No one has ever painted, sculpted, modelled, built or invented except to get literally out of hell.
Antonin Artaud
The first cycle of which there is a trace is the Stories of the Gospel, executed by Dady Orsi in 1944. Amintore Fanfani, as the cultural officer of a refugee camp in Switzerland, did his best to get the architect Bassi and the painter Orsi an order to renovate and decorate the Catholic Chapel of Chexbres. Orsi prepared some sketches in tempera on paper but did not finish the work because of his hasty return to Italy. The painter took all the sketches home except one, which Fanfani kept for himself (the figure of St Peter). The sketches share a Christological theme, probably dictated by Fanfani himself. The scenes depicted are a Crucifixion, a Resurrection, probably a Conversion of Saul and at least three Miracles of Christ. From a symbolic point of view, these iconographic choices seem to be a reference to the process of change and rebirth that was taking place in Italy through the Resistance. The Miracles have a longitudinal format and seem to have been designed for the side walls of the chapel. Marked by a modernism that Italian sacred painting did not usually embrace, they are characterised by a synthetic style, vivid colours, and an absence of chiaroscuro. In its composition, in the expressionist rendering of the bodies and in the cubist representation of space, the Crucifixion seems to be influenced by Guttuso’s 1942 painting. This encounter with sacred painting and public art is unique in Orsi’s experience, which was only taken up again in the 1990s with his personal homage to Mantegna’s Dead Christ.
