cm.56x55 - 14 deep - 1983

This bronze-cast-high-relief sculpture has a unique history. 

In spite of first sight appearances it’s a very sensual work. Had no idea of anything like this could I do till the day came when across the renderings of some archaeological diggings undertaken in Rome, inside the Foro Romano by the Palatine, fell into my hands.

Struck by the strength of the image before me, and in spite of the apparent barrenness of the discovered artefact, the association with something intimate and warm came soon to mind. 

The newly found relic of the past was identified as the remnants of the original ‘Ara’ (the pagan alter, as in the ‘Ara Pacis’) where the Virgin Vestals would have attended to the forever burning sacred fire of Rome, the ‘Caput Mundi’.

That image spoke of a world of its own, self-contained and encircled like a womb, deeply compelling, with promise of luring and obscure but tantalizing depths. A holy place to be revered. A feminine form immediately associated to the very essence of the Virgin Vestals, the Ara patrons, when the hearth of ancient Rome was theirs to nurture and protect for ever. 

A symbol of eternity, of great psychological import for all Romans.

Female duty was theirs, as tending to the home hearth, then and now, always has been. 

But that holy hearth, the mental home for all Romans, had a different spiritual dimension. 

It meant linking the strength of the city to the will of all powerful gods, for their protection, assistance and enticement to proceed with conquest, with the imposition of roman rule and civic order, and the quest towards the perpetuation of the always cavorted, but never quite achieved, almighty, ephemeral ‘Pax Romana’.      

Historians suggested the one reason for that duty to be assigned to female care was because , even in the throws of inebriation, or madness or defiance, could they not be tempted by any perverse, sacrilegious wish to take their own revenge by urinating onto the fire. 

That fire that made them enslaved.  

But surely there was more to it than that.

The very existence of the holy fire was the source of roman man faith in themselves, their strength and resolve. Their male prowess depending then from the very centre of the vestals more intimate being, their vulva, even in metaphysic terms.

The vestigial form of the Ara as we now know it today, evoking an abstract image for the vulva great labia, conjures up a resonance of meanings whereby the idea of vulva, as protectres, finds now  its deferential symbolic and even loving homage within its reification into the physical shape of the very artefact the vestals were meant to tend to. 

Their Ara. Live by the magic of what’s left of it by the ware and tare of time.

Historians tell us that roman women never had any public role or overt political power, but within the domestic realm their power instead was obsolete and unquestioned, and in that milieu much political play, or even intrigue, took place over the ages and fortunes made and destroyed.  

Furthermore home is the natural cradle where mother tongue is taught, where values are formed, where creeds are sustained, and where the basics of self confidence and respect of rule and order are built. 

Those were all the very attributes needed for the ascending power of the greatest empire ancient history has ever known.

So, never in the public arena, nonetheless no doubt, women were the backbone of roman society, and the power of the vestal’s Ara was symbolically theirs, in the domestic realm. 

What at first might have appeared, to some, as a cavalier proposition concerning the feminine treasures, eventually after so much free association, it could then be conceded that my interpretation of the vestal Ara remnants as some metaphoric “Great Labia of Rome”, is meant in fact as a poetic transfiguration intended as a tribute to womanhood, of all times, for their resolve to endurance, to staying by the domestic hearth and, with its governance, forge man and women strong in body and character, able to tend to their future, compelling duties.

Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli

Arrogance, cynicism, greed and worse lead the worst of mankind to the destruction of other man, women and children, in the orgy of wars …  as it was in the Holocaust, and into the many other holocausts that humanity had to suffer over centuries and millennia by wanton predators..

In their childhood, man and women of my generation, all over Europe,  may remember having themselves been occasional eye witnesses, or victims, to frightening events in the century of the greatest insanity since history began being recorded.

WW1,WW2, Fascism, Nazism, Communism, with their massacres by the millions, one wonders if there ever was anything worse, at any other time in our history.

Hybris is the Greek term for arrogance, prevarication, rage and death-wish of inhuman man driven into violence and prey. 

