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by Barbara Rose

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revelers in the blood bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death

Ferdinando Ambrosino began as a painter of landscapes, only to become a painter of icons. How and why did such a radical transformation, which suggests more than ordinary stylistic evolution, take place? Such a dramatic change of subject, content and form suggests an event of major significance,a psychological awakening brought on by nothing less than a spiritual epiphany or an emotional trauma.
In Ambrosino’s case, his decision to abandon a pleasing style of cheerful, abstract landscapes based on Impressionist precedent appears to have been triggered by the sudden vision of the meaning of the catastrophic events of our century.

Already in the early years of the twentieth century, the Spanish philosopher Miguel prophetically defined modem historical consciousness as “el sentimiento tragico de la vida.”
This existential tragic sense of life is common to those who think and feel deeply in any given time, but the events of our own epoch have heightened our degree of consciousness to a new and painful awareness, which eventually became the content of Ambrosino’s paintings. In this connection it is significant that Ambrosino was born on the eve of World War II in Bacoli outside of Naples and that he was trained as a geologist. His knowledge of geology surely sensitized him to the idea of the metaphor of strata of experience, layers of buried history, to be excavated for their meaning.