The first paper model created by Father Costantino for the church of San Bernardo di Chiaravalle in Rome, later re-created in partially different forms; the shape of a dove is visible. Pavia, Studio Ricerca Arte Sacra

Church of San Bernardo di Chiaravalle, Centocelle district of Rome, project drawings, elevations, and sections.
Pavia, Frate Sole Foundation

He showed no interest in the essential requirements of building, which depend on techniques and technologies, the rapid development of which has been the main reason for his highly successful formal results to this day. This self-limitation, of no small importance, explains the role he assumed in architectural design. Regardless of his academic qualifications, which many practicing architects once lacked, he cannot be considered an architect in the strict sense for several reasons: he never graphically developed a project and did not manage construction sites, which he nevertheless attended to understand, as the construction took shape, how to intervene with qualifying components. He therefore did not practice the rationality of construction in its conceptual and practical sequences, from the general design to the detailed design, to the coordination of related technical skills, and finally to the administrative burdens.

The projects that bear his name always emerged from collaborations in which he was involved in multiple ways: in the definition of a barely sketched plan and layout; in the control of the plastic definition of volumes through three-dimensional models, sometimes elaborated in multiple stages; in the design of free forms with ornamental value; in the interior and exterior surface finishes; in the communication of the global meanings of his churches, in debates and publications. 2 The furnishings of the celebration centers, the stained glass windows, the benches, the confessionals, the furnishings of all kinds, the vestments, and the choice of materials were entirely his. He experienced firsthand, as a direct interlocutor, the relationship with the clients, to whom he always acted as guarantor of the entire process.

His procedural reference, in the pursuit of the fusion between existence and dwelling, which he called the “unity of ‘human space’,”3 was the craftsmanship of medieval builders, thanks to which he stated: “The cathedral was transformed into a school, a workshop, a political, forensic, cultural, and commercial hall. Thus, unity was achieved between the artist, men, and their impatience for beauty.”4 Thus, practicing architecture, he conceived of himself as an artisan-artist with medieval sensibility, in a pragmatic conceptual exercise devoid of any intellectual abstraction.

A final methodological clarification is essential: Fra Costantino believed unwaveringly in the artistic image, in the flourishing within him of figures, geometries, signs, connections between colors, patterns of spots, and the exaltation of the intrinsic qualities of the most diverse materials. He also frankly believed in the possibility of sharing it with others. Without the torments typical of many modern artists, he relied on the proliferation, in the “world of his soul,” as he put it, of an imagery simultaneously fueled by the two spheres of modern art and faith. He captured flashes of mysterious light, revelations of presences to be given fraternal or divine names, kinship between his own and others’ intimacies, and between this and the multifaceted physical consistency of nature and the world. He therefore allowed this visionary imagination to be guided by the confident certainty of being able to celebrate the beauty of the human condition and of the entire cosmos, both marked by resurrection, in a foretaste of a rediscovered Eden and rediscovered innocence. To achieve this goal, he endured every effort, with the naturalness, humility, and anxious yet patient expectation of a farmer working in the fields.

In the critical process by which I develop these reflections, I have, so to speak, forced myself to begin by identifying the purposes, objective limitations, and procedural method that characterized Father Costantino’s work in the construction of churches—from 1977 until his death in 2007—to highlight as clearly as possible the inner rigor of his work, carried out not only in serene loyalty to his Order but also in the freedom of friendly relationships, the echoes of which are still perceptible today, with his brothers, his artist and architect friends, his young collaborators, his artisans, and his clients.

Moreover, over the last thirty years, now settled in his beloved Pavia, he did not suspend his experimentation with painting and sculpture; rather, he extended them and opened them not only to photography but also to developments whose important implications can be discerned in his architecture. The latter were conceived by him, in a coordinated unity of components at all scales, as a sign of the Christian liturgical universe. His experience as a friar, priest, artist, craftsman, and, if you will, as an architect sui generis, is therefore entirely unique in the synthesis of joyful human tones that anticipate the Evangelii Gaudium to which the current pope invites us.

