VIA CRUCIS

Position in the museum

FIRST FLOOR

The cycle of the Via Crucis consists of six terracotta panels whose subjects - Christ insulted, Meeting with the pious women, Meeting with Veronica, Christ stripped, Deposition and Christ at the tomb - belong to traditional evangelical iconography.

The model for the mold of the panels was made by the artist in the winter of 1926-1927, at the studio in Anticoli Corrado on the Lazio Apennines. In these years, the attention towards medieval art that characterizes his large and small format production is evident.

The reference to the Romanesque tradition, to which the religious subjects of the same period are linked (from the linocut graphics, where the Madonna with child and angels group recurs, to the terracottas of the Nativity scene, large and small, up to the bronze masterpiece of The Prodigal Son made for the Ottolenghi couple), is developed in terms of an essential narrative, without frills, yet highly expressive.

A rigorous construction system organizes the elements of the different compositions: alternating empty and full spaces, the spaces appear densely populated, while the sloping of the levels gives the whole a remarkable three-dimensional effect. Depending on the episode described, each panel presents elements of the setting that, symbolically, refer to the painful journey of Jesus on Golgotha until his burial. The scenes are lively: the characters involved (five to seven) participate in the drama of the events, carefully studied in their poses and attitudes on historical models (early medieval and popular), so much so that in some cases they constitute the prototype for major works.

The recovery of the medieval historical-artistic roots is in line, in the decade of the twenties, with the “return to order” promoted first by the magazine “Valori Plastici” and later supported by the Novecento group, with which Martini exhibited in the First and Second Milanese Exhibition in 1926 and 1929.

Like the contemporary large Nativity Scene, the cycle was put into production by the Genoese factory of the architect and client Mario Labò, who presented the artist in the individual exhibition at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan in 1927. The panels preserved at the Luigi Bailo Museum belong to the donation, in 1967, of Costantino Barile, a scholar of Martini and his activity as a ceramist in the Ligurian area.