Saint Francis of Paola

Author: Unknown southern sculptor

Dating: Mid. XVIII

Material: Wood carved and painted

Dimensions: cm 180×89 approx.

Location: Milazzo, church of Jesus and Mary

The simulacrum depicts San Francesco di Paola, co-patron with Santo Stefano Protomartire of the city of Milazzo. Although it is an object of ancient and lively devotion as well as of undoubted quality and mentioned by a vast literature, it lacks specific and scientific studies aimed at investigating and clarifying its executive events. According to reports by Antonio Micale and Giovanni Petrungaro, would have been made in 1702 by an unknown Neapolitan artist, following a decision taken by the General Council of Milazzo, in 1696, which provided for the proclamation of the Calabrian Saint as protector of the town of Capo. This information, however, as substantiated, can not be accepted sic et simpliciter, in the writings of the two scholars, and often refuted by unequivocal documentary evidence or, in the case of references to works of art, by obvious stylistic differences.

Specifically, the statue of the Saint of Paola, even if it is likely to be in the Neapolitan area, or at least southern, in the absence of documents, would suggest a somewhat later date than that already mentioned and subsequent, of a few decades, at the siege carried out by the Spaniards in 1718-1719, during the war of the Quadruple Alliance, which caused various damages to the artistic heritage of Milazzo, lacking that lively and accentuated dynamism as well as that refined decorativism that characterize the Neapolitan scultur of the early eighteenth century and that can be seen, instead, for example, in many works by Nicola Fumo and Giacomo Colombo. The presence in Messina of Neapolitan wooden sculptures, some of which can be traced back to well-established artists such as Giuseppe Sarno, Francesco Di Nardo and Filippo Colicci, or to lesser known sculptors, is very widespread, as was argued elsewhere, vome Francesco Antonio De Mari, of whom there is, in Milazzo, in the church of San Papino, a San Pasquale di Baylon, signed and dated 1750, a work of a certain quality although of quite devotional intonation.

The simulacrum of the Saint of Paola has replaced an older statue – which is mentioned in the Memoirs of the City of Milazzo by Father Francesco Napoli, in relation to a miraculous apparition of San Francesco to a child in 1582 – and, in its current location, on the high altar of the church of Jesus and Mary, an ancient painting that devout tradition wanted to have been executed by its own founder of the Minima – on the door of the house of blessed Candida, whose remains are recomposed in the same church – in memory of his stay Milazzese and that, destroyed by a fire in 1908, could perhaps identify with the image of the Saint “of painting over table, and brush for what appears pilgrim, remembered by the Capuchin priest Francesco Perdichizzi in his Melazo Sacro. Deeply rooted in Milazzo, the cult of San Francesco di Paola has its origins in the presence of the Saint. According to tradition, in fact, he would have stayed in the Sicilian town between 1464 and 1467 (but more realistically between 1479 and me 1482) founding the church of Jesus and Mary and the adjacent convent, on the site where was once the small church of San Biagio dei Ragusei, This building whose existence testifies the presence in Milazzo of a “nation” of the ancient and flourishing Republic of Ragusa or San Biagio, about which nothing is reported in the local literature.

There are numerous miraculous episodes of which, according to the hagiographic writings, the Saint would have made himself protagonist in the Sicilian town, from the healing of a man struck by lightning to the liberation of an innocent condemned, as some paintings on the side altars of the church of the Pauline sanctuary illustrate. No reference to them is found, however, in our simulacrum, represented according to a fairly traditional iconography but that differs in part from the more widespread one that sees the Saint depicted in the act of holding the stick, Physical support in his continuous wandering, or with hands joined in prayer, according to the models formulated by two distinct portraits executed by the real one, presumably made during his stay in Naples, at the court of Ferrante d’Aragona, in 1483, the other work of the French painter Jean Bourdichon, valet de chambre of Louis XI, both lost but source of inspiration for many works painted later; or again in the act of crossing, with a fraticello, the Strait of Messina on his cloak, used as hull and sail. The Milazzese statue represents the Saint standing, with arms extended forward in act of invoking God, dressed with the typical “patience”, the heavy black tunic long up to the heels equipped with hood, along in turn until half of the femurs both front and behind, and with two high clogs at the feet, shoes which according to the Paolotti rule should have been preferably of wood, or of straw, or of rushes.

From an executive and stylistic point of view, the work shows apparent affinities with an unprecedented sculpture of similar subject but small size, jealously guarded at the premises of the shrine paolotto and, both by the Minima and by the devotees, considered the preparatory model. Although obviously different is, in fact, the pose of the Saint, in the sketch made with the right hand to the chest and the left in the act of holding the stick, similar appears to be the draping of the lower part of the tunic, similar, as simplified, the shaped beard and facial features. Marble translation of our simulacrum can, instead, be considered the statue placed in the center of the scenographic staircase with double ramp that leads to the church of the Sanctuary, performed, as an epigraph recalls, in 1760 by the will of the Milazzese Senate. The work also finds an immediate precedent, in local context, in San Francesco di Paola today in the church of Santa Maria dell’Arco, in Messina, realized by Ursino Mari in 1712 and, of course, an illustrious term of comparison in the simulacrum of the Saint executed in 1732 by Giovan Battista Maino for the Basilica of San Pietro in Rome.

Buda V., Lanuzza S. (a cura di), Tesori di Milazzo. Arte sacra tra Seicento e Settecento., Milazzo 2015