Inevitable isolated moments of discomfort

In the ecclesiastical, conventual, and institutional context, these experiences did not undermine the integrity, docility, and freshness of Ruggero’s faith, which was always mindful, as he recalled when evoking a dialogue between Picasso and Matisse, of the innocence of his first communion. 6 Indeed, he candidly embraced artistic modernity, in ways he considered consonant with himself, in the radicality of a Franciscan affiliation to which he knew he had been called almost by chance since childhood. For him, it was a matter of keeping the two dimensions firmly united within himself, without slipping outside of his personal artistic research or his historical and specific ecclesial context.

I have already explored Father Costantino’s overall production on several occasions. In two recent essays in particular,7 to which I refer without reiterating their content here, I have briefly outlined the progressive and compelling expansion of his artistic practice. I also highlighted his brilliant assimilation and transposition into a contemporary language, avant-garde in origin but bent on biblical and Franciscan meanings, of the religiosity of the early Christian art of the most ancient Roman catacombs. He used this as the basis for evocative messages structured in large, colorful compositions of antique blown glass.

Bronze model of the church of San Paolo, in Rho (Milan); the bell tower was never built. Pavia, Studio Ricerca Arte Sacra

An important editorial note, alongside the first page of a paper by Ravasi—published in 1995, accompanied by photographs and a table-summary of fourteen floor plans of churches and chapels, all by Ruggeri—highlighted, on the one hand, the “rigorous relationships between the liturgical elements, almost always linked by a sinuous progression of the spatial background, in contrast with the great freedom in the invention of the overall form”; on the other, their total detachment from traditional typologies or a new model favored as normative, in favor of “relationships of energetic, luminous, coloristic, and sculptural intensity of the elements interacting with each other, with the space and with the people.”8

The author, undoubtedly Glauco Gresleri,9 expanded on the interpretation outlined here the following year, focusing on the terms of the transition from sculpture to architecture, developed by Fra Costantino with the essential support of the architect Leoni.

The original emergence of the latter, in the three-dimensionality of the unitary volumetric modeling structuring an initial set of static and constructional problems, was the maquette. The internal spatial ordering was instead developed through the aggregation of liturgical spaces, placed in relation to each other and to their backgrounds, according to intuitive proxemic relationships. Finally, the internal spatial unity was achieved by the shifting intensity of light, enriched by transparencies, of the large windows, with colored effects applied to the liturgical centers, ceiling, floor, benches, and even people. The result seemed to Gresleri to be an unprecedented concretization of the building starting from liturgical gestures, aimed at creating a hollow and vibrant spaciousness.

Ruggeri wanted the final drawings of his solutions, especially in publications, to be reduced as much as possible to synthetic calligraphic outlines, almost to dematerialize their architectural consistency; indeed, the naked face of a community life order was to emerge, anticipating, through the allusion of signs, an unrepresentable spiritual world.

Giorgio Trebbi also formulated lucid judgments: the inadequacy of many modern churches—interpreters of a functionalist exaltation that heralded a pseudo-normative and liturgical academicism—he contrasted with the superior burst of creativity, characterized by a decisive emotional intensity, in the churches of his friend the friar. In his first church in Varese, he perceptively captured what would become a constant in Ruggeri’s ideas: an “introverted” volumetric conception as a condition for the surprise of the interior space, always counterbalanced by substantial glass walls.

The index of Spazi di luce – a book compiled by Father Costantino himself, with his own writings and those of friends, for individual architectural, civil, and religious projects, whether completed, in progress, or still only in scale models – highlights both the significant maturation process of the projects by their authors, Father Costantino and Leoni, and the significance of the former’s plastic research.

After the group of eleven churches – starting from the first in Varese (1977) to the one in the Centocelle district of Rome (1988-1993) and the Moretti Chapel in Erbusco (Brescia) – a brief sequence of diverse projects is presented: the restoration of the Carmelite hermitage, or Deserto, in Varazze (1986-1990); the construction of the House for Friends Lina and Giordano (1976) in Borgo a Buggiano, near Pistoia (1976); The renovation, with the addition of a chapel of only 119 square meters, of the Carmelite Convent in La Spezia. The index follows with chapters on the Cells and the Cenacles, the latter presented in non-chronological order, both accompanied by important reflections by Ruggeri.

