Faggi's Via Crucis
Colum, Padraic
18 THE COMMONWEAL November n, 1925 FAGGI'S VIA CRUCIS By PADRAIC COLUM T NSTEAD of being flat and colored like the Stations of A the Cross that we are familiar with, these have...
...And in those days when religious art is so unvital Father Shannon of Saint Thomas's is to be greatly praised for having taken into his church sculptures that are so vital and so arresting...
...We realize this because Alfeo Faggi has given us, not conventionalized figures, but types of great experiences, and has given them to us in terms of a great Christian art...
...as it is of willingness to bear all—of compassion, of heroic suffering...
...How saintly the saints in that exhibition were...
...Mary is lily-like, upright and radiant: she meets the eyes of her Son...
...There is tenderness to be found in the fourth and fifth stations...
...We get a fresh revelation as we stay before each of them...
...How seldom those who design Stations of the Cross make this fresh revelation in each one of them...
...But she is not conscious of death...
...The Saint Francis had found the beatific peace...
...it was a monumental mass quickened by love...
...Faggi's sculpture then showed us a withdrawal from the world...
...Both, I thought, had come out of the desert...
...the head is small and the features in low relief...
...In each there is a fresh emotional appeal, a new fountain...
...Between them the Saviour stands firmly on forward-placed feet, the lines of his figure free and flowing, commanding in his dignity...
...And because they do not their stations are different without being distinct...
...The arm raised was sharp as the branch of a tree...
...Even then, perhaps, he was preaching to the birds...
...And they are stations—that is to say that they are designed with the idea that we stay before each one of them...
...One might say that the Mother who meets her Son bearing the cross, the Mother who stands beside the cross, and the Mother upon whose knees the Crucified is laid, are three different personages...
...In each station the Mother has a new representation...
...But what agitations and resolves the Saint John brought with him...
...The strife that is so evident in the sculpture of today was in this sculpture passed over as folly...
...I thought then that to go into the room where this sculpture was shown, was to make a little retreat from the world...
...In my mind I compared the Saint Francis preaching with Rodin's Saint John...
...There is tenderness, too, in the regard of Simeon, as he holds up the cross with his strong hands while the Saviour slips down into the shadow...
...This is force...
...If one wanted to state the range of Faggi's art, one would contrast these figures with the vulture-faced, armor-encased Roman soldiers who strip the garments off Christ or who fasten Him upon the cross...
...The child, the priestess, the saint—at the time these stood for the types that Alfeo Faggi creates...
...In the Pieta, the child had become a man and lies broken in his mother's arms...
...The mother was of heroic size...
...In her hands is the tenderness of women who have little to give but who give all...
...the love she knows will still be served when the broken body is at last taken from her...
...How uncompromisingly the Roman judge and the Roman soldiers are represented...
...18 THE COMMONWEAL November n, 1925 FAGGI'S VIA CRUCIS By PADRAIC COLUM T NSTEAD of being flat and colored like the Stations of A the Cross that we are familiar with, these have surfaces that darken and gleam...
...Alfeo Faggi's work has the characteristics of Christian art...
...Alfeo Faggi has taken his figures out of the living world, simplified, intensified, spiritualized them...
...They are in bronze...
...Time and time again he would have to go back to the desert to grow into peace...
...as the Pieta she is massively made, the mother of all humanity, holding across her knees the body that seems to belong to her own body again...
...The sense of what a Station of the Cross is, is in each of the bronzes that Alfeo Faggi has made for the Church of Saint Thomas in Chicago...
...Peace—the beatific peace—was his by grace...
...But is was not an Oriental renunciation that was there, it was the Christian peace such as is in the unsophisticated art of early Tuscany...
...The meeting of the Mother and Son holds a fresh and noble conception...
...And from the first to the fourteenth station the work is sustained as with spiritual force...
...That is the law...
...Whatever suffering may come to her afterwards, she sees and understands all now...
...I had the very great privilege of seeing in the workshop of the sculptor the embodiment of a like conception...
...And then how tenderly the Mother and Veronica are done...
...It was a withdrawal that meant a profounder life...
...it can be stark, saying straightly the stern thing, and it can be tender...
...up to his face go the hands of the little, worn, old countrywoman...
...It is five years since I saw in Chicago an exhibition of Alfeo Faggi's work...
...And then upright, rigid as the spears they hold, are the two Roman soldiers, their faces having the clear lines of hawks in Egyptian sculptures...
...In Alfeo Faggi's we know that in each station the artist has made a new beginning...
...but he had not known that he had been through them...
...All the figures in these stations are great and constant types of men and women...
...It blessed all creation...
...The priestess was in a Mother and Child that for me dominated the exhibition—the woman who rises up as if she and the child in her arms were the only beings in the world, who moves, but who, as it were, moves upward— the priestess of human love...
...As we look upon them and pass from one station to another, we realize that these are scenes out of the greatest drama that man has ever thought on...
...The type varies, the cross varies, as the revelation is one of vision, resignation, maternal devotion...
...It blessed...
...They remain with us to purify and spiritualize our experience...
...Alfeo Faggi has grown beyond even the work of that exhibition: in the Stations of the Cross there is a more intense life, a greater plastic power...
...There was nothing unctuous in this figure...
...But not a withdrawal that has to do with defeat...
...each station is distinct as having a new revelation to give...
...she stands at the cross a simple woman, stricken but unbroken...
...Her eyes are wide with vision...
...she was austere—the mother of the love that is native of the rocks...
...In the next station the Saviour seems to walk in a daze...
...The rare sanctity of the collection was enhanced by the figures of children shown —a toddling, realistic little child, a child kneeling in rapture, and a child with seraphic wisdom on his face whom the sculptor named Saint John...
...Where she meets her Son she is slight and virginal...
...Pilate in the first station is but the head and shoulders of a man—the lines that make the bust awry...
...He had gone through austerities (how shrunken the body on which the brown habit hung...
...But it was a human arm and hand, the organ of benediction...
...And one might note that the cross seems sometimes to be light and possible to bear, and sometimes to be crushing in its massiveness...
...the child stands by her side and reaches up to her breast...
...All the figures were touchingly human, but they were human beings who were most themselves when they were rapt in an ecstasy of love, when they made a gesture out of a profound meditation, or, as in the Pieta, when they bent over the dead, conscious less of their affliction than of their power to love through the ages...
Vol. 3 • November 1925 • No. 1
