The Last Cart Painters of Bagheria

Before there were trucks, there were carretti, and before there were carretti there was, presumably, the urge to make the most ordinary object in your life as visually loud as a religious procession. The Sicilian cart, painted in dense panels of vermilion, lemon yellow and saturated blue, is one of the most extreme examples of vernacular art anywhere in Europe — a working farm vehicle treated like an altarpiece on wheels.

Franco Bertolino's workshop in Bagheria, on the bay east of Palermo, is the oldest continuously-operating cart-painting studio on the island. Franco is the fourth generation: his great-grandfather painted carts for the lemon trade in the 1880s, when as many as 30,000 painted carts moved through Palermo every harvest. By the 1960s, the count was perhaps 500, all over the island. Today, working carts are essentially extinct. The painting tradition survives because the carts themselves have become heirlooms, props and ceremonial objects.

The panels follow a strict iconographic programme. The side panels — the sponde — almost always carry scenes from the chivalric epics: Roland and the paladins, Saracens being routed, the betrayal of Ganelon, all rendered in the flat, frontal style of Sicilian puppet theatre. The shafts carry geometric stars. The hubs of the wheels are sunbursts in fourteen colours.

Franco still mixes his own pigments. "You cannot buy this red," he says, lifting a jar of something the colour of a butcher's window. "It is cinnabar and bone and patience." He paints with three brushes only — a fitch, a sable rigger, and a flat hog-bristle he has owned since 1991. He has trained his son Lorenzo, 27, and one outsider — a Polish woman named Magda who fell in love with a Bagherian and stayed.

The cart Franco is finishing this week is for a wedding outside Trapani. The bride's grandfather drove this cart when it was a working vehicle, sixty years ago. It was found in a barn last winter, half-eaten by rodents. Franco has rebuilt the wheels, replaced four panels and one shaft, and is repainting the entire iconographic programme — Roland again, the same Roland Franco's great-grandfather painted in 1893.

I ask Lorenzo if he ever wants to do something else. He is twenty-seven, after all, and Bagheria is not Berlin. He thinks about it for a long moment. "I do other things," he says, finally. "I cook. I have a girlfriend who is a graphic designer. We argue about everything. But I do this because if I do not, in twenty years, somebody's grandfather's cart will be found in a barn and there will be nobody to paint it."

He goes back to the wheel hub. Fourteen colours, fourteen sectors, no compass. He paints them by eye, the way Franco taught him, the way Franco's father taught Franco.