Reporting of Federici Studies Center
We see it with his eyes. Thomas Lorenzone, the painter of the Help of Christians
«Look how beautiful she is! It's not my work, no. It's not me who paints. There is another hand guiding mine. Tell Don Bosco that the painting will be beautiful".
In the first months of 1865, Don Bosco's thoughts are absorbed by the large painting of Mary Help of Christians which will stand in the sanctuary. He entrusted its execution to the painter Lorenzone, and tries to communicate to him everything he "wants to see" in that painting:
«In alto Maria SS. among the Angels, the apostles around her, i profeti, the virgins, the confessors. In the lower part, the people of various parts of the world who stretch out their hands towards her and ask for help".
Lorenzone lets him finish, Then: «And where do you want to put this painting?»
«In the new church».
«And he believes he will? And where to find the room to paint it? To find a space suitable for the dimensions you imagine, we would like Piazza Castello!»
Don Bosco had to recognize that the painter was right. It was therefore decided that only the apostles and evangelists would be painted around the Madonna. The oratory would have been depicted at the foot of the painting.
Lorenzone rented a very high hall in Palazzo Madama and began work. It would last about three years.
He managed to give Mary Help of Christians' face a very sweet and maternal expression. A priest from the oratory told the story:
«One day I entered his studio to see the painting. Lorenzone was on the ladder, giving the final brushstrokes to Maria's face. He didn't look at the noise I made when I entered, continued his work. Soon he came down and began to observe. Suddenly he became aware of my presence, he took me by the arm and led me to a point of full light: “Look how beautiful she is!” he told me. “It's not my doing, no. It's not me who paints. There is another hand guiding mine. Tell Don Bosco that the painting will be beautiful". He was thrilled beyond words. So he got back to work.".
When the painting was brought into the sanctuary, witnesses recalled, and lifted into place, Lorenzone fell to his knees and began to cry like a child.
A good painter
The painter Tommaso Lorenzone was born in Pancalieri (TO) il 13 February 1824; he studied at the Albertina Academy and distinguished himself as a prolific producer, especially of paintings on sacred subjects, of large and small altarpieces. In his early works the imagination and freshness of color are to be appreciated; in this period of his artistic activity he was very close to the environments of the Turin Academy, in a round of prestigious commissions for portraits of the Savoys and noble Turin families, with a variety of subjects that will later be absorbed by sacred art alone. The altarpieces for the Turin churches of San Francesco da Paola and San Gaetano belong to this period.
Yes it can, in some respects, connect Lorenzone's poetics to the pictorial current of the Nazarenes, perhaps known thanks to the disclosure made by the painter Tommaso Minardi and the printed reproductions that certainly circulated among Piedmontese painters. “Their belief was a preference for the Middle Ages, the acceptance of the Renaissance up to Raphael's early works, the study of nature, ethical-religious commitment". In fact the Lorenzone, both in the arrangement of the figures of his compositions, often with a pyramidal development, both in the forms and in the purity of the color it harks back to the painting of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
Lorenzone was satisfied in his aspirations. The sacred art he produced, if it appears valid from the point of view of the devotional function, remains aesthetically characterized by the 'handicap' of what is known, of the obvious. The religious effect is satisfactory, but produced by a dated artistic form having gone back through the centuries even if with the best intentions.
He died in Turin in 1901.
A “devoted impression”
A preparatory drawing of the painting of the Help of Christians for the main altar is preserved in Turin-Valdocco and an autograph sketch of the same painting is preserved in the collection of objects from Don Bosco's bedrooms.. The first phase of developing the iconographic project was laborious. Don Bosco decided one thing: “On foot of the painting, under the glory of the Madonna, the Oratory house would be built". This last observation is interesting for the awareness that Don Bosco had about his work in Valdocco: he was "convinced of a particular investiture of God in favor of the redemption of youth". No longer, therefore, the "emblems of the great victories of Mary and the people (…) in the act of raising his hands", but the Oratory and with it the multitude of young people assisted, almost as if to emphasize the fact that the work he began was a victory for Mary and the young people he assisted replaced "the peoples of the various parts of the world".
The painting received an enthusiastic reception, to say the least; as Don Bosco himself wrote, the painting of the Help of Christians, completed in 1868, And "… Work (…) well expressed, proportionate, natural; but the value that it will never lose is the religious idea that generates a devout impression in the heart of anyone who looks at it".
While sharing the opinion of those who evaluate the "work constructed in an extremely rational way, according to nineteenth-century academic usage, typical above all of sacred painting", in the painting of the Help of Christians it is rightly worth appreciating the marked beauty of the figure of the Madonna on which the painter focused with understandable and particular complacency. They seem quite successful, on the other hand, the figures of the apostles, in old-fashioned clothes (in the meaning that could be given to the notion in the mid-nineteenth century). Of course “we are not faced with superior artistic genius, free and unscrupulous; Lorenzone's ideal was that of a formal orthodoxy, perhaps even more canonical than that of Don Bosco, by virtue of which he was so appreciated as an artist of the sacred", however, the consummate compositional skill and the ability to affectively involve the devotee as was the client's intention are to be praised.
The placement of a topographic reference, lower in the composition (in this case of the oratory building), it is an expedient dear to Lorenzone who will also use it in the altarpiece of Saint Joseph, for the same church and for the altarpiece of the Blessed Caterina da Racconigi in the collegiate church of San Lorenzo a Giaveno, where it will depict the castle of Racconigi.
The Holy Family
In the 1873 Lorenzone finished the second order for Don Bosco: the altarpiece of the left arm with Saint Joseph and the Holy Family of Nazareth. The canvas is in the center of a small yellow: Don Bosco in 1868, in his Wonders of the Mother of God, invoked under the title of Mary Help of Christians, he describes the work as if it were already placed in its place above the altar, while in a letter from 14 October 1873 Don Rua writes: “Between D. Cagliero and D. Savio think about the painting of S. Giuseppe who is near Mr. Lorenzone finished, and all that's needed is the frame to be put in place". The Biographical Memoirs correct Don Bosco's expression: “In the cross on the left there is the altar which will be dedicated to St. Giuseppe; but the painting was not yet on site, the artist Tommaso Lorenzone worked to paint it. It would have represented the Holy Family. The composition was symbolic and here is the design. S. Joseph is standing on a cloud, carrying the Baby Jesus on his left arm, who holds a basket full of roses on his knees: The Child takes the roses and gives them to St. Giuseppe and he gradually makes them rain on the church of Mary Help of Christians which can be seen below and has the hills of Superga as its background". Certainly that of the saint was a trick adopted to give the idea to the devotees of the Help of Christians, and his benefactors, of a church now completed if not in all its parts, at least in the essential furnishings. How could he describe the picture in the 68 if it was finished in 73?
The description of the painting was possible thanks to a demonstrative sketch that Lorenzone had prepared before the execution of the altarpiece. The little painting (cm 27,5×48) it was recently identified in a private collection in Asti. Recently restored, It is in good condition; it is not known what the process was that led him from the painter's studio to the antiques market and from there to the collector. It was easy to attribute it to Lorenzone, given the obvious relationship with the definitive work; anyway, the writing “Carlo Morgari” appears on the frame, unless it is a note of ownership by this Piedmontese painter, the note demonstrates that attribution was not always so peaceful. The small work does not present substantial variations compared to the final product. In the final picture, the figures are more voluminous and the angel on the left has slightly more abundant drapery, with a flourish of fabric behind the shoulders. The altar of Saint Joseph was inaugurated on 26 April 1874.
