Decaying Female Figure or Vanitas

Donation in memory of Ernesto Cilento (2020).

The transience of beauty in the face of the atrocity of suffering.

The bust of a woman is modeled with accurate anatomical research and deep emotional participation. Her face, once beautiful, is marked by inexorable death. Referring to an artist close to the ways of the Syracusan Gaetano Giulio Zumbo (1656-1701), the Vanitas is a splendid and disturbing memento mori of the Baroque tradition, a period marked by the Thirty Years' War and the terrible plague that killed a large part of the population in Europe, in particular following the epidemics of 1630 and 1656.
Death and pain, constantly present in the daily life of the time, become privileged themes in the imaginary of the artists, who reflect in their works the climate of the Counter-Reformation, through the exaltation of martyrdom and sacrifice, and absorb the stimuli coming from contemporary studies of anatomy and the progress of medical sciences.