Charity

The group of Charity, placed in a prominent position beside the triumphal arch in the Palermo oratory of the Bardigli and Cordigeri of San Lorenzo (all these oratories were the seats of pious confraternities), marks one of Serpotta's achievements of highest stylistic perfection; with exceptional purity of language he fuses observations from life, the popular pretext, into an ecstatic and transcendent representation. Exceptional passages of the sculptor's prestigious skill (stucco, a mixture of lime and marble dust, demands rapid execution, allowing no second thoughts) are the two little children clinging to their mother's clothes and the other sucking milk: an extremely fresh and immediate modelling seals one of the happiest inventions of eighteenth-century European sculpture.