Emerging outsiders: a tribute to Alessandro Franchi a century after his death

 

In the Cathedral of Prato two of the main frescoes of the Italian Renaissance are preserved: the “Stories of the Virgin and of St. Stephen” painted by Andrea di Giusto and Paolo Uccello between 1435 and 1436 and the “History of St. Stephen and St. John the Baptist” by Fra Filippo Lippi and Fra Diamante (completed in 1465). Obviously visitors to the Cathedral tend to focus their attention on these paintings. But on the right of the apse there is a nineteenth-century frescoes representing stories of the Old Testament which, although overshadowed by the fame of its neighbors, is signed by a painter who should be re-evaluated: Alessandro Franchi (Prato, 15 March 1838 – Siena, 29 April 1914).

 

The first thing that strikes you when looking at his work in the Chapel Vinaccesi, is the particular attention that the artist dedicated to hairstyles and headgears. It is indeed a singular coincidence to discover from his biography that both father and mother of Alessandro Franchi were hatters. This frescoes seem to be in perfect harmony with its Renaissance neighbors, Filippo Lippi an Paolo Uccello. There’s indeed a strong consistency with the fifteenth-century forms, given by both the choice of design solutions and the implantation of the composition by Franchi.

 

In 1868, the artist made a trip to Venice, and in a letter to a friend explained the huge attraction that the works of the fifteenth century Venice had exercised over him. Over time criticism has proved that the Renaissance and the fifteenth century were a constant in Franchi’s art practice.
In 1870, for example, the artist began to work on the graffiti for the floor of the Cathedral of Siena. The success of that led the Opera del Duomo to commission him other artworks: the graffiti and marquetries for the floor under the dome of the cathedral, in addition to those already made by Domenico Beccafumi (1486-1551). Franchi’s work has been praised by the critics all for the perfect way it fits with Beccafumi’s one.
Other times, the criticism linked his painting to a coeval movement, which was inspired by the Italian art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, recovering a sentimentality typical of Ruskin, or screeching color of the Pre-Raphaelite type. Other critics have traced Franchi’s to the movement of the Nazarenes, a group of German Romantic painters active in Rome in the early nineteenth century, whose pattern was characterized by a formal reconstruction, almost philological, of the style of the fifteenth-century Italian artists such as Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Luca Signorelli, Perugino and Raphael.

 

Today, looking at the figures in the frescoes of the cathedral of Prato, especially the old man with the brown cloaks and long white beards in the desert, perhaps we can say who was inspired by him in the twentieth century: the visionary author of the science fiction movie Star Wars. Couldn’t it be?

September 22, 2014