UMILE da PETRALIA. - Sicilian sculptor, in secular life Giovanni Francesco Pintormo, born at Petralia Soprana in 1580, died at Palermo on Feb. 9, 1639.
Received as a lay brother in the Palermo convent of S. Maria di Gesù of the Minor Reformati, he began a life there
UMILIATI - Various occupations of the U. Miniature and Incipit of Chapter X of the Chronicle of Fra' Giovanni di Brera (1421) - Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, cod. G. 301 inf.
of fervor, which is attested by the numerous wooden Crucifixes (33, according to tradition) scattered throughout the churches and convents of Sicily (Petralia, Mussomeli, Chiaramonte, Randazzo, Nicosia, etc.). The friar never set his hand to his works without inner spiritual preparation: whence that aura of mystical piety that pervades them.
Other works: the Ecce Homo of Calvaruso, the S. Francesco of Enna, the pulpit of S. Nicola in Trapani. His style is free from seventeenth-century caprice and a certain sixteenth-century eloquence: his anatomy is precise, without the exasperation of reality. The work of friar U. reveals a plastic sense born of inner clarity and which, while adapting to the real, re-proposes it in a religious vision of high interest for the history of piety.
It is difficult to specify U.'s artistic relationships with the Ferraro da Giuliana and the Li Volsi da Nicosia; also because an exhaustive monograph on this prestigious woodcarver is lacking.