Fra Mario Favretto, Provincial Minister

That yellow sun rising against the intense blue of the large stained-glass window, reflected in the water of the baptismal font in the church of San Dionigi in Milan, is an image I will always cherish in my memory for the effect it had on me from the moment I first saw this work. It’s the same effect I felt before the pastel-hued frescoes, which depict Saint Francis and the first Friars in a completely new and original way, in the classic convent of Busto Arsizio. I felt the same emotion before and inside the church designed and built of stone and wood in Nyakai, Burundi.

The approach to Father Costantino Ruggeri’s work truly captivates you and penetrates your soul, leaving an indelible mark. I asked myself: “Why?”, aware that similar emotions are felt before a work of art when you feel touched and penetrated by something indefinable that somehow, stammeringly, you manage to express in one word: beauty.

When asked why Father Costantino’s works had this effect on me, I gave myself the following answer. Because the colors and shapes of a stained-glass window or a fresco that envelops you aren’t a curiosity to be satisfied or a sight to be enjoyed, but create an experience in the moment. Standing before a stained-glass window by Costantino, you feel like you’re experiencing the light that comes within you to transmit the energy and harmony of something new, unusual, and unprecedented. Yes, admit to yourself that you’re experiencing creation, that is, perceiving the surprise and pleasure of something just created and offered to you as a firstfruits.

Through those colors, those ever-original compositions, through the unexpected effects, the idea of ​​who conceived and created that work comes to you and penetrates you; the feelings that accompanied the artist as he expressed the torment of having to draw out something intimate to make it part of all creation come to you. But it’s not just the overflowing and tormented soul of a man, a Franciscan friar, and an artist that shines through his works. You feel touched not only by his soul and his genius, but also by something that surpasses his and your abilities to express yourself: this something, which not all artists possess, is faith. Yes, from Constantine’s works it is inevitable to grasp his richness and his torment, which stem from his faith in God. Father Constantine, in fact, said of himself: “I was given […] the grace and joy of having identified my faith in art and my art in faith.” 1 It is this relationship with the Lord that guided his entire life. It is the need to express this sublimity and to share this experience that led him to choose artistic expression as the most appropriate way to speak to you about God, because God is “Beauty.” “You are beauty,” prayed Saint Francis. “Saint Francis contemplated in beautiful things Him who is beauty,” said Saint Bonaventure. Father Costantino, a son of these masters of faith and steeped in Franciscan spirituality, chose not to keep to himself what he clearly perceived as a gift. To share it, he understood that transmitting this gift had to become his mission. For this reason, he devoted his greatest efforts to sacred architecture and sacred furnishings, and it can be said that Father Costantino dedicated his entire life to the pursuit of beauty for places of worship.

Light and color, shapes and materials are the means Costantino used to materialize his vision, his feelings, and his faith. In reviewing his works, from his early years to his mature years, I noted a progressive search for increasingly essential features, even in the figurative, and a search for materials increasingly in keeping with the context, including the geographical context, for which the work was intended. Essential forms and a closeness to place and nature are traits that a Franciscan feels as essentially his own, after the figure of Saint Francis instilled in his soul a fascination with simplicity, humble materials, and poverty. For this reason, we do not hesitate to say that all of Father Costantino’s artistic production is imbued with Franciscan spirituality. “A color, a line, a relief, a curve […] can be enough,” he writes, “to suggest how even the furnishings integrate […] the mystery of the temple, without uprooting themselves from the already sacred daily routine of life, from the intense elementarity of creation.”2 In this quest for simplicity, essentiality, and immediacy, he as an artist discovered stained glass windows. And how could he not be fascinated by the creation of windows where the main element is something immaterial like light? And once again the sacred building reveals itself as the ideal place to preserve the experience that Constantine feels pulsating in his soul: simplicity, poverty, light, to transmit what

and it is sublime, that is, the presence of the divine. Father Costantino, therefore, in designing churches or furnishing them, is entirely absorbed in the spirituality that inspires him, convinced as he is that, from antiquity to today, the church is the guardian of beauty: true beauty, that which through the visible opens you to the invisible. “Praised be you, my Lord, especially my brother sun, … he is beautiful and radiant with great splendor, de te, Altissimo, porta significatione,” sang and prayed Saint Francis. Even in the gaze of Father Costantino, obsessed with the search for light, a special “devotion” to the sun could not be missing. Saint Francis says: “because de te, Altissimo, porta significatione.” In Costantino’s stained-glass windows, from Italy to Africa, to Asia, all the way to Yamaguchi in Japan, it is common to find the sun; a large sun that stands out in the light and among the colors, that reaches you, illuminates you, and warms you. In each of these places, the sun was designed for you: for you, the faithful, for you who celebrate the divine mysteries, for you, the visitor, for you in search of a spirituality denied to you by today’s world. In this recurring element, Costantino is not repetitive, but creative, as he devises every possible way and space to welcome you and offer you an ever-new experience, an ever-unique experience, that of encountering light, an encounter that never leaves you as before because, through a gaze flooded with light, it penetrates your person, your life.

Here is my brother, Father Costantino, Friar Minor, Franciscan: he is the Friar who, with simple materials and light, captures you, enraptures you, removes you from your time and leads you into the dimension of your person, often overlooked, sometimes forgotten: that is, the spiritual dimension. It is a bit like what once happened when Saint Francis passed by: a simple, humble presence, a lover of poverty, but who, upon meeting him, aroused an irresistible fascination in everyone: not for what he was, but for what he carried within: the love of the Lord.

¹ C. Ruggeri, Soltanto un fiore. Genesi di un artista cristiano, a cura di N. Fabbretti, DIES, Milano 2001, p. 67.
² P. C. Ruggeri, Le “cose” e il tempio, La Locusta, Vicenza 1982.