Salvo | Il trionfo di San Giorgio

Born in Leonforte, in the province of Enna, in 1947, Salvo (Salvatore Mangione) spent his childhood in Sicily, before his family emigrated to Turin in 1956. Here he expressed a precocious interest in art and at just 16 he participated in the 121st Esposizione della Società Promotrice delle Belle Arti, with a drawing after Leonardo. At the end of the 60s, Salvo began his involvement with American conceptual artists Joseph Kosuth, Robert Barry, and Sol Lewitt. Following this, his work began to display key characteristics that would later become essential to his research, engaging with the search for Self, narcissistic self-satisfaction, and the relationship with the past and the history of culture.

An “archaeological spirit” accompanies Salvo’s entire artistic parabola. It nourishes the languages and techniques with which he experiments from the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include marble tombstones with engravings, self-portraits such as Cristo benedicente and photographic self-portraits inspired by Raffaello. He also creates lists of illustrious historical and artistic figures of the past, in which he includes his name. From 1973 onwards, his paintings reinterpret the San Martino and San Giorgio of the best pictorial tradition, and even subjects from Greco-Roman mythology and capriccios with classical ruins.

In 1974, during the Projekt ’74 exhibition in Cologne, Salvo made a unique request. Instead of exhibiting alongside other artists at the Kunsthalle, he asked for a room at the Wallraf-Richartz, the city’s museum of medieval and modern art. There, he requested the opportunity to select a work from each century spanning the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. This selection aimed to construct an artistic lineage, culminating with his own 1973 piece, San Martino e il povero (St. Martin and the poor), to represent the twentieth century.

For the twentieth century, Salvo presents a reinterpretation of El Greco’s San Martino che divide il mantello con un mendicante (St. Martin sharing his cloak with a beggar) (1597-99) , borrowing the acid green of the drape and the subject. However, the drawing and palette are simplified and lightened. The figures regain sharp contours and the background becomes antinaturalistic, almost reduced to a horizon line.

“Colours that rarely appear in the history of art, and just as rarely in nature, include the lavender colour of the horse’s harness in the S. Martino shown in Cologne, […] the pinks lightly touched with a blue shading in the S. Giorgio e il drago (da Raffaello) (S. George and the Dragon [from Raphael]) of 1974, the violet and mauve harmonies in the after Carpaccio, the icy indigo of the Apollo e Dafne (Apollo and Daphne) and the deep indigo of Cavalieri tra le rovine al crepuscolo (Riders in the Ruins at Dusk ) of 1978. When Salvo painted in his studio, he always used electric light, so that his painting would not depend on the passage of time and on changes in natural light, so he preferred to use a colour that was born alongside artificial light and that appears to contain it within itself, like a vibration that is at once dark and shrill”.

Elena Volpato, Io sono Salvo. Works and Writings 1961-2015, Archivio Salvo and Nero, 2023 p. 36.

“As long as the model can be seen in a new way, because the definition is not finished, why should one stop the search?”

Salvo, On Painting. In the Style of Wittgenstein, Hrsg, Paul Maenz & Gerd de Vries, Colonia, 1980, p. 24, par. 37

Il trionfo di San Giorgio (The Triumph of St. George)

The over 2.5 metres high and nearly 8 metres long, d’après Carpaccio was painted in 1974 and exhibited at the Galleria Franco Toselli in Milan in the same year and two years later at the 37th Venice Biennale.

Salvo’s d’après reveals a clear shift from a rigorous geometric space, symmetrical arrangement, and a closed world resembling a miniature, to a painting style that eradicates figures, horizons, and theatricality, focusing solely on the mythical image. The figures, which live as ideal images in the light of thought, have no shadows and are accentuated by the contours of the drawing. The background behind them is condensed into a horizon line. The artist eliminates the depth of the shadows, as his aim is neither illusionary nor pathetic. The work serves as a central example of Salvo’s research in the 1970s. In contrast to contemporaneous art movements, it stands as a central focus in his oeuvre, exploring themes such as the connection with tradition and re-examination of art history.

In Il trionfo di San Giorgio (The Triumph of St. George), Salvo revisits Vittore Carpaccio’s (1502-1507) Trionfo di San Giorgio (1502-1507). Carpaccio’s canvas spans 3.5 metres wide and was commissioned by the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni in Venice, where it is still preserved. The scene shows George leading the tame dragon, with the broken spear still in his throat, after rescuing the princess, into the Libyan city of Selene and raising his sword to decapitate it for good. On either side, the Selenites, in their exotic robes and with the sumptuous trappings of their horses, form two dense wings full of colour. Behind stands the city of Selene, with a large, centrally planned building. From the balconies the people look out, farther away the sloping hills can be glimpsed, cleared by the mist, against the background of a blue sky variegated by light clouds.

Salvo’s interpretation of it is under the banner of narrative simplification and colour translation. He retains only the groups of figures and animals in the foreground by placing them on a pastel green meadow, the urban background disappears in favour of a very low mountain range silhouetted on the horizon line, a cold and homogeneous light illuminates the scene by canceling the shadows.

Salvo gives new life and meaning to the classical iconography of the Christian hero defeating the dragon, uncovering a whole series of meanings and new values: the break with perceptible appearances towards a more contemplative vision, the elimination of any narrative excess in favour of a more rarefied atmosphere.

“I was interested in saints who were a bit like Ercole and the Idra, world subjects. The dragon is there in Greek mythology, in the Catholic religion, but also in Chinese art…I was interested in the symbolic meaning of the figure of the man fighting against the dragon.”

(from Conversazione mobile between Salvo and Laura Cherubini in Laura Cherubini, Il paese delle meraviglie e le Tavole della Legge, Volpaia Castle, 1994).

Salvo | Il trionfo di San Giorgio

Il trionfo di San Giorgio (The Triumph of St. George)

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