle erotic incipit, as if she were removing the veil of modesty from Aphrodite Sosandra to show us a new Aphrodite Cnidia.
The artist gives us a multifaceted vision of this woman, winking at the contemporary world with its new decadent and anti-classical canons, which she clearly represents on the tables. The artist uses, for example, the “colour dripping” technique as an apparent reference to Pollock, up to Mimmo Rotella’s décollage.
Furthermore, almost at maximum saturation, bright colours allude to the new digital universe with its latest media, which is so dear to contemporary man.
In the artist’s figurative culture, one of the most sumptuous Etruscan artistic representations is undoubtedly very clear: the Tomb of the Chariots (5th century BC), where elegance and chromatic essentiality are superbly combined, the artist “enlightening” these colours more, creating an indissoluble chromatic bond with the past, making use of today’s mediums, and using an ancient technique such as fat tempera, to obtain that fullness and chromatic power that imposes that precise trademark on his works.
Therefore, by combining these new forms of contemporary expression with their thousand facets, we arrive at the overlapping of two important historical moments: the nostalgia of an immortal past combined with contemporary decadence due to the abnegation of classical values, but as Pascoli would say, “Ancient always new”, as the imperishable beauty of the classical world is inherent within us.
The painter shows us the theme in an innovative setting in the three large exposed canvases: Hypnos, Thanatos, and Eros. Hypnos and Thanatos represent Sleep and Death, respectively, while Eros and Thanatos represent the opposing drives of life and death. Iorizzo projects the personifications into the deep sea abyss, a dreamlike dimension where we can even perceive the refractive index of the light that propagates in the underwater environment, giving the faces their characteristic allure.
Hypnos has closed eyes and is capable of embarking on an eternal sleep that is a prelude to death. Eros is life, colour, and passion; Thanatos is emaciated and worn out but, at the same time, has a charming sincerity. The androgyny of the figures alludes to the Platonic concept of the balance of opposites, which is capable of generating perfect harmony.
The Marquis Vincenzo Giustinani (1564-1637) would indeed not have remained indifferent to the works of our artist; in the famous letter to his friend Teodoro Ameyden (1586-1656), he explicitly expressed his idea of the different artistic “modes” present in Rome in his time, and would undoubtedly have mentioned Iorizzo at the top of the scale: “The twelfth mode is the most perfect of all because it is more difficult […] that is, to paint in a manner and with the example of the natural in front […] among which some he pressed more in the natural than in the manner, and some more in the manner than in the natural without however departing from one or the other way of painting, pressing in good drawing, and true colouring, and with giving proper and true lights” and the artist does not betray any of these aspects, since the genesis of his works derives only from the long journey of his imagination.
