La Madonna dell'Eclissi

The woman looks up. The eclipse is what she sees.

The two elements — figure and oculus — are separated by the stone masonry of the arch, but read as one work: the gaze below, the object of the gaze above. The architecture of the building becomes the composition.

This site-specific installation was painted in July 2020 in the external portico of the Palazzo Comunale in Rieti, as part of the TraMe – Tracce di Memorie project — the programme of urban art interventions curated by Annalisa Ferraro with the support of the Lazio Region and FESR funds, in which Neve, Sbagliato, and Ale Senso each produced a work in the city. The intervention occupies a single bay of the medieval stone portico: a pointed arch with, above it, a circular oculus window. Neve treated the two elements as a single composition — a vertical diptych structured by the architecture itself. In the lower element, a large painted panel fills the archway to the wall: a close-up portrait of a woman of dark skin tone, her face tilted upward, a transparent white lace veil draped over her head and shoulders. Her gaze is directed above and beyond the frame — composed, intent, not reverent in a religious sense but absolute in its attention. The light falls on her face in the manner of Neve's Caravaggesque studio practice: one side lit, the rest in shadow. The black ground is complete. Neve's signature appears at the lower left of the panel. In the upper element — the circular oculus window above the arch — Neve painted a total solar eclipse: the moon's disc in the centre, surrounded by the solar corona, with filaments of white light and dark space. The corona's brilliance is rendered with the same hyperrealist precision as the figure below.