Carmen is my Spanish friend who teaches Art History. She loves IL VOLO and loves to make comparisons between IL VOLO and artwork. Her teaching method is to create this parallel so that the lessons result less heavy for the students.
It is very interesting and I thought to ask Valeria to translate it for you.
This is what she thinks of Piero.
THE KNIGHT WITH HIS HAND ON HIS CHEST,
written by Carmen Garcia Rodriguez.
When I first watched the trio Il Volo for the first time, two of its members immediately reminded me of the characters I had seen in various artworks. Gianluca has a classic beauty that reminded me of Hermes of Prassitele and Ignazio, for his deportment and for his face, he seemed to me a Knight of the seventeenth century, coming out of a picture of Caravaggio or Dumas’s novel “The Three Musketeers”.
And many people have asked me: “And Piero, do not you remember any character?” The fact is that he reminded me, yes, some, but I did not understand who. His glasses, which give him so many personalities, I think, prevented me from accurately identifying what character of the past he was like, until I saw his picture without glasses and black dress. Then I understood: Piero was “The Knight with his hand on his chest”.
His austere air, his serious face, and the penetrating look were those of the famous Toledo horseman depicted by El Greco. Afterwards I realized that, very often, singing or greetings, Piero carried his hand to the chest in a gesture very similar to that of the man of the painting, and I thought: finally I found Piero’s character.
El Greco was a famous painter of the sixteenth century, born in Crete and artistically formed in Italy, although today he is considered a Spanish painter since he settled in Toledo and in Spain reached the fame he still maintains. “The Knight with his hand on his chest” (Museo del Prado) is surely his most famous portrait. Unfortunately, we do not know for sure who the Knight is, but El Greco, as a portraitist, has been able to grasp the character of the character. .
It is a simple portrait in which black and gray predominate, which gives arousing air to the character, but there are three elements that characterize the portrait: the penetrating gaze, the grip of the sword pointing to his character noble origin and, above all, the hand on the chest that represents it as a man of honor.
Of course Piero is more attractive than El Greco’s Knight and also wears glasses that I hope will never be removed because they characterize his image. I do not know Piero personally, so I do not know if his personality resembles the one that comes from this horseman, but for some reason Piero is for me “the Knight with his hand on his chest”, one of my favorite portraits.
(translated from Spanish to Italian by Valeria Bosch)
The teacher Carmen Garcia Rodriguez has a blog dedicated to art and IL VOLO. This is her link,
http://ilvoloarteycultura.blogspot.it/p/los-protagonistas.html