San Rocco e l'Angelo

The pilgrim saint and his angel, 30 metres, on the walls of a town between Venice and the Brenta.

San Rocco e l'Angelo is a mural created by artist Neve in 2019 in Dolo, Venice, for the IDoLove Street Art Festival, organized by the Comune di Dolo and Associazione Forme Art.

"San Rocco e l'Angelo" is a large-scale outdoor mural painted in 2019 on a building wall in Dolo, in the Venetian mainland, for the IDoLove Street Art Festival — organized by the Comune di Dolo in collaboration with the Associazione Forme Art. The composition stretches horizontally across the full facade in a single unbroken scene, the figures rendered at monumental scale in deep Baroque chiaroscuro against a black ground. The subject is the moment of divine comfort from the life of Saint Rocco — the fourteenth-century pilgrim saint, patron of plague victims and the sick — in the episode in which an angel descends to tend to his wounds after he withdraws into the forest of Piacenza, struck by plague himself. At the left of the composition, San Rocco: dark-bearded, head tilted, eyes closed, in the posture of the ill and resigned. His red pilgrim's mantle, richly embroidered with golden patterns, falls across him; the scallop shell — emblem of the pilgrim — rests against the cloth. At the centre, the dog who according to legend sustained him with bread stolen from his master's table. To the right, the Angel: enormous white wings filling the upper register of the wall, face close to Rocco's, indicating the wound — the gesture of care, of pointing toward what must be healed. The composition is framed by near-total darkness. The light — Neve's Caravaggesque light — falls on the shell, on Rocco's face, on the dog's white coat, on the wing feathers; the rest is shadow. The scale of the work is such that the figures are larger than a standing person: a woman and child photographed at the base are barely waist-height to the figures behind them. The building that carries the mural was subsequently used as a COVID-19 vaccination centre during the pandemic — giving the image of the plague saint and his angel an unintended and precise second life. Neve with a group of local schoolchildren was photographed in front of the finished work.