Una lezione barocca a Messina: i marmi mischi e tramischi. Dal significato simbolico alla concretezza materiale.

For years I have cultivated the deep desire to deal the mischi and tramischi marbles decoration, which in the Baroque age covered the interiors of many churches of Messina, no longer existing: "flowers, fruit, monsters, birds, ribbons, embroidery, velvets, laces, damasks, brocades, sculptures, enamels, gold, exploited in every suggestion of forms, colours, lines, according to an inexhaustible inventiveness of the artists and artisans [1]". A huge heritage now decommissioned, stacked or musealized, testifies that Messina, with a autochthonous definition of marble inlays, has been not inferior to Palermo. Looking to the "archaeological" nature of the available data - heterogeneous documentary sources, surviving material finds, identified holograph affinities - I asked myself what could have been added to what was scientifically stratified for other places - Palermo with punctual rigor but Messina in a fragmentary - noting that the symbolic and aesthetic themes had been dealt more than the material and executive ones. Undertaking the analysis of the patrimony subtracted at the earthquake and preserved in the Regional Museum of Messina, of the finds pieces transferred in the reconstruction churches, as well as of the similar achievements dispersed in the province and elsewhere, I tried to reconstruct a unified perspective of the Messina yard of the "mischio marble decorations", expression of an baroque culture independent and with a role at least co-leading role in Sicily. The reasons for this interest are oriented towards the hypothesis of a "Messina's school" of master artisans who could have worked in "a craftsman's shop" to conceive geometric, floral and allegorical decorative subjects, on models and prototypes literary or assumed by other manufacturing arts. Perhaps using the same types of marble and following symbolic and spiritual needs "unavoidable" dictated by Religious Orders active at that time in Messina, who entrusted their power and challenged themselves on the material field of mischi marbles decoration and here, only rarely, tramischi.