ST. PETER’S SQUARE IN THE VATICAN, ROME, ITALY
Référence :
Black and white photograph of St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican. Ferrante Ferranti explores the vestiges of the past through the play of shadows and light created by the sun. With the soul of an archaeologist, this architect by training combines his photographic work with his passion for antiquity and the Baroque.
Length : 0.39 in / 1 cm
Height : 23.62 in / 60 cm
Width : 15.75 in / 40 cm
Weigth : 2.2 lb / 1 kg
Artist : Ferrante Ferranti
Technique: Digital photography
Support: Fine Art Pearl Paper laminated on dibond
Dimensions: 60 x 40 cm
Number of copies: 21, signed and numbered
Year: 2009
Inspiration: St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican, the immense baroque esplanade designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in front of St. Peter’s Basilica, a place of gathering and liturgical fervor that embodies one of the most emblematic public spaces in Christendom.
In this image, Ferrante Ferranti shows less a postcard than a presence. The light chisels the architectural lines, accentuates the curves of the colonnades and sculpts the mineral surfaces of the stone, while the vast areas of shadow invite the eye to circulate in the depth of the space.
Through this monochrome treatment, the artist — trained in architecture and deeply attentive to historical strata — reveals the tension between monumentality and silence, between the human dimension and the sacred grandeur. The square, open to the sky of Rome, becomes here a place of visual breathing where the forces of light and shadow respond to each other in a thoughtful and subtle economy of forms.
Ferrante Ferranti
FRANCE
Born January 13, 1960 in Algeria, of a Sardinian mother and a Sicilian father. He took his first photograph at the age of eighteen, a wave in Belle-Île-en-Mer. Passionate about Fernand Pouillon’s book, Les Pierres Sauvages, he began training as an architect in Toulouse, which he completed at Paris-UP6 in 1985 with a diploma in Theaters and scenography in the Baroque era. Traveling photographer, he has been involved for thirty years with Dominique Fernandez in a joint exploration of the Baroque and the different layers of civilizations, from Syria to Bolivia via Sicily and Saint Petersburg. His photographs dialogue with the texts of the writer, who defines him in the album Itinerrances (Actes Sud, 2013) as “the inventor of a language which links the sun to the ruins, in search of the meaning hidden in the forms” .
