Nicola Samorì, Intra vulnera tua

Inaugurated in December 2024, the panel created by Nicola Samorì for the confessional to the right of the portal makes up for the empty space left by the theft a few years ago of the 16th-century wooden panel by the Taurino brothers. The scene, painted in oil and depicting Christ Mocked, is presented as a trompe-l'oeil, echoing the forms of the ancient work. However, the panel shows at its center a natural void in the wood that is ripped open, as if the wound in Christ's side opened up to become a body. That void becomes the body of the wounded Christ. Taking up a verse from the medieval prayer of the Anima Christi, into that body we are called to enter to receive the very secret of life. In the history of the West, the wound has always been a leitmotif that can unite art, music, literature, sociology, and so on. To speak of a gash is to probe the deepest dimensions of the body, of pain, of limitation, aspects that if on the one hand we shy away from, on the other resurface in our lives with force and insistence, beginning from the very moment we are born. In fact, between myth and history, sacred and profane, the wound is an archetype that surfaces as an ineradicable element of human life.