Domenico Fiasella's St. Lazarus: a masterpiece of "Caravaggism revisited" to drive out the plague

In that thin strip of plain on the border between Tuscany and Liguria, squeezed between the hills on one side and the sea on the other, the traveler driving along the Aurelia moving toward Sarzana will notice at a certain point, among the businesses, warehouses and cultivated fields that dot this industrious area, an anonymous-looking nineteenth-century church, glued to the left edge of the highway, and preceded by three linden trees that almost seem to guard it. It is the church of San Lazzaro, a hamlet of Sarzana: a handful of cottages, workshops, and warehouses in the middle of the countryside, watched in full view by the Colline del Sole, where vineyards and olive trees vie for the gentle slopes that slope down to the Magra plain.

Here stood the ancient hospital, of which all that remains today is a ruin on the Aurelia, a few hundred meters south of the church: mentioned since the 12th century, it offered shelter to wayfarers and pilgrims on their way to Rome, especially those who were ill, along the route of the Via Romea (or the “Via Francigena,” to use the terms of contemporary tourist categorizations) that descended from Lunigiana, crossed the Magra valley and then, touching the village of Avenza, passed the Apuan Riviera and continued in the direction of Versilia. Where the San Lazzaro district is now, there was once nothing: just a hospital surrounded by scrubland. Then, in the eighteenth century, came the closing of the shelter, which was transformed so that its facilities were put to agricultural use: the story of the ancient wayfarers ended, the story of modern trade began. And the convent chapel had an heir: in 1842 the parish of St. Lazarus was established and the decision was made to build the new church, which was begun the following year and consecrated in 1880. But already a few years earlier, in the mid-1970s, the little chapel began to be emptied: local historian Achille Neri had complained about the deterioration of the lazaretto, wishing for a more worthy location for its riches. And he was heard. This, then, is why this small church, so young and so ordinary, holds an extraordinary treasure, one of the most fascinating paintings of seventeenth-century Liguria: the Saint Lazarus Pleading with the Virgin for the City of Sarzana, an early masterpiece by Domenico Fiasella.

Domenico Fiasella, Saint Lazarus Imploring the Virgin for the City of Sarzana (1616; oil on canvas, 213 x 149 cm; Sarzana, San Lazzaro)

The great artist from Sarzana had executed the work in 1616, in just a month, upon his return from a ten-year long formative stay in Rome: evidently Fiasella must have sensed from a very young age that he had exceptional talent, since he manifested very early on his intention to travel to the capital of the Papal States to observe at close quarters what neither his hometown nor Genoa, where he had moved shortly before to study under Giovanni Battista Paggi, could give him: the chance to learn the craft from the greatest. In Rome, Fiasella had the opportunity to observe the paintings of Caravaggio and the Caravaggeschi, Orazio Gentileschi, Guido Reni and the Bolognese, as well as the most distinguished exponents of the manner, from Federico Zuccari to Cigoli.

In the canvas of San Lazzaro, therefore, we find many of the cues that Domenico Fiasella knew how to draw from observation of the most up-to-date artists of his time. It is an easy-to-read work: a characteristic that will be typical of almost all Fiasella’s production. St. Lazarus, dressed in threadbare rags, is kneeling at the feet of the Madonna, who appears to him seated on a throne of clouds, surrounded by a dense host of angels, among whom one stands out, bizarrely, with black wings. The figures are very close, but they could not be farther apart: the rough, dirty, folkish profile of Saint Lazarus is the exact opposite of the candor and purity of this adolescent Virgin, who looks at him compassionately as she holds in her hands the Child, leaning lopsidedly on her left knee. But there is no contrast: the encounter between naturalism and classicism is balanced, harmonious. And it will become one of the distinctive elements of Domenico Fiasella’s great art. Saint Lazarus, accompanied by one of the dogs that lick his sores in the Gospel parable, is invoking protection for the city of Sarzana: we see its skyline below, amid clouds heralding gloomy thunderstorms, with the Porta del Mare no longer standing, the bell tower of the Cathedral and that of the church of Sant’Andrea silhouetted against the buildings around it, and in the middle the mighty outline of the Sarzanello Fortress, which actually dominates the city from the top of a hill, but the painter painted it as if it were in the center.

The painting had been commissioned on March 4, 1616, from Domenico Fiasella by the Protectors of the Opera di Santa Maria, who were in charge of the hospital church, for which the altarpiece was intended. The young painter did not disappoint expectations: he had delivered “a work of great commitment,” wrote Piero Donati, “through which Fiasella, then 27 years old, wanted to show his fellow citizens that he had well spent the long years he had spent in Rome.” What we see before our eyes in the church of San Lazzaro is thus a masterpiece of “tempered naturalism or revisited Caravaggism,” to use Donati’s expression again: “one can see here, in the figure of the mendicant saint, a convinced participation of Fiasella in the experiments on the natural conducted by the followers of Caravaggio, and in particular by Baburen and Jusepe de Ribera.” Fiasella had long observed the works of the Dutchman and the Spaniard in the collection of Vincenzo Giustiniani, whom the painter had met in 1611: the Genoese nobleman, moreover, was to become a staunch supporter of his, since in the inventories of his collection compiled shortly after his death four works by Domenico Fiasella are mentioned. Caravaggio’s naturalism is thus the beacon under which the sarzanese artist models the body of Saint Lazarus, a body that is alive and present: the light brings out the muscles of the arm, the olive coloring of the beggar’s skin is accentuated by the whiteness of the rags knotted haphazardly around his waist and realistically soiled by the artist’s brush (right down to the passage of the bloody bandage that wraps around Saint Lazarus’ leg), his gaunt face is caught in a sorrowful, pleading expression.

The Virgin, on the other hand, surprises with her crystalline, delicate, ethereal, classical beauty, reminiscent of the art of the Carraccis or Giovanni Lanfranco, who were also known in Rome. She is placed on a three-quarter throne, exactly like the Madonna of the Sarzana Altarpiece by Andrea del Sarto, a masterpiece that later ended up in Germany and was destroyed in the fire of the Friedrichshain Flakturm. The Florentine’s work had been one of the founding texts of Domenico Fiasella’s training: Raffaele Soprani, in his Lives, returns the image of a Fiasella who observed, carefully studied and drew over and over again the panel of Andrea del Sarto, who “so well taught him in the true rule of good drawing, mastery of composition, and beautiful practice of coloring with sweetness, that he succeeded in making himself conspicuous among all those who in our day have with exquisite brushwork colored canvases.” It is nice to think that Fiasella wanted to pay homage to his ideal master: the band that holds the Virgin’s hair in place, decidedly démodé at the beginning of the seventeenth century, is identical to what could be seen in Andrea del Sarto’s altarpiece.

And it is interesting to think that the altarpiece was meant to save Sarzana from dangers that might have threatened it. Dangers referred to by the allegorical storm that looms over the town menacingly obscuring the buildings and the few human presences glimpsed there, and very specific dangers, since Lazarus was revered as the protector of lepers: disease, pestilence, epidemics. At the time, we relied on the saints: and so that masterpiece by Domenico Fiasella is no longer just an extraordinary work of art, but a memory that speaks to us, a living testimony that reminds us of how we were and makes us think about how we are.

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