Tout y parlerait
À l'âme en secret
Tout y parlerait / À l'âme en secret
Clément Mitéran
7 - 8 - 9 March 2025
#2 Particelle | residenze artistiche
presumed Chapel of San Giovanni Decollato
Ravenna
This project is supported by the patronage of the Municipality of Ravenna and carried out under the Cooperation Agreement between the Department for Youth Policies, Universal Civil Service, and the Emilia-Romagna Region – FPG 2023 – Agreement 202/CU/2023.
Special thanks the Municipality of Ravenna, the Department of Culture, the Department of Urban Planning and Heritage of the Municipality of Ravenna, the Region of Emilia-Romagna, the Academy of Fine Arts of Ravenna and ARCI Ravenna. We also thank the Ravenna State Archives and the Classense Library Institution of Ravenna.
Thanks to Gioia Boattini and Daniela Iurato.
Tout y parlerait / À l’âme en secret is the title of the solo exhibition of the French artist Clément Mitéran (Wissous, 1984), organised and curated by marte. Located in the presumed chapel of San Giovanni Decollato in Piazza Unità d’Italia, Ravenna, the exhibition takes the form of a return of the second edition of marte’s project Particles | artistic residencies and will be open to the public from 7 to 9 March 2025, specifically on 7 March by invitation and on 8 and 9 March by reservation. The exhibition is designed for one person at a time and will be lit exclusively by candlelight.
The artist: research and practice
Clément Mitéran lives and works in Wissous, Essonne (France). After studying philosophy at the University of Paris VIII-Vincennes, Mitéran attended the three-year course at the Scuola Mosaicisti del Friuli in Spilimbergo, graduating in 2008. His work has been exhibited in France, Italy and Japan in various galleries, institutions and museums, including the Maison des Arts et du Patrimoine, Châtenay-Malabry (Représentations, 2022), the National Museum of Ravenna (Rappresentazione anonima, curated by Emanuela Fiori and organised by marte, 2017) and the Mosaic Tile Museum in Tajimi (Mosaic in the world now, 2020).
A self-taught photographer since his early youth, the artist’s research is dedicated to portraiture, exploring its possibilities of representation, reception and, ultimately, existence in contemporary times. Mosaic and photographic materials merge in a practice that traces, through philosophy and the study of the history of figurative art, the relationship between subject and portrait, between reality and representation, between reality and imagination. The short-circuit created between the mosaic and photographic techniques gives life to delicate and profound works which, according to the artist’s usual practice, begin with the cutting of white enamel tesserae and end with the development of the negative on the light-sensitive surface of the mosaic.
The exhibition and residence Particelle
The title of the exhibition, Tout y parlerait / À l’âme en secret, takes up two lines from Charles Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage, a composition that has been present since the first publication of the collection Les Fleurs du mal in 1857, which literally read ‘Everything would speak / To the soul in secret’.
The five new works in the exhibition are part of a new project in which Mitéran constructs his research from the myth of Butade, recounted by Pliny in Book XXXV of the Naturalis Historia of 77-78 AD, which describes the birth of painting by shadow. The artist reflects, also in the wake of Victor Stoichita’s publication Breve storia dell’ombra, on the possibility of an “animated double of the individual, an immaterial memory that persists” (C. Mitéran). The five works have different but complementary themes and are divided into three series: a portrait based on art history (echoing Edvard Munch’s The Scream), two mosaics that are anonymous portraits, and two works inspired by Roman mosaics.
These last two works, created during the Particelle residency, are based on the study of ancient works: the white marble portrait Untitled (provisional) is a reworking of the two mosaic figures found in the floor of the house of Paquius Proculus in Pompeii (2nd century B.C.), near the impluvium: the figures of the master of the house and his wife are silhouetted against black tesserae, a common mode in Pompeian mosaics. A few steps away, the same figures are depicted realistically, and a fresco with the same subjects was found in the same house.
The second work is based on a study of the mosaic Matrona in her Bath, in the Bardo Museum in Tunisia. The figure shows a matron with two servants, one of whom is holding a mirror up to her. The peculiarity of this work lies in its state of preservation: the face of the matron has a rather large gap, while the figure reflected in the mirror is intact. Mitéran takes up this mosaic by isolating the main subject and somehow bringing her reflection to life.
In Mitéran’s reflection, the shadow becomes a projection capable of mediating between the material presence of a portrait and the memory of the person himself. The artist continued to explore the potential of the portrait, using only white marble and gold. He also used for the first time the photographic technique of the chymigram, invented in 1956 by the Belgian artist Pierre Cordier. This is an off-camera method of working that exploits light, using not a camera but a photosensitive emulsion that reacts to light with developing and fixing liquids.
Photography, by its very nature fragile and ephemeral, contrasts with the permanence and strong materiality of mosaic. This choice of medium allows one to perceive an inherent tension in the portrait, which seeks to fix a fleeting moment in a permanent form’ (ibid.).
The setting of the works, created to be enjoyed individually and in the dim light of a candle, is designed to blend in with the environment of the presumed chapel of San Giovanni Decollato.
During Particelle, marte’ art residency, now in its second edition, Mitéran created two mosaics using the Ravenna technique, i.e. the direct method on a temporary support: the marble and gold mosaics were laid on a white lime base and then covered with gauze impregnated with a special adhesive. After drying, the mosaics were torn off and inserted into the final support, a honeycomb panel. The use of this technique was made possible thanks to the fundamental support of the CaCO3 Mosaic Studio, composed of Âniko Ferreira da Silva (Ravenna, 1976), Giuseppe Donnaloia (Martina Franca, 1976) and Pavlos Mavromatidis (Kavala, Greece, 1979), who have been working in Ravenna since 2006. The collaboration of Roberta Casadei, Cecilia De Carlo, Veronica Di Felice and Samuela Cottignoli, students at the Ravenna State Academy of Fine Arts, has been invaluable.
