La pittura rupestre in Basilicata

The artistic dimension of the cave in the territory of Basilicata isn’t circumscribed and limited to a mere repetition of traditional iconographic stylistic features and themes, as is prejudicially believed, but reveals its vocation towards a much broader figurative universe, capable of generating innovative solutions, as suggested by the unusual decoration of the Cave of the Original Sin in Matera, the cave frescoes that follow the most up-to-date contemporary figurative trends in late-Comnenian art and, a century later, the Angevin paintings of some Vulturine crypts, which anticipate the great flowering, this time of an exquisitely western style, of Lucanian painting in the following century. Thus, the cave was transformed from a dark grotto into an incubator chamber, where trends, iconographies and stylistic features were born and propagated.