Sesta Sinfonia

Beethoven's Pastoral on the walls of Antrodoco — a symphony painted in the mountains of Lazio.

Sesta Sinfonia is a mural created by artist Neve in March 2021 in Antrodoco, Rieti, for the Resistenza Street Art Gallery, organized by Ondadurto Teatro.

"Sesta Sinfonia" is a large-scale outdoor mural painted in March 2021 in Antrodoco, in the province of Rieti, for the Resistenza Street Art Gallery — a programme of urban art organised by Ondadurto Teatro. The work is inspired by the third movement of the Third Symphony of the German composer Joachim Raff — the symphony subtitled "Im Walde" ("In the Forest"), whose third movement is a nocturnal scene: the dance of the Dryads. Raff's "Im Walde" is a symphony about the forest as a living world, inhabited by its elemental spirits. Neve's mural translates one of those spirits into hyperrealist figurative form. The subject is a Dryad — a nymph of the oak trees in Greek mythology, whose life is bound to the tree she inhabits. The figure is a young woman with dark features and long hair, lit from one side with warm copper light; her head is crowned with a wreath of dark oak leaves. In her hand, an oak branch with autumn-red foliage. She wears a deep forest green. Around her: a blue-black space scattered with stars, the ambient light of deep night or deep woods. Above the figure, glowing white against the dark ground, is the alchemical symbol for the element Air — an upward-pointing equilateral triangle bisected by a horizontal line. In the classical system of four elements, Air is the element assigned to the Sylph: the elemental spirit of the air. The Dryad inhabits the tree; the symbol she stands under is that of the air the tree breathes. The figure and the symbol together name the space between earth and sky that a tree occupies. The mural is painted on the exterior wall of a building adjacent to the Ostello Il Castagno — the hostel "The Chestnut" — whose name (castagno = chestnut tree) creates a further layer of resonance with the subject: the work about tree nymphs is placed beside an institution whose name is itself a tree. The building's circular utility fixture on the wall is incorporated naturally into the composition. The official description, published by the Resistenza Street Art Gallery and Ondadurto Teatro, reads: "Through a realistic portrayal of these tree nymphs, the artist exalts the Nature of the place in its enchantment. As these nymphs are to the trees, so too the work embodies the force and cultural vitality of the territory — and is symbolically placed beside the Ostello Il Castagno, to underline the connection with Nature in the very toponymy of the local initiatives, in a play of metaphorical correspondences and reflections that give continuity between the work and its setting."