When the Palio di Siena is a work of art. The artists who painted the banner

As the sound of the mortar shell rampages through the shell of the Piazza del Campo, the horses, with their respective jockeys on their backs, appear under the Torre del Mangia and make themselves known to the contradaioli thronging around. All, handkerchiefs around their necks, incite their contrada, wishing the worst displeasure to their rival. The ritual dictates that the order of disposition inside the canapi, that is, the two ropes that delimit the starting area, the move, is delivered by an overseer, in an envelope, into the hands of the mossiere, who will then call the contenders to dispose themselves properly, under the shouts of the crowd, which is fully aware of how much a good position can affect the race. The race: three laps of the field, just over a minute, that determine the winning horse. The jockey does not need to make it to the saddle; it is the animal that counts. Whoever triumphs wins the palio, which literally is a piece of cloth painted each year by a different artist. It is this object, in fact, the only material prize of the race. The members of the winning contrada, as soon as it is proclaimed such, head under the stage where it is displayed and, amid tears and hugs, loudly claim it. They will guard it together with the others, as an aesthetic expression of a day as ephemeral and eternal as the Palio, which lives forever but is exhausted in one day.

An eternity-immobility that also binds the drappelloni, or “cenci” as they are called in Siena, to an iconographic content that is almost unchanged over time and follows the main symbols of the city and the event: the Madonna, Piazza del Campo, the Torre del Mangia, the contradaioli, the flags, the kerchiefs, the horses, the jockeys. All artists, invited twice a year, for the Palio di Provenzano on July 2 and the Palio dell’Assunta on August 16, are called upon to interpret (almost) the same elements for centuries, as if it were a particularly subtle artistic genre. In the same way as still lifes, landscapes, and portraits, the Palio rag stimulates the artist to express himself fully in order to differentiate himself, to imprint a personal flash on a predetermined subject. It doesn’t matter what, it matters how. The results are a compendium of signatures and characters typical of the many important authors who have worked on it over the years, some key artists we now recognize as central to the history of Italian (and other) art of the second half of the 20th century. To see their works in a context so distant from the museum imaginary where we have come to know them is yet another contradiction inherent in the Palio, an event deaf to almost all contemporary innovations, except precisely those in the field of art, the very ones that contemporaneity instead struggles to interpret as its own. On the other hand, in the centuries-long history of the drapes, artistic independence has not always existed, but has instead been the result of a long but precise evolution.

The first document related to the making of a pallium dates back to 1306. Within it, it mainly mentions economic values, 25 lire in particular, needed to make the cloth. The expense-notes piglio is also evident from a document from 1310, for example, where the costs of making a cloth in sciaminito, a heavy wool, and lined in vaio are listed. Coats of arms began to be applied to these in 1316, but it was the search for the precious fabric, and the associated economic value, that interested Palio organizers until the mid-seventeenth century. The pallium was thus a kind of banner of fine cloth, similar in size to today’s, long and narrow, but its material value far exceeded its symbolic value. So much so that, considered a fungible prize, it was sometimes sold by the winner to make clothing or sacred vestments for the churches.

It was as the importance of the contrade grew, and thus the value of the event, along with the importance that patrons and financiers assumed in the organization, that the insertion of coats of arms and symbols, as well as the iconographies inherent in the Madonna, Provenzano and the Assumption, became increasingly common. Most importantly, from fabric the palio gradually became painted. In doing so, not only its workmanship changes, but also its value: it becomes more and more a unique object, the keeper of the memory of a specific edition, of an unforgettable victory. Although, in reality, from 1718, the year to which the first preserved drapery dates, until well into the nineteenth century, the works remain mostly one assimilated to the other, with the standardized iconographies of the respective Madonnas, accompanied by the patrons’ banners. Only in the early nineteenth century did the work take on more purely historical characters, with the various noble coats of arms, from that of Napoleon to that of Lorraine, marking the past dominations of Siena. In 1833 the contrade make their appearance on the drapery: it is the visual manifestation of their social recognition, which is consecrated in 1841 with the synthesized depiction of their emblems, mostly animals, not in a naturalistic key but understood as true heraldic figures. Making the drapes are mostly artisans, decorators, who take on the task and repeat the score slavishly even for five or ten consecutive years.

The drapery’s status as a work of art was consolidated in 1894, when for the first time its craftsmanship was entrusted to the best-known painter of the time, Arturo Viligiardi. While maintaining its symbolic and representative aspects unaltered, the drape began to shed its eminently decorative guise and put on its artistic one. From here on, the rag will be fully conceived as a painting, and therefore entrusted to a painter. In 1910 the final shift with the birth of a regular competition to entrust the task. A change that implies not only the professionalization of the commission, but also the legitimization for the artist to apply his vision to the theme. The drapery bill takes on the nature we recognize it today: a dialectical confrontation between the artist’s personal poetics, pictorial rules and official heraldry. Observing them ideally, one after the other, composes an ideal artistic gallery that has value as a synecdoche, a part that tells the whole of what in the field of art has happened in Italy in the last one hundred and twenty years, appreciating the evolutions in terms of techniques, styles and taste.