The Cells, previously presented at the Galleria di San Fedele in Milan in 1978 and in a 1982 volume that collected 28 of them, are fragile sculptures made of cardboard and other humble materials, alluding to an interior space. Some are distinguished by the drawing of a sun on the wall or the presence of a tiny table, perhaps an altar, or small masses. “Humble and absolute signs of a nascent space, expressive of the soul and hospitable to the heart,” “a space more mystical than sacred,” “ancient heart” of the “most transparent and courageous future”11—these, together with the I trasparenti series, not examined in this book but present in the color section, testify to the artist’s aspiration to generate forms, he said, “with humble materials like bread,” a precious product of human labor that, with wine, hosts the Eucharistic presence of Christ.

The Cenacles, places of mystical space never betrayed “even if in many cases it could have been more radiant”12, were created in pre-existing spaces or chapels (from 1966) or built from scratch on very small scale (from 1970). Presented in thirteen

Proposals (one is in a private residence), reminiscent of the first, small group of friends gathered around Saint Francis, are a gift offered to “a poor and happy archipelago” of small grassroots Christian communities, spread throughout the world since the 1960s. In the book’s index, after Cells and Cenacles, the presentation of church projects resumes with the Roman sanctuary of Divine Love (1987–1999) and the Japanese one, only begun in 1996, in Yamaguchi (1993–1998). The volume concludes with models of projects not yet realized. Cells and Cenacles are thus set between two groups of churches, to signal, between two seasons of projects, the leap of self-awareness identified by the mystical space.

Upon initial inspection, Gresleri and Trebbi’s critical notes are confirmed in all the completed Cenacles. However, others must be added: the altimetric remodulation of sites when necessary; attention to the relationship with the surrounding landscape; the constant preference for interior volumes of very controlled height; the avoidance of the specificity of local cultures; the increasingly virtuosic use of stained glass windows and their colorful and moving light effects.

By way of example, I briefly recall here three cases from the first section. The church of Santa Maria della Gioia in Varese,13 his first “creation,”14 then a branch of the parish of Sant’Antonio alla Brunella, had a difficult start, agitated by members of the community who were unconvinced by the project, which, however, was chosen from among the four proposed by the architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni, who was consulted. This agitation transformed, during the construction phase, into a warm friendship between the designers, Ruggeri and Leoni, and the clients, contractors, and workers.

Situated on a site remodeled to create a “mystical gulf,” in which a block of stone served for outdoor celebrations, the church—made of reinforced concrete, seating 100 people and raised, like the covered churchyard, above a floor of community meeting rooms—features rounded walls finished in rustic white plaster, with a window of over 100 square meters made of antique blown glass. Above it is a large roof terrace with a hanging garden, complete with nesting boxes for birds. From the entrance, overlooking the baptistery and the church hall, one is enveloped in a joyful atmosphere dotted with precious sacred furnishings, mostly in bronze: a true celebration of faith. Monsignor Giovanni Fallani (1910-1985)15 recognized in it the Franciscan message of perfect joy, proposed without the then-widespread, but in reality merely “rhetorical,” pretense of a “return to origins.”

The churches in the Franciscan missions of Africa (1979-2001), sparse in ornamentation and rich in references to local habitation in the light touch of the solutions and the honesty of the interaction with the known populations, reflect a humble search, aware of the risks and dangers of colonization, for links between the universal Christian religious sense and its embodiment in individual cultures. This echoes a Catholic awareness

that reached full consciousness in the Second Vatican Council, expressed in the conciliar decree Ad Gentes of 1965 and in Paul VI’s 1975 exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi.

