 | The crocodile of Santuario of Saint Mary of Grazie | |
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The crocodile, hanging in the first aisle bay. |
The area of votive offering within the Sanctuary, or the joists where the statues and life size statues in wax are held, are to be linked, according to the writer's own personal interpretation, to the painted decorations of the 14th century on the stone plates that hang along the joining points between the ribs on the three crosses which depict, starting from the entrance and moving towards the apse, Our Lady with the Child Jesus, the brilliant sun with the monogram IHS, and the moon . These three images can be interpreted as representations of passages described by Apocalypse (12) who narrates the apparition in the sky of a Woman giving birth, shining in the sun and with the moon under her feet. The woman is the Mother of Christ, the sun is the symbol of Christ, and the moon symbolises Our Lady. In the XV or XVI century a stuffed crocodile (Crocodilus niloticus) was added, most probably as a votive offering, and it completes the symbolic representation symbolic of the Apocalypse which goes on to tell of the appearance in the sky of a dragon ("the antique serpent, which is Satan, the devil, ") who tries to divorce the Son from the Woman, but who falls to earth and is chained for a thousand years (20, 1-2). In ancient times, no distinction was made between dragons, serpents and crocodiles which were indifferently referred to with names such as anguis, draco. In Christian times they were considered personifications of the devil, and the remains of stuffed crocodiles and fossilised prehistoric animals were hung as votive offering in the mediaeval churches. Numerous symbols and legends are linked to crocodiles. The crocodile hanging in the Sanctuary of the Grazie may have been captured in Curtatone or came from an unnamed zoo belonging to the Gonzagas. The crocodile remains hanging in the churches acted as a warning against the human inclination to sin: chaining the crocodile to the facade of the church was the equivalent of controlling the forces of evil. Both the aforementioned plates in stone and the crocodile remains are strongly linked to the stylised flowers, an astral symbol, of the faces, the number, the form and the colours which symbolise the various phases of the Opus alchymicum. The presence of the stone plate depicting the sun, the symbol of Christ, at the meeting point of the ribs on the central cross, whose floral decorations seem, more so than in the others, to represent the phases of the Opus, it is not pure chance. The parallel between Christ and the philosopher's stone (which, according to mystical alchemy, was effective in the transmutation of the sensual man into the perfect being, was brilliantly illustrated by C. G. Jung. The crocodile, under whose body was sometimes depicted Ouroboros, the serpent representing the various phases carried out in alchemy, completes the composition. The high Sun and the Moon, symbols of Christ and the Madonna, and lower down the crocodile, the symbol of the diabolic, and lower down still, the wax statues and life sized statues, symbols of man and his troubles, illustrate the union of principle to end, from the high to the low: a symbolic interpretation of the correspondence of the universe, of the microcosm with the macrocosm. The crocodile and the serpents symbolise the realisation of the unity of the material being and the rise of the spiritual. The custodians of the Sanctuary and the producers of the complex system of the votive mechanism were the Francescani Minori Osservanti, (XVI-XVII century) who were notorious for practising alchemy since medieval times. The recent restoration of the crocodile was completed along with the restoration of the joists and the statues and the life sized wax statues. The restoration work recovered the ancient appearance of indivisible unity from the votive cultural background of the Sanctuary of the Holy Virgin Mary of the Grazie.
Attilio Zanca