Madonnaro Street Painter
Florence Italy
2016

https://thekeypoint.org/2015/06/30/my-life-as-a-street-painter-in-florence-italy/

The world of the Madonnari, meaning street painters. (Madonnaro is masculine singular. Madonnara is feminine singular.)

The madonnari work mainly in chalk and pastel. The art form “is believed to have started in the Mediterranean region. It can be found in Italy sometime in the 16th century and began as devotional drawings outside of churches and directly on the streets. The subject was typically the Madonna, hence the name of these artists.”

Today in Florence, the madonnari on Via Calimala mainly draw copies of artworks by old masters such as Botticelli, Caravaggio, Leonardo da Vinci, and of course, Michelangelo.

Madonnari tend to work from 9:30 or 10:00 a.m. until midnight to complete one large street painting… Because one cannot paint on a wet surface, each artist was responsible for washing his own work at the end of the day, typically midnight. In the morning, the driver of the street sweeper could pass over the work and the square would be somewhat clean and dry by the time the next artist arrived.

“The question that street painters probably receive the most often is: How can you create such beauty only to have it destroyed shortly thereafter?” As a sculptor, she works with stone and bronze—it doesn’t get more permanent than that. “However, what I discovered for myself is that there is a certain freedom in knowing in advance that the work will not last. Without the pressure of having to create a masterpiece, my brain shifts into a sort of ‘play’ mode that allows for experimentation. And that leads to learning.”