General design drawings for the Sanctuary of Saint Francis Xavier in Yamaguchi, Japan: location on the hill, plan, and section. Pavia, Frate Sole Foundation

The explosion of the biblical message in imposing stained-glass windows dominates the interior space of the parish church of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in Rome. In the oval plan, the white Carrara statuary bema, detached from the walls, compacts the altar, the pulpit, the ambo, and the baptistery into a single block. Along the longitudinal axis, it imposes a symmetrical and transversal celebratory order, contrasted by various asymmetries in a tension reiterated on the exterior in the arrangement of the bell tower, the church, and the parish works around the square, once a lawn. Inside, the gray serizzo floor, the walls, and the plaster paneled ceiling, all white like the bema, capture, in mirrored reflections that change throughout the day, the colored light from the stained-glass windows, which offer an extraordinary coded narrative centered on the altar. 16

The final section of the book presents two sanctuaries: the first, of Divine Love in Rome, is a large-scale demonstration of the compositional principles developed by Ruggeri and Leoni; in the second, the Sanctuary of San Francesco Saverio in Yamaguchi, rising with two bell towers on the hill overlooking the city, the proportion between solid walls and stained-glass windows reinforces the masonry’s consistency, in homage to, or perhaps in harmony with, the Japanese sense of light. Indeed, while remaining colorful and rich in messages, light here is less disruptive than that of many other Ruggeri projects, because it is “treated architecturally and in this sense abstract,” not naturalistic, in the apt expression of Tadao Ando. 17

Happy Spaces, Sensibility, Poverty: Faces of the Christian Mystery

In brief remarks here, I have only intended to stimulate curiosity about the unusual, and still too little explored, procedures employed in the church designs of Ruggeri and Leoni. The devastating Italian urban development, in which almost all parish churches are located, and the normal neglect in their general daily management, easily undermine their material and visual integrity, which instead deserves historicization, respect, and protection. Since much remains to be understood about the work of this Franciscan artist, to introduce further explorations, I briefly outline three complex thematic areas below.

First, we must explore the proximity and distinction between Father Costantino’s mystical space and Le Corbusier’s espace indicible. Many years after meeting the famous architect, Le Corbusier stated: “I was overcome with emotion when I heard from him the expression [espace indicible] that had been my ideal for years, the program and goal of my life.” That 1965 repercussion was essential for him, he added: “to fully open my eyes to the world of my soul. In this sense, even today I dream and see a little through the eyes of that great master.”18 The encounter occurred during a crucial period for him: in 1962, he had completed his thesis on the first Christian epigraphic signs and graduated as a sculptor; having recently arrived in Pavia, in 1959, he had also intensified his activity as an artisan-artist for liturgical furnishings and furnishings, already thinking of churches. Under the pressure of a highly trained imagination and sensitivity, the encounter with Le Corbusier was therefore a powerful stimulus to the free outpouring of his own inner world. It is well known that the project for the Ronchamp site was, in the mid-twentieth century, the cause of great and widespread dismay. The architect, until then a proponent of a Cartesian rationalism that was authoritarian in many respects, called the chapel a rondebosse en creux, a sculptural model created by excavation, and persisted, unheeded, in highlighting two privileged Christian themes: the cross of Christ, known as “the witness,” and the motherhood of the Virgin Mary. Suddenly dismissing the traditional primacy of typology in church design and simultaneously responding to the liturgical reform in progress, the chapel, a fusion of diverse borrowings, in short, transfiguring and almost alchemical, with its emotional and cryptic beauty, shook the Catholic world and secular culture.

The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar asked: “Ronchamp: why has it become such an important sign for us? […] Where does so much joy and hope come from in Ronchamp?”19 A synthesis of “images of happy space” that “transcends geometric space”, as Bachelard would say20, it made Ruggeri vibrate with a first and foremost human harmony. Perhaps, in this knot of spiritual incandescence already anticipated, but with more torment, by the Dominican fathers Marie-Alain Couturier (1897-1954) and Raymond-Pie Régamey (1900-1996) of “L’Art sacré”21, his decision to tackle architecture was triggered, favored by Le Corbusier’s architectural masterpiece implied with sculpture and by a strange kinship between the master’s inexpressible sense of the sacred.

Swiss and the Christian sensibility that Ruggeri cultivated within himself.

Perhaps this was the occasion for the emergence of the question of the sacred, which culminated, in 1978, in the proposal of the mystical space, with which the friar prudently distanced himself from the theme of the sacred as an object in the history of religions, a topic much debated in Europe, especially since the contributions of Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) from the 1950s onwards. Since man is religious “[…] when he thinks, when he eats, when he works, when he loves, when he is with his family, when he experiences friendship, when he suffers. If he is faithful to the sacrament of life, he is always religious […]”22, for him, every beauty perceptible in the light of a simple faith, free of preconceptions regarding the freedom of art, became charged with mystery: this is the core, I believe, of the legacy the friar leaves in reflections, art, and architecture.

