As an architect and artist I recognize myself in the expression: in a workmanlike manner. It is not a formula, as is commonly believed, only for the execution of work, but a rule of life, valid for every human activity. In our works that I created in Rome, Florence, Ferrara, Lecce, I have always tried to underline a principle so dear to Coomaraswamy: every man is a particular artist and not every artist is a particular man. Florence, the city where I obtained my degree in architecture, expresses this principle, although it seems the opposite. The plurality of roles of the Renaissance artist must be understood in the freedom and creative openness for every human activity, not in the individual exuberance of the single personality.

There are two, maybe three images that inspire my work, contained in the memories of a childhood lived in a small provincial town. A white outfit with brightly coloured embroidered edges, of which I was very proud, the smile of my mother as she bends down to hug me, and the proud and good-natured presence of my grandfather. I remember looking at him from below, he was as my aunt proudly said, a very tall man, “on his deathbed he measured 202 cm.” Some memories come from heaven, They don’t represent, as is erroneously thought, the past, the present or the future, but something much more important, they represent our vocation and our destiny. If Zola writes that Manet is “blonde”, then I should be white, thanks to that little outfit, a gift which I assume was from my mother.

The vision of those images is bathed in light, a light that unites them and at the same time distinguishes them, making them alive and present even when they seem absent. “Come to the light” could be the best expression to identify and represent my work. It was a wonderful discovery for me to know that the colour of mourning in Japan is white, a white man who leaves us in the West with hope for a journey towards a purer world. But to know, from Newton, that all the colours reside in white, does not please me as much as the wonder and the mystery of their presence in the rainbow. The simple vision of that miracle is enough to give me the strength to live. It fills me with courage knowing that the colours are suspended in space, they are born from a thunderstorm or a waterfall, from the union of the sun and water. It makes me even happier to know there exists a rainbow of the moon, the darkness and the night. To feel the substance of colour and its reality, without waiting for the rainbow, take a pinch of coloured powder, throw it in the air and enjoy it as it disappears, because “take” it and “leave” it, as claimed by Cristina Campo, is one single ecstasy …