Loretta Secchi.
On Saturday, May 9, 2026, the Museo Tattile Statale Omero (Omero State Tactile Museum) in Ancona hosted the first of three scheduled events. These events are part of a prestigious initiative by AICVAS (Associazione Italiana Combattenti Volontari Antifascisti di Spagna – Italian Association of Antifascist Volunteer Fighters of Spain) for the current year funded by the Ministry of Defense. The initiative is titled: Educating for Peace through Art.
The subject under examination was Pablo Picasso’s undisputed masterpiece, Guernica. The celebrated Spanish painter created this artwork after the tragic events that struck the homonymous Basque town which was bombed on April 26 by the German Condor Legion and the Italian Legionary Air Force at the request of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists.
In Guernica, Picasso’s symbols and iconographic recollections rise, perfectly suited to the subject matter. Recalling the words of art historian Roberto Longhi, we could argue that the genesis of the painting delves into the depths of Christian iconographic tradition. This was done to bestow a universal and sacred aura upon the civil suffering of Guernica.
The most direct link to the theme of the massacre of the innocents is manifested in the screaming mother on the left of the painting. Her image recalls the Mater Dolorosa from Guido Reni’s version of the Massacre of the Innocents. Thus, Pathos and Pietas are nothing less than a communion of human conditions, simultaneous realities and symbols. The woman holding her dead son echoes the composition of thePietà turned into a scream of despair. This evokes both certain medieval compositions from Northern European painting and dramatic representations from Renaissance and 17th-century painting, where gestures of imploration or despair are deliberately eloquent.
In Guernica, the child’s broken neck, bent backward, is an explicit reference to the tragic rigidity of slaughtered infants in Renaissance and Baroque altarpieces. The mimicry of pain, tear-shaped eyes and a wide-open mouth facing upward, transforms historical reportage into a biblical archetype, where the violence of power strikes the defenseless.
By utilizing these codes, Picasso elevates the 1937 bombing from a political event to an eternal, morally inhuman tragedy. The Massacre of the Innocents becomes the filter through which the viewer recognizes the moral horror of war, transforming the Spanish victims into universal martyrs of modernity. There is the instinctual strength of the bull, echoing the bloody and fierce nature of the bullfight in the arena.
Above all, the rearing horse: its anatomy and posture lead back to late 14th-century or proto-Renaissance Triumphs of Death. We can think of the striking detached fresco by an unknown author and date currently exhibited at Palazzo Abatellis. In it, Death, riding a ghostly, skeletal horse, lunges into a gallop while around it life unfolds unheeding of the fate descending upon humans without distinction of age or social background. Similarly, Picasso’s geometric horse, with nostrils flared and teeth exposed by terror, evokes this being caught by surprise, there is the inability to escape destiny. This mirrors the warrior lying on the ground, dismembered, still clutching a broken sword, an unmistakable sign of an interrupted life.
Yet, there are also symbols that rekindle hope, however faint: a flower sprouting near the dying people and the lamp held by the hand of a woman who bursts into the scene seeming to light a beacon capable of casting out darkness from the human heart.
“Painting is a blind man’s profession. A person does not paint what he sees, but what he feels, what he says to himself about what he has seen” Pablo Picasso used to say. True: if we consider what it means to transfigure reality while maintaining, through style and cognition, adherence to the profound meaning of a theme and the way it finds worthy and pregnant representation independently of any demand for verisimilitude because this demand is an operation as limiting as inadequate in art. Because the essence of truth triumphs over the appearance of verisimilitude, Picasso studied throughout his entire career the best way to iconically express his thought without over-intellectualization, simply through the power of form and style. This is the finest way an artist chooses a subject to translate into imagery what he feels in his heart.
It is worth noting that a permanent bas-relief reproduction of Guernica is on display at the Museo Omero. Rendered in polychrome terracotta on a 1:2.775 scale, it was crafted by eleven students from the Libera Università Cinque Castelli and donated to the museum in 2017, exactly eighty years after the events that led to its creation. Although this translation introduces some variations compared to the original, it offers blind and visually impaired people a concrete, tactile understanding of this masterpiece. Unlike the painting, dominated by shades of blue and gray, the terracotta reproduction in its tactile experiential translation has been glazed using white and orange for the figures and shades of blue for the background. This specific color choice facilitates the perception of compositional elements for visually impaired visitors.
During the presentation of the initiative, the AICVAS Coordinator for the Marche region, Giordano Vecchietti, the President of the Museo Omero, Aldo Grassini and the Councilor for Culture of the Municipality of Ancona, Marta Paraventi, showed the educational role and relevance of the conference topic. They invited the audience, including twenty-one students from the “Licini” Art High School of Ascoli Piceno, to reflect on how an artwork can be a Summa symbolica and a distillation of human conscience, timeless, yet deeply embedded in history.