Ruggero’s second thematic focus, which requires further exploration, is the pursuit of the creation of churches as unified and powerful sensorial instruments, resonating with the human body and spirituality within the fibers of the great fabric of the world. The internal coherence of the progressive expansion of Father Costantino’s artistic production is astonishing. Born in 1925 and died in 2007, he spanned much of the 20th century, assimilating important traits of avant-garde languages; he embraced everything that had a genuine sense of relevance, whether contemporary or ancient; he developed an interest in architecture through thoughtful craftsmanship; he generously devoted himself to the construction, modification, and completion of religious buildings, from chapels to parish churches. His goals were immediately identified and always maintained.

Confidence in his own synaesthetic corporeal sensitivity, perhaps more tactile than visual23 and only apparently lacking in conceptual depth, favored his joyful and emotionally charged hand-to-hand encounter with materials. His objects, in fact, bear the imprint of a manual skill that has now all but disappeared with the spread of industrial design, no small Italian glory, but increasingly dominated by the persuasive sirens of advertising strategy. In decorations and furnishings—for example, in the tabernacles that evoke the peasant home’s kneading trough; in the breadbasket-shaped ciboria; in the crosses and colored glass in rough blocks; in the sturdy marble altars and ambos; in the soft stone basins of the baptisteries with living water; in the precious use of antique blown glass—and in the entire architectural organism, an ever-changing sensorial conglomeration, he affirmed “the more meaning” with “a less material refinement,” in keeping with the sensitive, even natural, contiguity of the human body with things.

This leads to the theme of Franciscan poverty, achieved with essential means and symbols, emerging in an architectural synthesis poised between despoilment and exultation, between poverty and glory, of God but also of humanity, more specifically of the simple people who never cease to turn to God. His friend Fabbretti pointed this out with extreme precision when he wrote:

Ruggeri’s was and continues to be an adventure of spirit, imagination, and manual skill that can legitimately be recognized as Franciscan. It is, in fact, the adventure of ‘spoliation.’ It has increasingly become a new ‘triumph’ of Madonna Poverty.

A true ‘spoliation’ in the nakedness of creation, his art nevertheless remained marked by an irresolvable tension between matter and spirit, since, his brother continued:

[…] what dynamic of art, poetry, and imagination has ever been able to avoid the daily entanglement with contradiction and ambiguity? And yet, conversely, what authentic work of art has not drawn the primary force of its spiritual inspiration precisely from this mysterious, penitential constriction?25

Ruggero’s art could not have been more precisely anchored to the living Franciscan ideal; nor more unscrupulously subjected to the test of evangelical adoration “in spirit and truth,” advocated by many in the first phase of the post-conciliar Catholic reform, as a reduction to the bare minimum of the corporeal materiality of places and rites. In my opinion, Father Costantino avoided extremism and ideological aridity because he had discovered the golden thread of beauty—loved in nature and in men, especially the poor, by the “jester” and penitent Francis of Assisi—in the non-dematerialized but densely material “‘almost nothing’ to which the artist gives the dimension of the infinite.”26 His artistic intention, indifferent to a utopian spirituality, corresponded to the logic of incarnation:

We must be careful, he said, not to weave sophistries around the vaunted and enchanting ‘poverty.’ Poverty is essentiality, ethics, exaltation of the spirit. Even gold is ‘poverty,’ if used in its truth. Certainly, the mat

The simplest and least expensive materials are also the most expressive. And who doesn’t know this, after Christ became incarnate and transubstantiated into a piece of bread? […] ‘Things’ are poetry. Let’s not transform them into formulas.

We can therefore recognize a radically Christian, and in this sense Franciscan, prophetic imprinting if we accept that: “Christian prophecy must prefigure a new humanity, not an alternative society,” since: “In Christianity, the truth of God is seen in a man, and the truth of a man is the truth of man. Remaining within the space of this interweaving is the Church’s challenging vocation.”28