The first one that perhaps comes close to our modern sensibility is Renato Guttuso’s from August 1971. The painter depicts the event by highlighting its paradoxical nature, within which sacred and profane encroach from their respective territories. At the apex the transcendent religiosity of the Madonna, at the bottom the dramatic instinctiveness of the horse. In the middle the enthusiastic crowd, which on the strange meeting of these two poles rests its celebration. Valerio Adami’s continuous and synthetic lines in August 1981 composed an ironic drape, almost lighthearted in its play with iconography. The Assumption, portrayed above in expressionist style, makes a pop tongue at the viewer, chooses mockery as a symbol of a day when (almost) everything is worthwhile. Seriousness and pictorial acumen return in the lower section of the work, where the artist describes the emblems of the contrade with particularly effective graphic gimmicks. The contrast between the black background and broad backgrounds of bright colors make this palio one of the most successful ever.

Powerful, monumental, Salvatore Fiume’s drape, painted for an extraordinary palio in September 1986. The horse stands out dramatically for the entire drape, dominating a bluish sky and offering itself frontally to the outside world. Mounting him is an elderly figure, holding up Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico alluding to Lorenzetti’s Good Civic Government. The animal’s bichromy and almost “new figuration” forms give the work a unique imperiousness. On August 16, 1992, again for the Assumption, it is Mimmo Paladino’s turn to confront the subject. He chooses the path of synthesis, compressing horse, Madonna and city into a third of the space. Underneath, a tree branches out from a man’s head, perhaps a mask, at whose ends flourishes the coat of arms of the running contrade. Embellishing it is the technique of making it, with some parts inlaid and embroidered as in the folk banners of old.

The lysergic wind that Sandro Chia, an exponent of the Transavantgarde, blows on the drappellone of August 1994 is enthralling. The Madonna, gigantic but very light, seems to rest her toes on the Torre del Mangia as she dominates a gloomy and stormy Piazza del Campo, enveloping the jubilant contradaioli in the anguish of the outcome. Only the horse stands as a hope to be referred to. In July 1997, Emilio Tadini seems to converge the cruel implications of the Palio, demonic in pandering to the vagaries of fate, into a kind of spiteful and unpredictable genius, roaming the red sky of Siena ready to mock the flags of the districts that wave beneath him. Surrealist and metamorphic, imbued with Luigi Ontani’s classic circus evolutions, the July 2002 banner. More fairy-tale and intuitive is the work that just a month later Fernando Botero presents to the Sienese. The Madonna takes on the round forms of the Colombian artist, as do the horses and the whole atmosphere, swollen with volumes and omens. By the way: inevitable is the temptation to read in the drapes various cabalistic clues about the outcome of the race. There has been speculation, in this sense, about Igor Mitoraj’s drape (August 2004), which presents a series of blindfolded, exhausted figures, and only one resist, standing, crowned. Which of the contrade, depicted just below, is it? If we are talking about crowns, the king of the Piazza, the leading jockey of the time, was Enrico Bruschelli aka Trecciolino, who in fact also won that 2004 Palio for the Tartuca.

Two years later, in 2006, Tino Stefanoni makes an unusual choice: not the crowd, not the madness, but the seemingly calm wait of the night before the race, with the Torre del Mangia looming in the dark sky, illuminated by the powerful light of the Madonna. It is the space in which everyone, in his or her heart, prefigures the most unpredictable unfolding for the next day’s career. Dragging one into the whirlwind of the race, on the other hand, is Mario Ceroli’s oblique drape (August 2008), which, thanks to the rotated structure of the scene, moves the viewer to vertigo. Bold is the quasi-religious minimalism of Francesco Carone, who in August 2011 barely hints at the silhouette of the Madonna, who of white mantle joins an immaterial white background, stressing the more spiritual aspect of the Sienese festival. Particularly appreciated in recent times is the drape delivered by Milo Manara in August 2019. A Madonna without a veil and with a contemporary, feline beauty stands as the bearer of the dual Paliesque soul, sacred and profane. Her charm is almost a spell, taming the horse and moving as in a dance of stars the symbols of the contrade. Paradox that also returns in the starring opera of July 2024’s career. Giovanni Gasparro here depicted the Madonna wrapped in a long veil from which sprouts, on the lower left side, the face, profane, of a page. It is precisely to this figure, in retrospect, that much is returned. In fact, the man seems to be shaking off his cloak and looking at the sky, in the same intimidated way that the Sienese saw the weather crack just at the most beautiful moment, for two consecutive days (July 2-3), forcing a double postponement of the race (which was run on the 4th). The banner made by Riccardo Guasco for the August 2024 palio seems devoid of premonitory suggestions. Evident, however, is the enthusiasm and fairytale-like joy that transpires from the childlike face of the Assumption, from the barberi (the characteristic spheres with the colors of the Contrade, with which the children of Siena play in the streets) that roll in the lower part of the work and whose shapes are reflected in the stars that fly over a nocturnal, fairytale-like Siena. Again the celestial and the earthly corresponding influences, the divine shattering into cubist cuts and descending on the Piazza del Campo for another minute and a half of frenetic ecstasy. That like the aurora dazzles, that only the night consoles.

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