Aligi Sassu - The Christ

A popular iconography throughout the history of Western art, the Crucifixion has its origins in the early Christian era and has developed over the centuries to the most recent expressions of contemporary art. The traditional iconography of Jesus on the cross has infinite variations, from the simplest, where only the crucified Jesus Christ appears, to the version accompanied by the "mourners," the Madonna and St. John the Evangelist. In the Middle Ages, Crucifixion scenes began to become increasingly elaborate: the thieves' crosses were added, and gradually more and more characters until they became the occasion for large choral scenes. It is often also accompanied by symbolic elements, such as the presence of the sun and moon or Adam's skull beneath Christ's cross (which is
(to signify the redemptive action of Christ's Passion against original sin). In this case, the artist Aligi Sassu, to accentuate the expressionist nature of the representation, opts for a concentrated and solitary interpretation, with only the body of Christ present. In this way, by eliminating even the element of the cross and highlighting the ostentation of the body, the idea of ​​redemptive sacrifice and Christ's identification with the consecrated host is communicated more dramatically and effectively.

Even in a small sculpture like this, the artist Aligi Sassu manages to express his aesthetic, grounded in a dynamism with strongly expressionistic overtones. The grandeur of this work is heightened by the fact that we are faced with a static subject like a Crucifixion. Sassu, through an elaborate conception of form, manages to convey to the subject a powerful dramatic tension and an almost uncontrollable flow of energy. He does so through an expressionist approach that brings about a remarkable process of formal synthesis. The artist renounces naturalism and anatomical precision. Thus, the figure of Christ is crushed into the surface to emphasize his suffering. The figure, reduced to its essentials, is also deformed to reveal his profound suffering. The entire body is traversed by a dramatically modeled surface, confirming the sculpture's strongly expressionistic character.

Aligi Sassu, born in Milan in 1912 and died in Pollenca in 2000, was a painter and sculptor. His painting focused primarily on the representation of movement and physical strength, which is why the subject of the horse or man on horseback was always congenial to him. In the late 1970s, he and Bruno Munari drafted the pictorial manifesto "Dynamism and Muscular Reform," which called for a return to anti-naturalistic forms in a dynamic sense. Much of his painting, moreover, is inspired by Delacroix and his battles.

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