Maria Antonietta Crippa

The renowned American historian Kubler1 pointed out, years ago, that between the professions of astronomer and art historian, in all its forms, there exists a singular affinity of purpose, resulting from the fact that both study phenomena of light that has long since faded yet is still visible. For astronomers, these are the brilliant, extinct stars that we can all admire on a clear night; for historians, they are the eminent facts of a culture that can no longer be recovered in its entirety but which has left traces of splendor in masterpieces of art, as well as in ‘things’ or tools of use, visible and enjoyable in our time. The sole purpose of astronomers and historians is to restore full visibility, that is, to make the object of their interest appear at its best, so as to better understand it.

This reference is useful here to understand the rationale for the collaborative investigation proposed in this volume: the authors have intended to provide the essential tools to reveal the greatness, both human and artistic, of Father Costantino Ruggeri (1925-2007), now too little known, indeed at risk of being forgotten, perhaps due to an increasingly widespread collective aesthetic superficiality. Their investigations and historical reconstructions, and the painstaking work of the president and members of the Frate Sole Foundation, produced to provide basic knowledge and select documents and images for documentary purposes, certainly do not claim to be complete. This book, conceived in a compact format, aims instead to mark the beginning of a rediscovery, and therefore a necessary historicization that requires the exploration of numerous archives, the detailed reexamination of a vast body of literature, and even a visual examination of all his architecture.

In planning it, given Ruggeri’s multifaceted and truly vast artistic production, we immediately realized the essential need to identify a suitable perspective to bring out its unifying essence and, therefore, immediately reflect his singularity as a man who was a painter, sculptor, craftsman, architect sui generis, poet, writer, as well as, importantly, a Franciscan priest and friar who spanned almost the entire 20th century and entered the 21st.

Jean Clair recently burst out in a cry of recognition of the dramatic density of our utopian present: “The bolt of the future has been broken, and it is time in its fullness that is being returned to us. A profound, profuse, contradictory time, without any imposed signposting, a time in which the phenomena of archaisms, of investigations of the past, of returns, cease to clash with the opprobrium to which they were subjected during the era of Futurist ideology, to become once again what they have always been: drives and resources, increased possibilities of freedom.”2 In his artistic work, Father Costantino anticipated this primacy of a present as a time of restored fullness, without, however, experiencing the harsh bitterness that runs through Jean Clair’s thought, because he experienced no rejection of the avant-garde, from which he instead continually extracted contributions that were indispensable to him, relying also on the universe of art of ancient origins, provided it was alive in the cultures of peoples.

There is a fortunate intuition in his focus on the principle of mystical space, escaping the complexity of the universal sacred—in the distancing from the semantic constellation between sacred, holy, religiosity, and religion, which has become a vast field of study from the 1970s to the present—but committed to affirming the infinite mystery of Christ’s human-divine presence in the world, in his own artistic research. Indeed, knowing, through daily familiarity with the Christian mystery, its historical relevance within the ecclesial community and therefore its persuasive power among ordinary people, he decided to entrust himself to it.

But the mystical meaning involved, a friend wrote, could be “immediately deduced from his robust build, his outstretched torso, his widely gesticulating arms, as he impetuously made his way through a jungle of exciting ideas and human contradictions,” and from the gaze “behind half-closed eyelids, protecting the long moments of violent concentration on his speech,” which he directed “thundering, vibrant, against the glass windows under construction in the workshop too narrow for the spiritual monumentality of his work and the expansive, crowded apprehension of his words.” 3 His mystical space is vitally energetic, embodied in the experience of encounter with humanity and the created world.

In a certain sense, he inherited it directly from Saint Francis of Assisi. The solid anchoring to his memory and the tradition he generated seemed to us the most compelling key to understanding the unity that structures Ruggeri’s diverse artistic expressions. In this regard, the chronological connection seemed to us to be a happy coincidence. between 2019, the date of publication of this book, and 1219 when the saint visited the sultan al-Malik al’Kamil in Damietta, Egypt.

¹ G. Kubler, La forma del tempo. La storia dell’arte e la storia delle cose, Einaudi,Torino 2002.
² J. Clair, Considerazioni sullo stato delle belle arti. Critica della modernità, Abscondita, Milano 2018, pp. 89-90.
³ G. Ferri, Il gesto della spoliazione. Costantino Ruggeri france- scano e architetto, La Locusta,Vicenza 1980, p. 49.