A new mural is in progress on a series of walls outside the hospital in Barga. A particularly distinguishing characteristic of mural painting is that the architectural elements of the given space are harmoniously incorporated into the picture. The artist, Lorenzo Lanciani has been gradually filling up the blank spaces on three walls around some of the hospital machinery with a carefully designed image which once finished should blend in with the space.
Central to the theme of the new mural is the image from Gustav Klimt’s “The tree of life” For Klimt, an Austrian Symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement, the tree was a symbol in which all the motifs important to him are united, from flower to woman, from the death of vegetation to the rebirth of the seasons. Trees and women intermingle in paradise, in a magical world in which people dance and love one another, in which women become trees. With the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, one is indeed in the Garden of Eden. The girl dancing under one of the trees represents Expectation. The couple embracing beneath the other tree represents Fulfilment. And, of course, death too is present, as might be expected in Klimt’s or Freud’s version of the normal life-cycle, to be observed in the form of the birds of prey sitting in the tree of life.
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