Brother Carlo Saving the Head of Ulysses, 2011 (oil on canvas)

“Perhaps, most of western art is an ever changing dialogue with the antique? That could be the secret of it power”. In October 2010, during his first visit to the villa of Tiberius and the National Museum in Sperlonga, Maestro André Durand was intrigued by the story of the monks who settled there around the sixth century and destroyed the decoration, in particular the statues that were in the Grotto of Tiberius. Of the nude female torso of Scylla there was nothing left. It had been shattered to smithereens. The monks found the great statue of the drunken Polyphemus almost as offensive as the female nude. However, it had been shattered less violently into the many recognizable fragments that survive today like the Cyclops’ magnificent right hand and his hairy left leg and foot. Imagining that all the monks could not be insensitive to the beauty of the statues, Durand has conceived an image, reminiscent of the iconography of the Davids and Goliaths in Italian 15th to 18th century painting and sculpture: a young monk, groping in the grotto basin to salvage an important fragment of sculpture, the head of Ulysses, a consummate masterpiece of Hellenistic art. With the wisdom of youth, Durand’s young monk knows that the beauty of art even of pagan subjects, is a manifestation of God.