Art of the Inquisition's victims revealed in Sicily

[emad]

Painstaking project unveils paintings and a glimpse into lives of tortured 'heretics'

John Hooper in Rome
Saturday January 14, 2006
The Guardian


By age 20 Francesco Mannarino had seen more of life than was good for him. The son of a Sicilian fisherman, he had been seized as a boy by Muslim pirates and converted, perhaps forcibly, to Islam.

In the early 17th century apostasy was not an offence so long as the convert reported promptly to the officials of the dreaded Inquisition after being ransomed or recaptured. Mannarino did so, but something must have failed to convince them he was still truly a Christian and he was thrown into the dungeons alongside Palazzo Steri in Palermo.

It was perhaps in a desperate attempt to persuade his captors of his devotion to the faith that he drew a life-size St Andrew on the walls of his cell, signing and dating it 1610. The drawing is among the first to emerge from a project that is offering a glimpse into the lives of the victims of the Spanish Inquisition.

Inch by inch, restorers funded by the EU are chipping whitewash from the walls of a building belonging to the University of Palermo. What they are finding underneath is an assortment of paintings and writings by alleged heretics and other inmates there before the Inquisition was abolished in 1782.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/italy/story/0,12576,1686234,00.html