Imitatio Christi, Imago Vitae: riflessioni per una lettura critica dell’opera di Georges Henri Rouault (1871-1958)

This paper examines a specific aspect of Georges Rouault's art: the Christo-mimetic action. The main focus is on Rouault's iconographic and stylistic metamorphosis over the years, to underline how the artist's religious feeling has determined very different ways to comunicate the Christian sense of pain, the divine humanity of suffering, fulcrum of his tormented artistic, human and spiritual research. By overlapping his own image with the figure of the suffering Christ (Man of Sorrows), Rouault figuratively translated his existential uneasiness. In fact, the salvific power of pain is the deepest essence of the Parisian artist's work growth. In this process, the Crucifixions, the Sacred faces of Christ and the Ecce Homos intertwine with the representations of a sore, hypocritical and sinful humanity, in a crescendo of the existentialist tension that reaches its most higher intensity with the trust in Redemption and Providence.