Modelli celebri per la tela con La Madonna della Misericordia di Calimera

The pretty altarpiece depicting the "Madonna della Misericordia", preserved in St. Brizio church in Calimera, is attributed to Giuseppe Andrea Manfredi, a painter-friar who lived for a long time (1659-1754), making many paintings of devotional subject updated on the dictates of'Post-Tridentine Catholic Orthodoxy. He would have realized more than hundred paintings for episcopal churches, monasteries and religious Orders such as Franciscans, Dominicans, and Carmelites. Thanks to those Orders there has been a great circulation in the "Earth of Otranto" of the iconography of "Misericordia", spread especially between the 13th and the 17th centuries. It represents the Virgin opening her mantle to welcome and give protection to the poor and sick, to saints and princes, to nobles, peoples and children. The canvas offers some iconographical innovations and similarities to the most popular examples of post-Tridentine devotional painting elaborated prevalent in the Lazio, Tuscan, Emilian and Venetian areas. In Manfredi's canvas, he presents and revisits some of the motifs that featured the most celebrated representations of "Mater Misericordiae": from the blue-cobalt mantle of the Virgin of Simone Martini and Piero della Francesca to the delicate elegance of Madonna by Domenico Ghirlandaio, the harmonious gesture of Madonna of Fra' Bartolomeo, to the solemn sovereignty of "Misericordia" by Moretto to the decorations precious of the Madonna of Luca Signorelli. The precious shades, poses, the physiognomy and the prospective design of the Calimera painting all seem to appeal to those artists and their celebrated models.