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Immediate is in literature the reference to Achilles’ wrath on Homer’s Iliad. Nonetheless, the most portrayed wrath in two thousand years of history is the Wrath of God.

There is also wrath typical of melodramas, usually caused by resentment. We finally arrive at nowadays wrath, which seems to blast from nothing?

Easy to understand that wrath is a state of alteration. Possibly, it is the only one of the seven sins not caused by egotistic reasons. It can be seen as a momentary explosion of rage, able to drastically alter the reality perceived by the individual possessed by wrath, who changes - or loses at all - his/her point of view. The perception of the surroundings and self-awareness shift on a space completely different from habitual life. We can say that, at that moment, that he/she is alone with his/her own drama without any relationship with other people. He/she is in an empty space. A typical consequence of this state is hate, a more enduring, stable and relative feeling.

As physicists would say, wrath is a “phase transition”, a confined lapse where a transformation, or better, a transfiguration, happens. Then everything changes; face, body, reality.

Referring to Hieronymus Bosch’s The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Things painting- where Wrath is symbolised by a scuffle between two drunk peasants while a woman is trying to stop them - it is interesting to linger on its depraved aspect (communal to all the Seven Sins), which assumes habit or inclination to commit a sin.

This is the key; To read our own interpretation - or reiteration - of the sin of Wrath. Compared to the Flemish masterpiece, our intention was to strengthen the dichotomy: although taken by a similar rage, the two combatants have different genres. Caliban, a man, and Gorgo, a woman, express in their fighting a painful trait of humankind, a rift that cannot be healed. This deadly split could be recomposed only thanks to the human pietas, symbolised by Persephone. This third character is crying as a tragedy mask, seemingly terrified and helpless, but her sensitivity and her awareness of the evil beneath the wrath gives hope for a way out.