THE COLOURS AND THE IMAGES OF TIME PASSING

Fr. Livio Tonello, director

The days, weeks and months... printed on twelve sheets of paper: it is not just a cold list of dates but it is life passing and flowing out through time. Every year the Universal Association of Saint Anthony comes into your home and into your life with an Anthonian calendar. It is a friendly way of coming back to St. Anthony’s figure so that his face, words and gestures will accompany and help us.

The fundamental events of his life and the most important aspects of his spirituality have been represented in different manners and we are always astonished admiring the cycles of paintings dedicated to the great Thaumaturgist. Their objective is not just to represent pure beauty and to give information (we thank the ecclesiastic and civil institutions for that who have allowed us to acquire images) but mainly to offer spiritual formation.

Each image of the most important events of the figures’life represents through colours, signs and words the way of living the faith in different cultural contexts. This year we have chosen to show you the frescoes of Francesco and Antonio Nasini (seventeenth century) who painted the most famous miracles and the most meaningful moments of St. Anthony’s life. But behind these images, these colours and these gestures there is a world of devotion and of faith that gives us a message of holiness. Over time the frescoes have degraded a bit: the cracks in the walls, the colours that have lost their shine, the burrs of the brushstroke...

Certainly it would be more touching to contemplate them in the Chapel of St. Anthony in the Church of St. Francis in Grosseto. The images represented in the calendar help us to understand the sensitivity of these artists who expressed through art the traditional devotion to St. Anthony. The calendar hung on the wall does not only remind us that time is passing and neither is it just a decoration on a white wall. We desire St. Anthony to be a model of life to imitate, a companion of our life to pray to every day.

As in the frescos we can admire time that has left its marks on our soul too: the cracks of fragility, the weakening of hope. But we do not feel alone and we always want “to be restored” to make our colours bright as God’s children For all these reasons, this year too, we entrust our days, weeks and months to Saint Anthony, our great protector and intercessor. We hope that you will love these images revealing once again the colours of our faith over time.