The great places of Italian art: Niccolò dell’Arca in Bologna

You can go to Bologna for a thousand different reasons, and all will be good. It is done for the kitchen sublime, for the music of Lucio Dalla and Cesare Cremonini, to stroll under the arcades when the sun begins to beat, to sit on the wall of the church of Santo Stefano and watch the city passing by. But even those who choose to visit Bologna for a single reason, a single face, which is that of St. John the Evangelist, would also be right. in the church of Santa Maria della Vita, in via Clavature.

Are one step away from Piazza Maggiore, in one of the most important churches of the Bolognese Baroque which was actually built a few centuries earlier: it is in fact in 1261 that Riniero Barcobini Fasani, of Umbrian origins, founded the brotherhood of the Battuti Bianchi in the city, also having a hospital built for the care of pilgrims and the sick with an adjoining church, enlarged in the mid-fifteenth century, at the beginning of the following century and again at the end of the seventeenth century, when it was almost completely rebuilt (the dome instead dates back to 1787). Next to the main altar is the main treasury of the church, the lamentation over the Dead Christ by Niccolò dell’Arca, an Apulian master very active in Bologna (so much so that the name by which we know him today refers to the ark he worked on in the basilica of San Domenico, not too far from here) who was certainly present, before trying his hand at this masterpiece, indeed, in the San Petronio construction site; it is probably precisely for having distinguished himself in the decoration of the most important basilica in the city that Niccolò obtained this commission, probably in the early sixties of the fifteenth century.

And in fact we can say that the trust of the clients was well placed: the terracotta lament is a true masterpiece in which the figures, slightly larger than natural, each show a different pain in front of the Christ just taken down from the cross. Screamed and incredulous that of three Marie (one, the Magdalene, has just arrived on the spot, her dress still blowing in the wind), astonished that of Nicodemus – or maybe it is Giuseppe d’Arimatea – the man on the left dressed in fifteenth-century clothes, who looks at us as if he did not understand what is happening, mangled that of the Virgin, withheld that of John the Evangelist, who turns around because he cannot see the tortured body of Christ, but then thinks about it and puts a hand to his face to try to stop the tears. A work of art can be said to be such not because of the celebrity of the person who made it, much less for the material chosen – which is very poor here – but because it always manages to touch some chord of our soul; and this he does, and he is not at all delicate in doing it, on the contrary. Gabriele D’Annunzio was also impressed, and wrote: “I will never forget that Christ. Was it of earth? Was it of uncorrupted flesh? I didn’t know what substance it was […]. Can you imagine what the petrified scream is? “