Seated Cardinal (1976)

unique specimen
Notes: filed with the Giacomo Manzù Foundation under no. 31/2018.

Giacomo Manzù has embodied, since the 1930s, the ideal model of modern sacred art, which over time has taken on aesthetic and iconographic value tout court, beyond merely devotional aspects. His first sculptures with a religious subject were executed when he was only twenty-four years old, in 1932, at the chapel of the Catholic University of Milan, in collaboration with architect Giovanni Muzio. The trace of a strong archaic matrix characterises these early years in Milan, marked by his closeness to Edoardo Persico and the prestigious publication of some of his works in the magazine ‘Domus’.

To the figures of Cardinals, a nodal topos in his production, Manzù began to devote himself in 1934, when he attended a service in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome for the first time. What Roland Barthes would call the punctum of an image, the detail that strikes and pierces the observer, for Manzù is the solemn hieraticity of the cardinals, which will lead him to replicate the subject, in different variations and developments, never repetitive, throughout his career: ‘The first time I saw the cardinals was in St. Peter’s in 1934: they impressed me with their rigid, immobile masses, yet vibrant with complex spirituality. I saw them as so many statues, a series of aligned cubes, and the impulse to create my own version of that ineffable reality in sculpture was irresistible”[1].

The unmistakable iconography of cardinals marks a research on spirituality embodied in ecclesiastical figures, but also and above all a formal and material investigation around the management of masses, geometries, and space: the sculptor repeatedly emphasised the stylistic and monumental importance of the subject, more than the religious one, interpreting it as a sort of ‘still life’ to be analysed in its many variants. Particularly from the 1950s onwards, the Cardinals became even more solemn and the volumes were simplified into a hieratic and compact monumentality of meditative gravity.

The seated Cardinal of 1976, a unique exemplar, is enclosed in the almost impenetrable envelope of the cardinal’s cape, in a pure plasticism that forms a cone ascending upwards, culminating in the mitre and moved only by the luminous patina, the buttons of the robe and the few folds in the lower part. The extremely geometrical intent of the composition is summed up in the formal simplification that conceals the body masses in a symbolic abstraction that is also reflected in the half-closed eyes, showing the intimate recollection of the figure. Purification of the surfaces, hinted contours, light that seems to penetrate the masses of the opaque bronze, absence of visible anatomy and stylisation of reality: the Cardinal is an evocative apparition in space, which loses the connotations of a portrait and becomes an emblem of the human and universal character of religion.

[1] Cit. in Manzù, l’Uomo e l’Artista, exhibition catalogue edited by C. Strinati, Rome, De Luca Editori d’Arte, 2002, p. 36.

Elena Lago