The support of Rebecca Marras and Ester Pistoia, students at the University of Bologna, was essential in the organisation, installation and mediation of the exhibition.
The presumed chapel of San Giovanni Decollato
The supposed Chapel of San Giovanni Decollato, in Piazza Unità d’Italia, is the historic site chosen for the exhibition Tout y parlerait / À l’âme en secret. Situated in the centre of Ravenna, the first news of the construction of the church date back to around 1190, then renovated in 1570 with the approval of Archbishop Giulio Della Rovere.
From 1614 to 1798, during Napoleon’s repressions, San Giovanni Decollato was taken over by the Brotherhood of Mercy or the Company of the Good Death, whose function was to comfort prisoners in the moments before their execution, helping them to “die well” (Compagnia della buona morte in San Giovanni Decollato di Ravenna (fund), 1567 – 1795, SIAS – State Archives of Ravenna; link). Before settling in San Giovanni Decollato, the Compagnia della Buona Morte was linked to the church of San Giovanni marmorato, dedicated to the same saint and located near Porta Anastasia or Serrata (G. Boattini, … aiutare le anime a ben morire. La Confraternita della Misericordia o della Buona Morte a Ravenna, dissertation in History of the Modern Church, University of Bologna, n.d. 2008-2009, p. 27).
The alleged Chapel of St John the Beheaded, which belonged to the Confraternity, “was located on the ground floor of the Palace of the Cardinal Legate” (ibid., p. 28). The church was accessed through a small architraved doorway to the left of the main door of the palace. The Palace of the Apostolic Legate in Piazza del Popolo, built in the 13th century to represent the Holy See in the city, was damaged and rendered unusable after the sack of Ravenna by the French in 1512. Later it was restored and enlarged, then demolished, also due to the serious damage caused by the earthquake of 1688; in the following years (1694-96) the Legate Domenico Corsi had it rebuilt, together with the public prisons, then demolished in 1907. Since 1863 the complex has been the seat of the Prefecture of Ravenna (Palazzo della Prefettura, formerly Palazzo del Legato Apostolico in ‘I Fabbricati Notevoli di Ravenna’; link).
The church was then reduced to a chapel and incorporated into the Palazzo della Prefettura. In Gaetano Savini’s publication Ravenna. Piante panoramiche:
Between the main entrance to the palace and the old portico (see plan 23 no. 3) there is the remains of the small church of St. John Decollate, consisting of two Greek columns with Ionic capitals and an arch forming a small tribune. This church, built in 1572, was deconsecrated in 1798: it was used by the Confraternity of the Good Death, which performed the last rites for those condemned to death.
In the courtyard of the Prefecture, on the right when entering, there are the Carceri Giudiziarie (judicial prisons) (see fig. 25 (A)), which served this purpose until 1897, when the new prison in via Porta Aurea was completed (G. Savini, Ravenna. Piante Panoramiche. Volumes I-V (1905-1907). Public and private buildings, urban monuments and objects, p. I-22).
The Compagnia della Buona Morte was suppressed by law on 27 June 1798 and, as Savini writes, the church was deconsecrated; after being used as a military barracks, it was closed shortly afterwards.
It is worth remembering that today’s Via Cairoli did not exist and that the buildings along the street date back to Venetian times: the river Padenna used to flow there.
The church had a long quadrangular shape, with three naves divided by ten pillars and two entrances: the main one facing Piazza del Popolo and the secondary one that connected the building to the courtyard of Palazzo del Legato, where the prisons were located. Towards the latter, the only wrought-iron window of the church, which still exists, overlooked the courtyard and allowed the mass to be observed from inside the prisons.
To the right of the main entrance to the church was the sacristy and opposite it the conforteria, a small windowless room with a wooden altar containing a painting of Christ crucified between two thieves, where the condemned were accompanied to prepare their spirits for a peaceful death.
The high altar of the church was dedicated to the Beheading of St. John the Baptist, and the panel above it has been identified as the one preserved in the city’s National Museum: ‘[…] initially attributed to Luca Longhi, until a restoration carried out in 1980 revealed the signature of Francesco Longhi, Luca’s son, and the date 1612’ (G. Boattini, … aiutare le anime a ben morire. La Confraternita della Misericordia o della Buona Morte a Ravenna, thesis in History of the Modern Church, University of Bologna, academic year 2008-2009, p. 29), which suggests that the son intervened posthumously on his father’s canvas.
In the main body of the church there were six benches on which the condemned and the friars could sit to pray, and on the walls, facing each other, two canvases depicting the image of the Holy Annunciation and a bishop in episcopal vestments. On their sides, four large works depict the episodes of St Peter in prison, the Visitation of St Elizabeth, Herod’s Last Supper and the Holy Temple with the Seven Candlesticks. Excavations in 2004 revealed that the bases of the columns in the main area of the supposed chapel were made of reused architectural elements in pink Verona stone from the area of Ravenna and from the late antique or early medieval period (Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities. Regional Secretary for Emilia Romagna). The decoration of the building was completed by two lunettes, one representing the Nativity of St. John the Baptist and the other the Liberation of the Slaves, placed above the door of the sacristy and the door of the conforteria. (ivi, pp. 29-30; Compagnia della misericordia in San Giovanni decollato di Ravenna (fund), 1567 – 1795, Ravenna State Archives; link).
marte is reopening the presumed Chapel of San Giovanni Decollato, closed to the public since 2019, on the occasion of Clément Mitéran’s solo exhibition, while allowing the church to retain its historic and mysterious air that has seen it travel and change over the centuries.
Photo by Lorenzo Pasini
