Peace

Serpotta's refined imagination found fully coherent expression in the crowded oratories of his city: that of the Rosary in Santa Cita, that of San Lorenzo attached to the church of San Francesco, and another of the Rosary beside the church of San Domenico. These are spaces of elementary architecture, with simple, linear members. But the sculptor clothes their walls with a veritable mantle of stucco, thronged with symbolic and narrative figures, which together form a single sculptural organism, a great coverlet on which the light traces silky softnesses and dense folds of shadow, in a fluctuating unreality. In this context the allegories of the Virtues mark the longest caesuras, the full notes (above all in San Domenico, where they are placed in niches made resonant by gold), and a myriad of putti weave around them a subtly refined pizzicato.