Tindaro cracked

Description

At the top of the Boboli Gardens, on the Chestnut Meadow, a colossal face awaits visitors: it is Tindarus, the king of the city of Sparta, father of Clytemnestra and probably of the beautiful Helen, the woman who sparked the epic Trojan War narrated in the Iliad. The sculptor is Igor Mitoraj, Polish-born but Italian by adoption. The artist, drawing on the classical world, manages to create his own highly personal mythology of the Greek world. Heroic heads, noble faces, large, wide-open eyes, shy and fierce mouths are the fragments of a classical imaginary that Mitoraj restores to the viewer's enjoyment. As in this work, which forcefully imposes itself on the inexorable passing of time, on human transience, but also becomes a symbol of the endurance of classical beauty and the permanence of the ethical and aesthetic values it represents.