Street Painting Caravaggio in Florence Italy

Cari Amici (Dear Friends),

I went chalking yesterday with colleagues Giovanni (Brasil) and Johnny (Ireland). Gabrielle showed up and said she had too much to do to prepare for our upcoming street painting competition in the south of Italy, so . . . we decided to tackle an image with fewer figures than in our original plan. Giovanni was undecided between a Bouguereau or a Caravaggio, images I had with me in my madonnara backpack. The Italian won out. Cool. I had tried to recreate “St. John the Baptist as a Youth” last spring, but was rained out.

With our new situation with the Comune (City Government) of Florence, Italy, the madonnari no longer wash our street paintings each night. Last week, we washed our space in the morning and began to draw once the street was dry enough. However, another madonnaro came over the weekend and just drew another Botticelli over ours. I wonder what it looked like when he was finished? Here I include images of what we saw days later and after a few street cleaners had passed over her.


Do you see the pentemente – an art term that basically means that the “mistakes” of the past come back to haunt you. Usually this means that underpaintings or the original drawings on the canvas start showing through because oil paint becomes more transparent with age. I find these interesting because it shows the thought processes of the artist and what changes he has made in his composition. In this case, parts of our original Botticelli’s “Madonna of the Eucharest” show through to the overlying “Venus” by Botticelli. You can see the baby’s leg at the bottom and I hope that you can make out the face of the Madonna to which I drew red arrows.

While I began to draw the face and body, Giovanni created the frame, sketched out the basic proportions of the rest of the composition and started to darken the background. This helps the public see what it is that we are trying to accomplish, in case they want to check out our progress later in the day, as many do. [Johnny arrived later and drew a wonderful ram.] I actually liked the colorful patterns in the legs and tried to talk the guys into “modernizing” a Caravaggio. Unsuccessful, that was.


And here is the street painting just before midnight. The guys will work a little bit more on it today, but I am beat and want to prepare for Friday’s adventure, as well as attend the opening of the Angel Academy of Art annual exhibit (in which two of my works were selected). I also want to head over to Charles Cecil’s art history lecture tonight and try to be asleep before midnight.

So, about this competition I have hinted about lately: Nocera Superiore is a cittalina in south of Italy, not too far from the Amalfi Coast. Each May they have a huge street painting festival in which madonnari from all over Italy attend. This year’s theme is “La Vita di San Paolo” (“The Life of Saint Paul”)

I will be taking the train south on Friday morning at an hour in which I rarely enjoy being vertical. Something like 80 artists (per the Web site) will start to draw at 6 p.m. Friday evening. We will draw all night long and we must finish by noon on Saturday or we do not get paid. The festival lasts for days, but people are coming to see the drawings, so we work in the night! I am a little bit nervous about this and chose something relatively easy to do – I hope! My first Rembrandt, a portrait of St. Paul, and I will add a window with bars to represent the second time Paul was imprisoned.

This will be one 24 hours I hope that it does not rain!

For more information on this concorso, check out (in Italian, sorry):
http://www.manifestazioni.com/manifestazioni/manifestazione/33c08af039

http://www.concorsomadonnari.it/

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