The Stone That PraysStefano da Putignano and the Apulian Renaissance

Where stone becomes devotion and the Renaissance speaks Apulian

There are places where stone is not merely matter, but living memory.In Turi, in the quiet half-light of the Mother Church, the Renaissance does not arrive softly: it reveals itself. This is the Renaissance of Stefano da Putignano, sculptor and architect of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who gave form to the faith, suffering and hope of an entire territory.

His Madonnas do not look down from above: they remain. They remain beside the faithful, with solemn yet deeply human faces, with draperies that seem to breathe, with Children carved not for anatomical perfection but for symbolic intensity. The Madonna of Terrarossa, miraculously preserved in its original polychromy, is one of these presences: a work that has crossed five centuries without losing its voice.

In a South torn apart by wars, foreign dominations, plagues and famine, Stefano carved images that became places of refuge. Apulia, at that time, was not a periphery but a crossroads: of materials, models and artistic languages arriving from the North and from Venice, filtered through a local sensibility that was austere and authentic. It is here that a unique style emerged, halfway between a persistent Romanesque tradition and a mature Renaissance, where monumentality prevails over grace and reality is never softened.

Stefano signs himself architectus. This is no minor detail. It means that his works are not merely statues, but projects of space and meaning. Figures inhabit aedicules, niches and altars: they do not decorate, they construct. Marked hands, veins visible on the surface, deeply carved faces: every detail is a declaration of truth.

Alongside the Madonnas stand the Saints, the Pietàs, the Trinity of Turi, and the Nativity groups: a vast yet coherent repertoire, conceived for a concrete, everyday, popular devotion. In these sculptures faith is not abstract: it is body, weight, silence.

Rediscovering Stefano da Putignano today means restoring the South to the centre of the Italian artistic narrative. It means recognising that there was not just one Renaissance, and that Apulia too was able to speak a universal language, carved in stone and in time.

Editorial Credits

Text reworked from historical and art-historical material published in: Il Paese, cultural supplement, May 2018Special issue on Stefano da Putignano

Original articles: Giovanni Lerede with critical and historical contributions by Clara Gelao

Photographs of the artworks: Giovanni Lerede