**4. The olive tree in art**

The culture of the olive tree and its fruits has deep ties not only in the gastronomic traditions of the different populations of the countries that overlook the sea "nostrum" but so permeates the civil and religious culture of the various nations that often they have based their own economic survival on the production of olives. Perhaps no tree like the olive has moved from cultivation to culture, each becoming an integral part of the other.

In the course of history and literature, numerous artists and writers have dedicated prose passages and poems to the olive tree, a plant that, due to its strength and structure, has always fascinated man and has become the tree par excellence, the protagonist of stories, tales, and myths.

Ode, canto, what a beautiful image comes to mind when quoting these two words. What if an ode was dedicated to food? It was Pablo Neruda, pseudonym of Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto (1904–1973), poet, diplomat, Chilean politician, Nobel Prize for literature, who generated this great idea. In the Ode to Wine and Other Elementary Odes, Neruda celebrates wine, bread, onion, tomato, oil, potato, and other foods, apparently so mundane, of which we do not realize their immense value. The poet approaches poetry with small things, giving them a new identity.

Evergreen and millennial trees are symbols of peace, hope, and resistance, the olive tree is already present in the sacred texts of the three major religions in the world, and from then on many writers have used this plant as a subject or metaphor in their texts or in their paintings.

With its leaves with iridescent, silvery reflections, whose delicate lines are highlighted by the branches and gnarled trunk, the olive tree represents in the collective imagination a sort of sculpture made by nature itself, also for this reason, in the history of art it has been the privileged subject, a constant source of inspiration for artists, also as a symbolic representation of virtue, dogmas, images, feelings, affections, and emotions [10, 11].

The olive tree has been represented in many religious paintings. The image of the olive tree is often the element with which the artist guides the observer on a path of didactic references

In the historical-artistic context and in particular, in the iconography of the Virgin and the Passion of Christ, the image of the olive tree is often the element with which the artist guides the observer in a path of didactic references, as on the figure of Maria Regina Pacis, parent of the Savior of the world.

An example is Giotto's *Entry of Christ into Jerusalem*, in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. The scene is composed of an amiable realism, very evident in the figure of the donkey, placed in the foreground, and in the atmosphere that the image itself, as the artist conceived it, generates in the viewers (**Figure 5**).

#### **Figure 5.**

Entry of Christ into Jerusalem *by Giotto. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua.*

In the twentieth century, the olive tree was defined, in all respects, as a natural element of the landscape, as a symbol of a pure, and authentic beauty that everyone, poets, writers, artists, can capture and be aware of its fascinating artistic significance.

Another notable example is the *Annunciazione* by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi in 1333 (Uffizi Gallery in Florence).

The young archangel, kneeling in the manner of a noble knight, hands the Virgin an olive branch, a symbol of the peace and universal harmony that the unborn child would spread on earth. She wears an elegant damask dress (whose golden color reflects Gabriel's nickname, known as the "messenger of light") and a lively checkered cape (**Figure 6**).

Sandro Botticelli, in the painting *The return of Judith to Bethulia* (c. 1472, Uffizi Gallery in Florence), places an olive branch in Judith's hand, symbolizing the rediscovered peace after the death of the Assyrian king Holofernes. This work, together with the other protagonist of the diptych, *Discovery of the corpse of Holofernes*, constitutes one of the first narrative paintings we know of by Botticelli (**Figure 7**).

The two protagonists are portrayed by Botticelli while they are on the run, with the enemy's head covered with a sheet, and Giuditta, while with one hand she holds the murder weapon or the saber, and with the other, she holds an olive branch, a typical symbol of peace.

Another religious example in which the Passion of Christ and the olive tree are intertwined, just like one of its branches, is that of El Greco's 1590 painting Christ in Gethsemane (National Gallery of London). In his unmistakable style with elongated objects and figures, the plant is a characterizing element as it is placed in the foreground to the left of Christ, thus making the viewer participate in the story. In it, moreover, the olive tree foreshadows the death of Christ and the peace to which humanity is destined by the will of God following the sacrifice of the son.

A further tribute to the sacredness of this tree and its fruits can be found in the marvelous *Madonna dell'olivo* by the Genoese Niccolò Barabino of 1888 in which the very pure Virgin in white hugs the baby Jesus who in turn holds a twig of olive tree, once again a symbol of peace and salvation (**Figure 8**).

**Figure 6.** *Simone martini annunciazione.*

**Figure 7.** *The return of Judith to Bethulia. Sandro Botticelli, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.*

The olive tree whose branches take on the same color as the background is placed at the back of the scene and in turn, completes the triad of the embrace (Madonna, Jesus, olive tree) in a global way, thus framing the picture and letting you imagine its continuation. beyond the perimeter.

Still in the same century but 50 years earlier, the landscape current of Realism and Naturalism spreads in France, connected to the school of Barbizon, a small town near the forest of Fontainebleau, whose painters, despite differing in style and temperament, are strongly linked because they share the same desire to discover the

#### **Figure 8.**

Madonna dell'olivo *by the Genoese Niccolò Barabino. Church of S. Maria della Cella in Sampierdarena – Genova.*

beauty of Nature. This will be the backbone of a new movement that will soon spread, Impressionism, through which painters bring to completion "[…] the accentuation of the perceptual moment over the fantastic" by painting en plain air.

Based on these assumptions, Van Gogh, the movement's leading exponent, in 1889 dedicated approximately 18 canvases to the representation of the olive tree in the autumn during which he was hospitalized in the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence for serious emotional and nervous difficulties. For him, the olive trees represent life and its cycle, the divine, and how the relationships between man and nature can connect the former with the divine. Furthermore, for the painter, being in harmony with nature means creating moments of idyll and contemplation (**Figure 9**).

National Gallery of Art in Washington summarizes this series:

"In the olive trees – in the expressive power of the ancient and gnarled forms – Van Gogh found the manifestation of the spiritual force that he believed to reside in all of

**Figure 9.** *Representations of olive trees by Vincent Van Gogh.* nature and his brushstrokes make the ground and the sky alive with the same movement of the rustling leaves, mixed to a shimmer by the Mediterranean wind. The energy in the continuous rhythm communicates to us, in an almost physical way, the living strength that Van Gogh found among the olive trees; that spiritual force that he believed took shape there."
