FLORENCE, ITALY – The White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall was transferred from Palazzo Strozzi to the Florence Baptistery, exceptionally for a day, to give participants of the Italian Church Forum the opportunity to admire this extraordinary work on November 10 , day of the visit to Florence of Pope Francis.
Pope Francis is a great admirer of the White Crucifixion. He will be in Florence on November 10 for the Italian Church Forum, organized by CEI, the Italian Bishops’ Conference, hosted by the Archdiocese. The Pope will see the Chagall masterpiece in the morning when he will address in the opposite Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral.
The 1938 painting White Crucifixion represents a critical turning point for the artist Marc Chagall: it was the first of an important series of compositions that feature the image of Christ as a Jewish martyr and dramatically call attention to the persecution and suffering of European Jews in the 1930s.
In White Crucifixion, his first and largest work on the subject, Chagall stressed the Jewish identity of Jesus in several ways: he replaced his traditional loincloth with a prayer shawl, his crown of thorns with a headcloth, and the mourning angels that customarily surround him with three biblical patriarchs and a matriarch, clad in traditional Jewish garments.
At either side of the cross, Chagall illustrated the devastation of pogroms: On the left, a village is pillaged and burned, forcing refugees to flee by boat and the three bearded figures below them—one of whom clutches the Torah— to escape on foot. On the right, a synagogue and its Torah ark go up in flames, while below a mother comforts her child. By linking the martyred Jesus with the persecuted Jews and the Crucifixion with contemporary events, Chagall’s painting passionately identifies the Nazis with Christ’s tormentors and warns of the moral implications of their actions.
Usually the paint is shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, in these weeks is a parte of the Divine Beauty in Palazzo Strozzi, Florence. For a day
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