Biblical-philosophical Scenery of Kole Idromeni in “Two Paths of Life”

Abstract

Kole Idromeno (1860-1939) Was a high-spirited and many-sided artist. Idromeno was born in the cradle of cultural-spiritual and Albanian contemporary civilization, in Shkodra. He had his first steps as an artist in the studio of the famous Italian photographer, Pietro Marubi, in Shkodra. After finishing the university in the Academy of the Fine Arts in Venecia, it’s the point when he succeeded as an artist. When he came back in his country, he didn’t find it easy because he was interned by the Turkish Authorities for a year (1897-1898). Idromeno was conspicuous as an architect, painter, musician and photographer. In 1912 for the first time in Albania he brought a camera to shoot cinematographic films. Useful values: The artist from Shkodra was the first walker of a new age in painting all over Albania. He achieved a lot of paintings with a new style and subject borrowed from Albanian life and tradition such as: “The garden of a house in Shkodra”, “Our sister”, “Cliff of Ulqin”, “Wedding in Shkodra”, “Father Shtjefen Gjecovi”, and wrote his name in aeternum in golden letters as the father of Albanian Renaissance painting. The purpose of research: In my esthetic- philosophical focus of a many-sided analysis, there’s the most impressive tableau of the painting “Two paths of life”, which belongs to the Renaissance period. It was the first announcer in that dark horizon due to the black shadow of 500-hundred Turkish invasion. It also contained critical elements and spirit and pointed out extraordinary historic-political, cultural-ethnographic and esthetic- psychological values at the end of XIX century in Albania. The picture that Kole Idromeno created through this fabulous work of art as a Iudicium, involves the Albanian people over years, where the crossroads between goodness and wickedness, existing and non-existing makes the message of victory of a native background be on the top of obelisk, deriving from the history of Pellazg, Illir and Albanian people nowadays. The method of research: Another description of the events, which belonged to the period that this masterpiece was created, is also the book “Souvenirs della haute Albanie”, published in 1901 in Paris by the French Consul Auguste Degrand, who paraphrases in the chapter dedicated to religion: The famous painting of Kole Idromeno “Two paths of life” has been helpful to the priests to do their job during the religious ceremony among peasants, who used to live in very difficult conditions: in poverty, in age-long isolation, their orient customs and difficulties that Franciscan priests faced, in order to make them follow the right path of Christian moral values.