In the first of these two articles showing paintings of the mythological, legendary and historical past of the Italian island of Sicily, I ended with the funeral of a great Greek general in about 337 BCE. Some fifty years later, one of the most famous Greek mathematicians was born on Sicily: Archimedes of Syracuse (c 287–212 BCE).
Archimedes’ tomb
Although Plutarch doesn’t describe the story, when Cicero was in Sicily in about 75 BCE he claimed to have discovered the location of Archimedes’ tomb. Cicero wrote in his Tusculan Disputations (book 5, sections 64-66) that he identified Archimedes’ grave, neglected and buried in undergrowth, near the Agrigentine Gate of Syracuse. Cicero described the cylindrical column with a sphere mounted on top, a symbol of Archimedes’ mathematical achievements.
Francesco Zuccarelli’s painting of Cicero Discovers the Tomb of Archimedes from 1747 shows this event, with the city of Syracuse behind.
Benjamin West painted Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes in 1804, the year that Napoleon became Emperor of the French. He shows Cicero wearing a white toga, speaking in front of the tomb, as workers with sickles clear the undergrowth from it. In the distance is the city of Syracuse on its coastal plain, and beyond it the smoking cone of the active volcano, Mount Etna.
Paul Barbotti’s Cicero Discovering the Tomb of Archimedes from 1853 at least shows Cicero as a young man, although there’s no sign of the cylindrical column with a sphere on its top.
Taormina
In 1887, the Kunstlercompagnie was commissioned to paint the walls of two large staircases in Vienna’s newly-built theatre. Among the theatrical scenes believed to have been painted there by the young Gustav Klimt is Theatre at Taormina, which was completed for its opening by Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1888.
Taormina is a village on the edge of the city of Messina on the east coast of Sicily, which in classical times was colonised by Greeks. The ruins of this ancient theatre still stand on the hillside, although the current structures appear to have been built in Roman times over an older Greek layout.
Early modern times
Domenico Morelli’s undated Sicilian Vespers refers to a rebellion which took place on Sicily at Easter, 1282, leading to the slaughter of French residents, loss of power by the government, and the start of the War of the Sicilian Vespers. At the time, Sicily was being ruled by King Charles I of Anjou, who had little interest in Sicily, seeing it mainly as a base from which to launch attacks to seize the riches of Constantinople.
The rebellion began at the start of Vespers sunset prayers on Easter Monday, 30 March 1282, at a church just outside Palermo. This seems to have started in an altercation over a woman, resulting in one of the occupying French soldiers being killed. This escalated rapidly, and within six weeks three thousand French men and women had been killed.
Morelli shows the other side of the story. Three women are seen, holding one another for safety, as they flee from the opening blows between French soldiers and Sicilians. Hitching their skirts up so that they can walk at speed, these three look anxious, as if they have just noticed that they are walking towards more French soldiers.
The city of Messina was home to Antonello, the painter who first developed the techniques of oil painting in Italy. Although his workshop remained on Sicily, much of his development was undertaken when he was working in Venice, from around 1465 onwards.
Antonello’s Christ Blessing (Salvator Mundi) shows sophistication in his modelling of the face and rendering of the hair. It also has a cryptic reference to the date in the scroll at the foot, which some have claimed date it to 1465, but it might in fact be ten years later. Paint analysis shows that the dominant drying oil used in this work was walnut oil, rather than linseed.
Over four centuries later, the Danish artist Laurits Andersen Ring visited the island, where he painted one of his most unusual works, Three Skulls from Convento dei Cappuccini at Palermo (1894). The Cappuccin monastery in Palermo has long placed their dead monks in catacombs, where their corpses slowly mummify. Ring shows three of the more than eight thousand bodies stored in catacombs which were, and remain, a tourist attraction.
Modern times
Achille Etna Michallon, the major French landscape painter, must have visited the island in 1822, when he painted this View of a Silician Port in front of the motif.
In the late nineteenth century, Antonino Gandolfo, who lived and painted in the Sicilian city of Catania, recorded poverty in his home city.
Temptation seems to be Gandolfo’s earliest surviving painting, and was completed before 1880. It bears all the hallmarks of Naturalism: carefully detailed realism in its figures, and a strong social message. The young woman clutching her head has just succumbed to an offer of money from the young man behind her, who is holding his wallet out ready to pay her for services. Her mother sits on the other side of a ramshackle wooden table, looking away in despondent disinterest.
The young woman was modelled by Maria Grancagnolo, who lived at Gandolfo’s house after his first wife committed suicide in 1874, became his favourite model, and in 1891 his second wife. The man is her brother, and the older woman their mother.
Gandolfo’s most prolific period of Naturalist painting appears to have been between 1880 and 1885, coinciding with the height of popularity of Naturalism at the Salon in Paris, and Jules Bastien-Lepage’s death in 1884. Evicted, which bears the Biblical sub-title of Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, dates from 1880, and shows a woman cast out into the street, her only possessions in the bag under her left hand.
We stay in the poor quarter of Catania for The Last Coin (c 1880-85). A young woman, who has been spinning, sits on an old chest and takes the last money from her purse, presumably to pay for some milk to fill the blue and white jug.
We have travelled far, from the myths of the ancient Mediterranean civilisations, to modern poverty, all on the one island.