{"id":699,"date":"2016-06-25T07:59:12","date_gmt":"2016-06-25T07:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/accesspressthemes.com\/accesspress-parallax-pro-demo\/?p=699"},"modified":"2024-08-02T11:23:05","modified_gmt":"2024-08-02T09:23:05","slug":"padre_costantino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/2016\/06\/25\/padre_costantino\/","title":{"rendered":"Father Constantine"},"content":{"rendered":"
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On 25 June 2007, Father Costantino Ruggeri, founder and president of the Frate Sole Foundation, died.<\/div>

\u00a0<\/p>

\"I had the grace and joy of having identified my faith in art and my art in faith.<\/strong><\/em>

Painter, sculptor, stained glass artist, 'batisseur d'\u00e9glises' and finally - or first and foremost - Franciscan friar and priest, Father Costantino was, as Mario Sironi described him, a soldier of two militias: that of faith and that of art.
From his childhood in the countryside of Franciacorta to his youth in the convents of Busto Arsizio and Trento, to his ordination as a priest in Milan, from his pictorial trials to the great masterpieces that made him the main architect of the renewal of sacred art in Italy, the story of Costantino Ruggeri, a man of faith and religion, is inextricably intertwined with that of the artist.


\"My true personal vow - equivalent for me as an artist to the three vows of me as a friar - is this:
never betray, at any cost, beauty'.
And, quoting Dostoyevsky:\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>'Only beauty will save the world'.<\/strong><\/em>


An artist and an awkward man who understands fidelity (to the past, to society, to the Church) only in the freedom to completely renew himself, Ruggeri has always avoided mannerism and pleasantness in his work, congenitally refractory to schemes and sacred and profane fetishes, as above all to the deadly commonplace of 'it has always been done this way'.

A friend of the greatest representatives of Italian art of our century - from Fontana to Sironi, from Morandi to De Pisis, from Manz\u00f9 to Carr\u00e0 - Costantino Ruggeri, worker of dreams, had in 1960 the perhaps decisive encounter of his itinerary, that with Le Corbusier. Since then, \"the architecture of mystical space\" has been his main occupation: \"to build a church that would not separate, but unite with its structures all of creation, light, trees, living images, the natural sounds of nature\". And it is no coincidence that, in his attic suspended between the roofs of Pavia and the sky, in silence and prayer he created the new Sanctuary of Divine Love in Rome \"the living harmony of a blue grotto\" and was the creator of the Frate Sole Foundation to capture in the world the splendour of the sublime and the passion of the divine.


To those who asked him the reason for these initiatives, he replied with the candour of a young boy from Franciacorta, referring to Matisse:<\/p>

\"They are only flowers that I make bloom every day for the happiness of men\".<\/strong><\/em><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t
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On 25 June 2007, Father Costantino Ruggeri, founder and president of the Frate Sole Foundation, died. \"I have the grace and joy of having identified my faith in art and my art in faith\". Painter, sculptor, stained glass artist, 'batisseur d'\u00e9glises' and finally - or first and foremost - Franciscan friar and priest, Father Costantino was,...<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4320,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4331,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions\/4331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4320"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fondazionefratesole.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}