Hybris brings to blind-wrath evil man led by greed, but seldom are they met by the righteous wrath of God, or human justice, that both should be brought down onto them for their rightful punishment.

Hybris belongs to man that in their folly rout and crash the innocent, the defenceless, the vulnerable … all victims of insanity.

In this bronze-cast-high-relief - my own very personal Guernica - the man wearing a steel-war-helmet with some futile insignia of power grafted on it, and a menacing raised fist, sweeps away the unarmed, distraught, crying and defenceless populace. 

In this allegory of mine the man with the war-helmet is ridden by an exalted, grimacing and shouting Fury, herself raising an alarming fist, worth a war cry.

What we all know about the horrors of war reinforced by  never forgotten personal childhood memories, along with tragic tales by a good man, a war Veteran bonded by mutual friendship, lured me to make this memento piece.

A cry to honour  man of Peace!

A friend carefully scrutinizing the just newly-cast bronze-high-relief - with that warrior’s mask deeply carved, fragmented and distorted evil features, bearing  suggestions of incumbent peril - observed that it could instead be seen as an apt metaphor for our constant urban strife, the on going never ending story of our times..

Truth, as always, is in the eye of the beholder!

Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli

When Lech Walesa started Solidarnosc, his popular movement towards emancipation from communism in his native Poland, the world free spirits rejoiced. 

And I with them.

At that time my sculpture of a face with hands firmly locked together over a very stern and wilful mood was already completed, but living in an uncertain limbo, titles. 

I cant remember where that image, of almost intimidating severity, came from, or what was so compelling as to bring it out, but some unease with the world I was then living in at that time was churning inside me stirring my restlessness. 

It had to come alive in some meaningful form. And so it did in that form.

When few years later, in the early eighties, that liberating people driven revolt swept its poor one party callously communist dominated country, I felt history unfolding had eventually found me an honourable and befitting title for my still unnamed work.

The spirit of the severe face framed by hands holding together promptly acquired a meaning for solidarity in freedom, and so it remained having waited long enough. 

Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli

PS. At present the piece is still cast in plaster and waiting to be properly casting in bronze.

cm.65x50 - 11 deep - 1977

Why Golgotha? 

“Where you under the spell of some religious mysticism when you did this work?” asked to my  surprise, Sheila, one of my dear friends attending the studio, at the time when many other ones often used to come visiting ’just popping in’, in the good, old, golden days of Via Delle Mantellate, under Herzl Emanuel’s patronage. 

Why should one ask such a question though?

Because one can see in that piece of clay the idea of a cross apposed upon some stylized image of a pained Christ-like-mask, was the unexpected suggestion.

Well whatever may have happened in the Trastevere studio that day I cant remember. Maybe the bells of the famous S.Maria, from the piazza not far form us, were peeling away some message for the congregation piety, or the cannon shot at noon from the Gianicolo, which always would catch me unawares, giving me an unwelcome jolt, combined together may have struck some memento of the unfailing Christianity of this eternal very Christian city of ours. 

Struck I was maybe by some distant cord of recollection, maybe of one’s youth lived under the doctrine of well meaning nuns and oratory, purgatory, before eventual emancipation took over and gave me freedom, to be the only thing that I could possibly be. I cannot say. 

Impossible for one to always tell the motivations of one’s impulsive doing, when caught by a compelling urge to attack the clay, pushed by something that’s been twirling in your mind for days, or maybe years, and it’s crying for wanting to came out, and be done with.

When you abide by the atmosphere of ancient Rome, the suggestions, cognitive or subliminal, may lure you into reflections, that touch you inside, stay with you unawares for you don’t know how long, and keep working there like silent currents under still water, till the time comes when something sparks and is bound to search fulfilment by some expression, in whatever form compatible with your being, your inner essence and subsequent experience.

Anyway, whichever the tale, the plaster and the bronze casts are there to tell anyone whatever story they may whish to see in it. 

That’s all there is to it. That’s art.

Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli