Calvary

Through the conspicuousness that the skeletons assume in the figuration as a whole, evidently alluding to Adam’s presumed burial place, the blue-and-red polychrome Calvary forces the spectator to contemplate his own ephemeral condition, his own death.
The remarkable increase in funereal sculptures must be related to the emergence of individualism, a phenomenon that spread across Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. In art, the predominance of certain themes and the development of certain representative strategies point to the manifestation of a desire or to the affirmation of a need.
The man who assumes self-awareness, who ceases to define himself only in terms of his social ties, or from a collective viewpoint, and begins to assert an individually professed protagonism, feels the need (and the desire?) to perpetuate his memory beyond death. Besides the various elements that were contained in funereal structures, serving to establish and perpetuate the entombed person’s identity, representations of the Calvary were another recurrent feature, precisely because, above all, they dealt with the death of God made man nailed to the cross, and then also with the death of each man made in his image.