On the wake of the memory of the Sienese hills, I look at the different
landscapes and environments of Manzella and I think that painting is a mental thing.
Leonardo petitioned this thinking of indefinite space, of the universe
concealed between one and the other aspects of the phenomenic world which the
eye distinguishes and recognizes, and which the mind nominates to record it
firmly in the archives of memory. Piero della Francesca sublimated it in the
formal purity of the score, from which generations of artists have drawn the
rule of composing contexts and terrestrial figures resembling celestial
perfection, possible only like the vision of projectional imagination. Paolo
Uccello and Mantegna translated into the artifice of the sweet and strange
perspective, in which I seem to see a bequest in certain daring frames from
above, below and in diagonal, and above all in some acrobatic and shortened
postures of characters that were so dear to our young artist. The medieval painters of gold backgrounds
knew this even then, Byzantine iconography where painting was prayer, even
before it was a liturgical deed or material for use in a holy service,
preparing for the difficult task of reducing the unspeakable divine to a
concept or a symbol, and to a visible human word.
(Nicola Micieli, Walks in Italy)
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