“Shkodra wedding” is not only an emblem of the painter’s gallery, Kolë Idromeno, this painting is the song of the representative values of Shkodra. Through this painting, Idromeno, a painter, but equally famous as a photographer, scenographer, architect, sculptor and musician, managed to convey through this painting a stage that is as much fun as it is the representation of the Albanian capital, in what is the most brilliant way than in that of the wedding, this solemnity, to which he gave you all that grandeur, all that ceremonialism, all that charm and finesse that Shkodra created among hundreds of years to inherit in the years to come as a high crest of civilization.

The American anthropologist Clifford James Geertz (1926-2006) about the work of art writes that it is a mechanism developed to define social relations, to support rules and to strengthen social values. According to him, when we study an art form, we explore a sensibility, which is essentially a collective formation, since the foundations of such a formation are as broad and deep as social existence.

We can explore the sensibility not only of the painter, but of an entire community by admiring the painting ‘Shkodra Wedding’. From that picture we learn how the rules worked in the Catholic community of the city of Shkodra, the economic and social relations between the tribes, families, genders, and strata of the population of that time. Today we do not see in the painting what Idromeno’s contemporaries saw, nor what Idromeno himself presented in his painting. When they admired a wedding ceremony, which was related to their way of life, to gender relations, to the form of communication between tribes, to the attitude towards the woman, towards the man, towards the family, towards the dress, the emotions of that time were different from what we try today. 

/a.p/