Un artista per i Gesuiti: Antonio Grano. Orientamenti del gusto e della committenza della Compagnia nei confronti di un protagonista dell’arte a Palermo tra XVII e XVIII secolo

The contribution focuses on the patronage exercised by the Society of Jesus towards Antonio Grano (1660–1718), one of the leading figures in the artistic culture of Palermo between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His activity—often carried out in collaboration with artists like the architects Paolo (1634–1714) and Giacomo Amato (1643–1732), or the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta (1656–1732), to name only a few—extended across multiple fields, ranging from painting and ephemeral decorations to the design of decorative art objects and architecture. It was precisely through a series of commissions that Antonio Grano was repeatedly engaged by the Jesuits, from the earliest years of his activity within the Church of the Novitiate to the interventions of the first decades of the eighteenth century in the Church of the Gesù in Palermo. In the case of the frescoes executed for the Novitiate, an unpublished drawing related to one of the depicted scenes is presented, thereby adding a further element to Grano’s graphic production.