Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
S.I was in the new house museum of Palazzo Maffei, in Piazza delle Erbe in Verona, perhaps the most beautiful in Italy. A woman runs it, Vanessa Carlonthe daughter of Luigi, a great collector.
Alongside the Italian and European masterpieces of the twentieth century, there are paintings by Veronese masters from the fourteenth century onwards. There is one that tells a story I didn’t know.
The author is Nicola Giolfino, Mannerist painter which gave its best in the first half of the sixteenth century. The title of the work is disturbing: “Chiomara throws the centurion’s head at the feet of her husband Orgiagone“.
It is a story of ancient Rome. We are in 189 BC, the Republic is engaged in the war against the Galatians, in Asia Minor, the current coast of Turkey overlooking the Aegean Sea.
Chiomara is precisely a galata woman. A Roman centurion attacks and rapes her. She cuts off his head with the sword, and throws it at her husband’s feet, telling him about the crime and at the same time her punishment.
The episode is narrated first by Tito Liviothen by Valerio Massimo, and centuries later by Giovanni Boccaccio in his De claris mulieribusthe book that the author of Decameron dedicated to great women.
There is something terrible and consoling at the same time in the rebellion of women. It is a timeless force, which comes from afar and from within.
The canvases of Judith and Holofernes come to mind, in particular those painted by Artemisia Gentileschi, the “painter”: the word painter did not yet exist, since no woman had ever signed her paintings; not even Marietta, the daughter of Tintoretto, a great artist whose works, however, were signed by her father.
Artemisia instead claimed the right to sign, and also to revenge. So she gave Judith – the heroine who saves the Jewish people by beheading the enemy leader – her own traits; while Holofernes has the face of Agostino Tassi, the rapist that Artemisia will have condemned (only to see him unpunished by the will of the Pope).
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