Los ojos de Santa Lucia
Eyes are the dominant object in all the collection of Italian ex votos, both in private ones, like mine, and in those that appear in the great catholic sanctuaries, especially in the South. These models bear very close typological and stylistic re¬semblances to all of the votive materials documented in the Euro-Mediterranean area from ancient times to today. In the folk culture of Southern Italy, eyes are the body’s fundamental organ, powerful, and at the same time delicate. A person’s eyes contain his life, but they also contain a mysterious quality that is seductive and en¬chanting, evasive and grasping. Eyes have a bewitching quality which captures and can potentially be negative and hostile. For this reason, it is necessary to protect oneself from the eyes of others; in particular, it is necessary to protect one’s own eyes from actual diseases as well as magically induced ones.
Lucy is the patron saint of vision, particularly in Sicily, and a majority of the ex-votos depicting eyes are offered to her, especially during the great feast-day of December 13. This feast-day is also a celebration of light, of the winter solstice (which is quite near to that date in Italy), and of defeating darkness (St. Lucy’s bonfires and eye ex-votos often go together). In short, these artifacts tell us about a society in which the status of the eye and the gaze is meticulously regulated. It is a society in which visual interdiction and ritual ostentation alternate and integrate with one another. It is also a society in which vision is the basis of all strategies of social relation: from the simplest ones of self-representation on the public stage, to more complex ones regarding the control of the gaze for constructing political power or for spiritual and religious domination.
The eyes in silver leaf present in my collection (some of which are older than the period extending from 1850 to 1950 that I have indicated for dating the ma¬jority of my objects) are, then, connected to eyes hidden under the pointed hood of a Lenten brotherhood; to eyes that admire competition between rival groups on patron saint feast-days; to eyes painted on the bows of Calabrian or Sicilian boats to protect against misfortune at sea; and to eyes symbolized with water, egg yolks, oil or other materials in women’s divinatory or apotropaic practices.
Francesco Faeta – Preliminary Remarks about Anatomical Ex votos of Southern Italy.
Artículo publicado en el Vol.5-Nº2 de la Revista Sans Soleil, puede consultarse integro en el siguiente enlace: