• At Halloween I received a message from my son: Saturday at 20:15 would be a TV-broadcast about „my“ Saint Martin. Indeed have I done a lot of studies on this saint. But it was not the only one. The first was Santus Laurentius, San Lorenzo, Saint Lawrence or Hl. Lorenz. Below you see some pictures from a show „Il sorriso di S.Lorenzo“,that I had in Italy 2009.

2007 the priest (parocco) of the italian village, where I stay every year for some weeks, asked me whether I would like to show some of my watercolours in a desacrated church. It is an awesome, wounderful baroque building called after its patron S. Lorenzo. After a first visit I decided not to show landscapes and other „watercolours“, but to do something about this saint. He lived in the tird century under the emperor Valerianus in Rome,  and was treasurer of pope Sixtus II . When Sixtus was murdered the emperor gave order to deliver the church property to him, which Laurentius denied. He was condamned to a cruel martyr becoming roasted on a grid.  The grid became the attribute of the later saint. Of course bloomed a lot of legends around his death. For example: The order of the emporer to deliver the church property answered Lawrence giving all the money to the members of the christian community and than, asked where the money was left, pointed at the people saying „this is our treasure“. An amazing, incredible story is that Laurentius was laughing and inciting the men to heat the fire more and turn him so that the roast would be well done.

While the former artists had to follow the official iconography  of the catholic church showing Lawrence suffering on the grill or standing with the grill as attribute, modern art concepts offer an almost unlimited scale of interpretations and presentations. As a straight follower of Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky I learned to appreciate the legends, pictures, texts and historical notions corresponding to the saints as important components of our culture. And I consider it my task to enlarge this „treasure“.

By the way- my studies on Saint Martin will be subject of the next post. Promised!

(For more see: Meine Bilder, Wasmuth,2009)