Purificazione del cuore

In the Christian iconographic tradition the heart represents the centre of the person, the place in which conscience, love and the relationship with God take form. In this panel Giorgio Lupattelli takes up that image, reinterpreting it through the language of contemporary art.

Francis holds in his hands a heart that gives off light. Around this figure a dialogue unfolds between symbol and scientific research. The brain waves and the system of veins and arteries build a landscape in which heart and brain do not appear as opposing realities, but as deeply interconnected elements.

The work draws inspiration from studies that have highlighted the complexity of the relations between cardiac activity and cerebral activity. Without turning such research into symbolic assertions, THEOPHANIA takes it as an occasion to reflect on the unity of the person, in which the affective and the rational dimensions are in continuous dialogue.

In the background there emerges a Combustione by Alberto Burri. The fire that passes through the material seems to radiate from the heart itself, turning it into a source of energy and of life. Combustion represents not only the heat of emotion, but the process through which every human experience can be purified and transformed.

In the Franciscan tradition, the purification of the heart does not coincide with the denial of the emotions or of bodily life. It is rather a path of integration, in which the whole person is progressively oriented towards a greater authenticity.

THEOPHANIA thus proposes a reading in which symbol, art and science do not seek to prove one another, but converse around a single question: how can a human being reach a harmony between what he feels, what he understands and what he chooses?

Francis becomes the image of this recovered unity. The heart he holds in his hands does not belong to religious tradition alone: it becomes the symbol of a consciousness able to integrate reason, emotion and openness to the transcendent.